Call it Nature, Fate, Fortune; all these are names of the one and selfsame God.

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

God cannot be realized through the intellect. Intellect can lead one to a certain extent and no further. It is a matter of faith and experience derived from that faith.

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

Man – a being in search of meaning.

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

A man should be upright, not be kept upright.

We often want one thing and pray for another, not telling the truth even to the gods.

Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.

When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.

Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it.

To the dumb question, ‚Why me?‘ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, ‚Why not?‘

Why was I born with such contemporaries?

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

God is so big. It’s a gigantic concept in God. The idea that God might love us and be interested in us is kind of huge and gigantic, but we turn it, because we’re small-minded, into this tiny, petty, often greedy version of God, that is religion.

I believe in believing. My coach John Kavanagh is a big atheist, and he is always trying to persuade people to his way of thinking, and I think, ‚What a waste of energy.‘ If people want to believe in this god or that god, that’s fine by me; believe away. But I think we can be our own gods. I believe in myself.

The Tibetan people will need to determine who the next reincarnation of the Dalai Lama is.

No traveler, whether a tree lover or not, will ever forget his first walk in a sugar-pine forest. The majestic crowns approaching one another make a glorious canopy, through the feathery arches of which the sunbeams pour, silvering the needles and gilding the stately columns and the ground into a scene of enchantment.

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?

It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.

All religions must be tolerated… for every man must get to heaven in his own way.

The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.

Egoism is the very essence of a noble soul.

I answer only to God.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

Diligence is the mother of good fortune.

A man is but the product of his thoughts, what he thinks he becomes.

I’m a strict, strict agnostic. It’s very different from a casual, ‚I don’t know.‘ It’s that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can’t present it as fact.

There is a specter haunting Europe, the specter of Communism.

There are trees of a thousand sorts, and all have their several fruits; and I feel the most unhappy man in the world not to know them, for I am well assured that they are all valuable. I bring home specimens of them, and also of the land.

I think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.

I have gained this from philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.

Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

God has his plans and his reasons. Sometimes we are supposed to go through things so that we learn lessons.

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation and is but a reflection of human frailty.

Behold a worthy sight, to which the God, turning his attention to his own work, may direct his gaze. Behold an equal thing, worthy of a God, a brave man matched in conflict with evil fortune.

At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.

Our body is dependant on Heaven and Heaven on the Spirit.

If I see a mountain, I just pick up and hike it.

To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else’s type of thinking.

Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.

If a man reaches the heart of his own religion, he has reached the heart of the others, too. There is only one God, and there are many paths to him.

We ought to fly away from earth to heaven as quickly as we can; and to fly away is to become like God, as far as this is possible; and to become like him is to become holy, just, and wise.

That we must love one God only is a thing so evident that it does not require miracles to prove it.

You can be rich in spirit, kindness, love and all those things that you can’t put a dollar sign on.

To go beyond is as wrong as to fall short.

All truth is simple… is that not doubly a lie?

The lie is a condition of life.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

The ‚I think‘ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‚I breathe‘ which actually does accompany them.

‚Happiness‘ is a pointless goal.

Silence is the mother of truth.

I have always believed in God.

If some people have the belief or view that the Dalai Lama has some miracle power, that’s totally nonsense.

Reason is the enemy of faith.