Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

The brain is wider than the sky.

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!

Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.

Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.

It seems sensible to me that we should look to the medical profession, that over the centuries has helped us to live longer and healthier lives, to help us die peacefully among our loved ones in our own home without a long stay in God’s waiting room.

I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

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

The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Reason is the enemy of faith.

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn’t wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.

A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.

Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago.

Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.

The fear of death often proves mortal, and sets people on methods to save their Lives, which infallibly destroy them.

Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?

Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

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

Falsehood is a perennial spring.

All men are equal before fish.

From the dust of the earth, from the common elementary fund, the Creator has made Homo sapiens. From the same material he has made every other creature, however noxious and insignificant to us. They are earth-born companions and our fellow mortals.

Only those are fit to live who are not afraid to die.

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

To appreciate the noble is a gain which can never be torn from us.

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like sand, creeds follow one another, but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons, a possession for all eternity.

The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.

One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.

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

A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? You can’t die with an unfinished book.

What then do you call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot of yourselves, without revelation, admit the existence within you of anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and thinking.

Age doesn’t bother me. So many of my heroes were older guys. It’s the lack of years left that weighs far heavier on me than the age that I am.

The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.

For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.

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

There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.

Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.

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

Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal.

Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding.

The end is the beginning of all things, Suppressed and hidden, Awaiting to be released through the rhythm Of pain and pleasure.

There was something undifferentiated and yet complete, which existed before Heaven and Earth. Soundless and formless, it depends on nothing and does not change. It operates everywhere and is free from danger. It may be considered the mother of the universe. I do not know its name; I call it Tao.

States are not moral agents.

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

Man’s greatness lies in his power of thought.

We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.

We might as well die as to go on living like this.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

No group and no government can properly prescribe precisely what should constitute the body of knowledge with which true education is concerned.

Theology is unnecessary.