Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

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

It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved.

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

One whose knowledge is confined to books and whose wealth is in the possession of others, can use neither his knowledge nor wealth when the need for them arises.

A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.

Trust, but verify.

Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.

Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.

The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

I don’t watch it, but I know enough to comment on it.

Genius without education is like silver in the mine.

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

Grace is not part of consciousness; it is the amount of light in our souls, not knowledge nor reason.

The earth is supported by the power of truth; it is the power of truth that makes the sun shine and the winds blow; indeed all things rest upon truth.

No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.

A useless life is an early death.

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth – often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

Is it ignorance or apathy? Hey, I don’t know and I don’t care.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

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

Education is the best friend. An educated person is respected everywhere. Education beats the beauty and the youth.

I feel a distaste for hunting, first because of a kind of Buddhist respect for the unity and sacredness of all life, and also because the pursuit of a hare or chamois strikes me as a kind of ‚escape of energy,‘ that is, the expenditure of our effort in an illusory end, one devoid of profit.

I had rather excel others in the knowledge of what is excellent, than in the extent of my power and dominion.

The greatest achievements of the human mind are generally received with distrust.

You could not step twice into the same rivers; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.

Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.

One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people’s minds.

Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.

If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?

I’d like to think I’m a great teacher.

A tomb now suffices him for whom the whole world was not sufficient.

One science only will one genius fit; so vast is art, so narrow human wit.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

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

I believe every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine.

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

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

I don’t like to commit myself about heaven and hell – you see, I have friends in both places.

For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.

Intuition and concepts constitute… the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

Nobody believes in completely unadulterated capitalism.

Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty – his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.