Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

I believe things cannot make themselves impossible.

I am a little too absorbed by science to be able to philosophise much; but the more I look into myself, the more I find myself possessed by the conviction that it is only the science of Christ running through all things, that is to say true mystical science, that really matters. I let myself get caught up in the game when I geologise.

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.

In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.

All men are equal before fish.

The way is long if one follows precepts, but short… if one follows patterns.

The natural desire of good men is knowledge.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever will be born must destroy a world.

Your philosophy determines whether you will go for the disciplines or continue the errors.

Men’s ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Why do I not seek some real good; one which I could feel, not one which I could display?

Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this.

Man’s greatness lies in his power of thought.

The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort.

That government is best which governs least.

There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge – that is everywhere.

Truth is everybody is going to hurt you: you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.

Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.

A man’s felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessing of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.

Time discovers truth.

The desire to annoy no one, to harm no one, can equally well be the sign of a just as of an anxious disposition.

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

My philosophy in life is, Decide what you want to do. You have to have something to hope for.

Philosophy is common sense with big words.

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

Time stays, we go.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known.

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.

Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair.

The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.

Character is destiny.

The lawyer’s truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.

There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Can the mind see the truth of its own incapacity to know the unknown? Surely if I see very clearly that my mind cannot know the unknown, there is absolute quietness.

Facts are stubborn things.

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

Our philosophy is that we care about people first.

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind.

Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

I don’t believe in death, neither in flesh nor in spirit.

God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight.

Before God we are all equally wise – and equally foolish.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

A God without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but fate and nature.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.