Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

Basically you have to suppress your own ambitions in order to be who you need to be.

There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.

Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you don’t find out til too late that he’s been playing with two queens all along.

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.

If you understand the universe, you control it, in a way.

I believe things cannot make themselves impossible.

All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?

Satisfaction consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of life.

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

We are not the sum of our possessions.

If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

It’s getting harder to make decisions to just want to do something to work… I’m trying to find things that are extremely challenging or mean something to me deeply.

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.

I believe in believing. My coach John Kavanagh is a big atheist, and he is always trying to persuade people to his way of thinking, and I think, ‚What a waste of energy.‘ If people want to believe in this god or that god, that’s fine by me; believe away. But I think we can be our own gods. I believe in myself.

Life’s a fight. It’s a good fight of faith.

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.

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.

The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.

Enlightenment is always there. Small enlightenment will bring great enlightenment. If you breathe in and are aware that you are alive – that you can touch the miracle of being alive – then that is a kind of enlightenment.

The formation of one’s character ought to be everyone’s chief aim.

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

Those whom the gods love grow young.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

In my opinion, there is no aspect of reality beyond the reach of the human mind.

The superior man does not, even for the space of a single meal, act contrary to virtue. In moments of haste, he cleaves to it. In seasons of danger, he cleaves to it.

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

My life is real.

My only fear is that I may live too long. This would be a subject of dread to me.

Who would set a limit to the mind of man? Who would dare assert that we know all there is to be known?

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

No group and no government can properly prescribe precisely what should constitute the body of knowledge with which true education is concerned.

Dying is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down.

We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.

Life began with waking up and loving my mother’s face.

I have always held firmly to the thought that each one of us can do a little to bring some portion of misery to an end.

People just overshoot trying to find God. They’re going outside and trying everything. They don’t realize that it’s right inside themselves.

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God – but to create him.

The universe is not indifferent to our existence – it depends on it.

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.

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.

The natural desire of good men is knowledge.

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

Although the life of a person is in a land full of thorns and weeds, there is always a space in which the good seed can grow. You have to trust God.

Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.

You should never give up your inner self.

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

Is man one of God’s blunders? Or is God one of man’s blunders?

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

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.

The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.

I don’t really know that much about love, it turns out.

If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

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

More gold has been mined from the thoughts of men than has been taken from the earth.

I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized, and I still had a daughter who I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.