Doubt is the incentive to truth and inquiry leads the way.

You just have to have a simple faith.

I look upon death to be as necessary to our constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning.

I have just got a new theory of eternity.

The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.

Man is made to adore and to obey: but if you will not command him, if you give him nothing to worship, he will fashion his own divinities, and find a chieftain in his own passions.

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

It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself.

We must accept what science tells us, that man was born from the earth. But, more logical than the scientists who lecture us, we must carry this lesson to its conclusion: that is to say, accept that man was born entirely from the world – not only his flesh and bones but his incredible power of thought.

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

Never lose a holy curiosity.

The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing.

It is impossible to reason without arriving at a Supreme Being.

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

By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.

A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.

We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.

To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don’t be.

Wisdom begins in wonder.

There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

In assisting his ‚neighbour‘ every day to the best of his ability, and keeping truth, honesty, and kindness perpetually before him, the Boy Scout, with as little formality as possible, is pleasing God.

It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.

The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

A gaffe in Washington is someone telling the truth, and telling the truth has never hurt me.

He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

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

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

Reality is a sliding door.

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.

To discover and know has always been a deep tendency of our nature. Can we not recognize it already in caveman?

If a subject excites us, if it stirs our deepest curiosity, or if we have to learn because the stakes are high, we pay much more attention. What we absorb sinks in.

Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.

The art of being a slave is to rule one’s master.

For me, my secularism is, India first. I say, the philosophy of my party is ‚Justice to all. Appeasement to none.‘ This is our secularism.

Small amounts of philosophy lead to atheism, but larger amounts bring us back to God.

What we live by we die by.

Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, and of every good to man.

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

The great quest of life has always been to discover truth.

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.

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

The foolish man conceives the idea of ‚self.‘ The wise man sees there is no ground on which to build the idea of ‚self;‘ thus, he has a right conception of the world and well concludes that all compounds amassed by sorrow will be dissolved again, but the truth will remain.

The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and must therefore be treated with great caution.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.

Truth is so rare that it is delightful to tell it.

There is nothing good or evil save in the will.

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

The American doctor, in my opinion, possesses a combination of conservatism and that other quality which has put the United States in the forefront in almost every department of science – that is, an eagerness to know what it is really all about in order that he may not be the one left behind if there is something to it.

In golf, the player, coach and official are rolled into one, and they overlap completely. Golf really is the best microcosm of life – or at least the way life should be.

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

Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.