Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle.

Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.

Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.

Sin is geographical.

Never in any case say I have lost such a thing, but I have returned it. Is your child dead? It is a return. Is your wife dead? It is a return. Are you deprived of your estate? Is not this also a return?

Since the child knew his parents would give in, he tried the same trick again and again.

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

It is best to rise from life as from a banquet, neither thirsty nor drunken.

Evil is whatever distracts.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?

What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.

Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.

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

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.

There is a fundamental question we all have to face. How are we to live our lives; by what principles and moral values will we be guided and inspired?

Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved.

I was never ignorant, as far as being experienced in classrooms and learning about different subjects and actually soaking it up, so I checked into college for a little bit. I took classes at a community college in West L.A. I took psychology, English, and philosophy.

Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.

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

Heaven is dumb, echoing only the dumb.

Nature does nothing in vain.

To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to recieve all the great truths which atheism would deny.

The man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for.

By the sole fact of his entering into ‚Thought,‘ man represents something entirely singular and absolutely unique in the field of our experience. On a single planet, there could not be more than one centre of emergence for reflexion.

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

And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.

The fool wonders, the wise man asks.

Law is mind without reason.

If the people are happy, united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the rest. We conclude that to be good from whence good is derived.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

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

Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.

The first book I ever really read was Plato’s ‚Republic,‘ and then I had to go over that five times or something.

All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.

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

It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.

We must conceive of this whole universe as one commonwealth of which both gods and men are members.

It’s really easy to have a nice philosophy about openness, but moving the world in that direction is a different thing. It requires both understanding where you want to go and being pragmatic about getting there.

He who can be, and therefore is, another’s, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature.

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

There is no such thing as Something for nothing.

That deep emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.

The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

Knowledge which is divorced from justice, may be called cunning rather than wisdom.

Ordinary morality is innate in my view.

Toleration is the greatest gift of the mind; it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle.

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.

The sage does not hoard. The more he helps others, the more he benefits himself, The more he gives to others, the more he gets himself. The Way of Heaven does one good but never does one harm. The Way of the sage is to act but not to compete.

Upon the subjects of which I have treated, I have spoken as I have thought. I may be wrong in regard to any or all of them; but, holding it a sound maxim that it is better only sometimes to be right than at all times to be wrong, so soon as I discover my opinions to be erroneous, I shall be ready to renounce them.

It is better to die than to preserve this life by incurring disgrace. The loss of life causes but a moment’s grief, but disgrace brings grief every day of one’s life.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

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

The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.