Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

The only objects of practical reason are therefore those of good and evil. For by the former is meant an object necessarily desired according to a principle of reason; by the latter one necessarily shunned, also according to a principle of reason.

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

People have so many hang-ups about how other people live their lives. People always want to keep you in a little box, or they need to label you and fix you in time and location.

The unnatural, that too is natural.

What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

If life is a checker game, someone else is moving the pieces. It isn’t us. Don’t be surprised by amazing coincidences. There are no accidents. Consider, as I learned to do, the incredible interconnectedness of all of life.

I’m not interested in people positioning me next to other artists.

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

We’re all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

Nature abhors annihilation.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

My philosophy in life is, Decide what you want to do. You have to have something to hope for.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

Let us work without theorizing, tis the only way to make life endurable.

What was God doing before the divine creation?

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

Words are loaded pistols.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

Wisdom begins in wonder.

My life is not to be somebody else’s impact – you know what I mean?

What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.

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

We human beings are strange creatures and still reserve the right to think for ourselves.

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.

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

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.

It’s nice to be included in people’s fantasies but you also like to be accepted for your own sake.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

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

I feel like when I try to fit in, it comes across as not genuine, and that is not good. I’d rather just do me and have people say, ‚Oh. That’s interesting,‘ than try to fit in.

Secretly we’re all a little more absurd than we make ourselves out to be.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

Man – a being in search of meaning.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

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

To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one’s being added to that being.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

We are not the sum of our possessions.

Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.

I don’t see myself as ever being like anybody else.

Maybe every city has a unique sensibility, but we don’t have names for what they are or haven’t identified them all. We can’t pinpoint exactly what makes each city’s people unique yet.

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

Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

There is a specter haunting Europe, the specter of Communism.

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

When you’re born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front row seat.

Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.

Plato is my friend; Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.

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

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

The man of science is a poor philosopher.

When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable thing possible: one thereby almost deserves to live.

Moderation is the center wherein all philosophies, both human and divine, meet.

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

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