Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.

Silence is the mother of truth.

Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.

Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.

It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.

By indignities men come to dignities.

I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

Life is hard. After all, it kills you.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

Justice… is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed.

Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!

Little things console us because little things afflict us.

Those whom the gods love grow young.

Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.

The world itself is the will to power – and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power – and nothing else!

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.

Everything is political. I will never be a politician or even think political. Me just deal with life and nature. That is the greatest thing to me.

Premature certainty is the enemy of the truth.

The act of dying is one of the acts of life.

When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable thing possible: one thereby almost deserves to live.

The deed is everything, the glory is naught.

Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.

There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.

He who doesn’t pray to the Lord prays to the devil.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.

What really raises one’s indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.

I don’t see myself as a philosopher. That’s awfully boring.

Nothing can be beautiful which is not true.

I have just got a new theory of eternity.

Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God – but to create him.

In the affairs of this world, men are saved not by faith, but by the want of it.

No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.

You are the universe, you aren’t in the universe.

There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.

Certain though I am – and ever more certain – that I must press on in life as though Christ awaited me at the term of the universe, at the same time I feel no special assurance of the existence of Christ. Believing is not seeing. As much as anyone, I imagine, I walk in the shadows of faith.

And yet it moves.

If it is surely the means to the highest end we know, can any work be humble or disgusting? Will it not rather be elevating as a ladder, the means by which we are translated?

So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.

To me, if life boils down to one thing, it’s movement. To live is to keep moving.

When I was very young I was sort of floored by the fact that my mother and my father and everyone I knew was going to die one day, and myself too. I had a sort of a philosophical crisis. I couldn’t believe that we were mortal.

It is the eye of other people that ruin us. If I were blind I would want, neither fine clothes, fine houses or fine furniture.

To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one’s being added to that being.

Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.

When the water starts boiling it is foolish to turn off the heat.

I have lived long enough to satisfy both nature and glory.

I call him free who is led solely by reason.