Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.

Wherever the invitation of men or your own occasions lead you, speak the very truth, as your life and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts of men with new hope and new revelation.

What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it’s a drag? But you see, that’s what people do.

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

In matters of truth the fact that you don’t want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought to publish it.

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?

It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.

It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

We are not the sum of our possessions.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness.

Power is not sufficient evidence of truth.

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

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

Such is the feebleness of humanity, such is its perversity, that doubtless it is better for it to be subject to all possible superstitions, as long as they are not murderous, than to live without religion.

All genuinely intellectual work is humorous.

Lies are sufficient to breed opinion, and opinion brings on substance.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.

Nothing is so wretched or foolish as to anticipate misfortunes. What madness is it to be expecting evil before it comes.

For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions, even on important subjects, which I once thought right but found to be otherwise.

Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.

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

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.

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

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

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

Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men.

Men would be angels, angels would be gods.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life.

If you gain, you gain all. If you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then, without hesitation, that He exists.

I don’t believe in an outside agent that creates the world, then walks away. But I feel very strongly there is an intelligence at work in every flower, in every blade of grass, in every cell of my body. And it is that intelligence that, I wouldn’t say created the universe. It is creating the universe. It’s an ongoing process.

The desire to annoy no one, to harm no one, can equally well be the sign of a just as of an anxious disposition.

We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.

Good men by nature, wish to know. I know that many will call this useless work… men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of that of wisdom, which is the food and only true riches of the mind.

Therefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics.

To me, the extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way, and martial arts is nothing at all special; the closer to the true way of martial arts, the less wastage of expression there is.

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

I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think.

I want to do a certain thing in the world, and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.

A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known.

In a way, the whole tangible universe itself is a vast residue, a skeleton of countless lives that have germinated in it and have left it, leaving behind them only a trifling, infinitesimal part of their riches.

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

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.

For though we love both the truth and our friends, piety requires us to honor the truth first.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.

Rebellion without truth is like spring in a bleak, arid desert.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

To do a great right do a little wrong.

The object of the superior man is truth.

Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.

It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

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

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.