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

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

The last act is bloody, however pleasant all the rest of the play is: a little earth is thrown at last upon our head, and that is the end forever.

How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.

Sin cannot be conceived in a natural state, but only in a civil state, where it is decreed by common consent what is good or bad.

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

Temperance is a mean with regard to pleasures.

You listen to the radio and all the songs sound the same, from 8 in the morning to 12.

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.

We do not learn; and what we call learning is only a process of recollection.

What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.

Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

The ‚I think‘ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‚I breathe‘ which actually does accompany them.

Blessedness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself.

Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.

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

Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt.

I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.

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.

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.

It is the eye of other people that ruin us. If I were blind I would want, neither fine clothes, fine houses or fine furniture.

Don’t think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.

Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.

Whether if soul did not exist time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted, so that evidently there cannot be number; for number is either what has been, or what can be, counted.

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

There is no such thing as accident; it is fate misnamed.

I do think there must be some kind of interaction between your living life and the life that goes on from here.

I think music is one of the hero/sheroes of the African-American existence.

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are… than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

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

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

Whatever the universal nature assigns to any man at any time is for the good of that man at that time.

Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.

Law is mind without reason.

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

Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.

Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that’s what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.

If we do discover a complete theory, it should be in time understandable in broad principle by everyone. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people be able to take part in the discussion of why we and the universe exist.

Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.

What goes up must come down.

Then not only custom, but also nature affirms that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice, and that justice is equality.

Nor shall derision prove powerful against those who listen to humanity or those who follow in the footsteps of divinity, for they shall live forever. Forever.

In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.

If I err in belief that the souls of men are immortal, I gladly err, nor do I wish this error which gives me pleasure to be wrested from me while I live.

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.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear.

Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.

There is no such thing as part freedom.

What we need is a system of thought – you might even call it a religion – that can bind humans together. A system that would fit the Republic of Chad as well as the United States: a system that would supply our idealistic young people with something to believe in.