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

Wishful thinking is not idealism. It is self-indulgence at best and self-exaltation at worst. In either case, it is usually at the expense of others. In other words, it is the opposite of idealism.

The fool wonders, the wise man asks.

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do.

The world itself is the will to power – and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power – and nothing else!

Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.

Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

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.

First and last, what is demanded of genius is love of truth.

We should not be so taken up in the search for truth, as to neglect the needful duties of active life; for it is only action that gives a true value and commendation to virtue.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

Our life is made by the death of others.

No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.

Sorry, I’m still a dialectical materialist.

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.

For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all.

‚Happiness‘ is a pointless goal.

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

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

Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

I think I have to trust that you end up with the person you’re supposed to end up with, and that everything in between is there to teach you stuff.

In the affairs of this world, men are saved not by faith, but by the want of it.

Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.

You are a child of the sun, you come from the sun, and that is something true with the Earth also… your relationship with the Earth is so deep, and the Earth is in you and this is something not very difficult, much less difficult then philosophy.

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.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.

If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?

For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

A man’s character is his guardian divinity.

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

What was God doing before the divine creation?

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

Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.

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

And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values, like you work hard for what you want in life. That your word is your bond; that you do what you say you’re going to do. That you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don’t know them and even if you don’t agree with them.

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.

There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.

Time stays, we go.

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

I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?

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

If one has a good disposition, what other virtue is needed? If a man has fame, what is the value of other ornamentation?

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

Nothing can be divided into more parts than it can possibly be constituted of. But matter (i.e. finite) cannot be constituted of infinite parts.

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

Philosophy is common sense with big words.

He who would pass his declining years with honor and comfort, should, when young, consider that he may one day become old, and remember when he is old, that he has once been young.

Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.

Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.

Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.

Will and intellect are one and the same thing.

I’m an atheist, and the concept of god for me is all part of what I call ‚the last illusion.‘ The last illusion is someone knows what is going on. Nearly everyone has that illusion somewhere, and it manifests not only in the terms of the idea that there is a god but that it knows what’s going on but that the planets know what’s going on.

To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.

No memory of having starred atones for later disregard, or keeps the end from being hard.