Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.

The person who grieves suffers his passion to grow upon him; he indulges it, he loves it; but this never happens in the case of actual pain, which no man ever willingly endured for any considerable time.

Time stays, we go.

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.

Regrets are the natural property of grey hairs.

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.

The love of economy is the root of all virtue.

The poetry you read has been written for you, each of you – black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight.

Things in themselves have no life in them. A car can’t comfort or encourage you. A house means nothing if there’s no life and love inside.

Take things as they are. Punch when you have to punch. Kick when you have to kick.

There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, ‚Thy will be done,‘ and those to whom God says, ‚All right, then, have it your way.‘

Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

From wonder into wonder existence opens.

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

The spiritual is the parent of the practical.

Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.

The fact that you are willing to say, ‚I do not understand, and it is fine,‘ is the greatest understanding you could exhibit.

Previous generations understood about death, and undoubtedly would have seen a reasonable amount of death. Once you get into the Victorian era, you might well have seen the funerals of many of your siblings before you were very old.

Glam really did plant seeds for a new identity. I think a lot of kids needed that – that sense of reinvention. Kids learned that however crazy you may think it is, there is a place for what you want to do and who you want to be.

The reward of suffering is experience.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.

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.

The proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.

All men are equal before fish.

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?

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.

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

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

I don’t want enemies. I want friends, and I want them in all shapes, sizes, and colors, and loving whoever they want to.

If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.

The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.

One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving.

Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.

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

Non-violence requires a double faith, faith in God and also faith in man.

In remembering the appalling suffering of war on both sides, we recognise how precious is the peace we have built in Europe since 1945.

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

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

We should learn to accept that change is truly the only thing that’s going on always, and learn to ride with it and enjoy it.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.

For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all.

Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

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 draw from the Absurd three consequences: my revolt, my liberty, my passion.

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.

Nature abhors annihilation.