Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.

Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

We become just by performing just action, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave action.

Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.

Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.

The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.

Let’s pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.

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

Non-violence is not a garment to be put on and off at will. Its seat is in the heart, and it must be an inseparable part of our being.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

I worked in ad sales. I would call up local businesses and try to get them to buy ads in the paper. The whole time, I felt like I was just scamming people.

No man was ever wise by chance.

To free a person from error is to give, and not to take away.

Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, and of every good to man.

Couples are wholes and not wholes, what agrees disagrees, the concordant is discordant. From all things one and from one all things.

There is no birth of consciousness without pain.

It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory.

I have finally decided to write my book on the spiritual life. I mean to put down as simply as possible the sort of ascetical or mystical teaching that I have been living and preaching so long. I call it ‚Le Milieu Divin,‘ but I am being careful to include nothing esoteric and the minimum of explicit philosophy.

Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.

The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved.

Justice is the set and constant purpose which gives every man his due.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.

The formula ‚Two and two make five‘ is not without its attractions.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

It is best to rise from life as from a banquet, neither thirsty nor drunken.

Nothing in life is promised except death.

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.

Virtue is relative to the actions and ages of each of us in all that we do.

I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

Virtue is not left to stand alone. He who practices it will have neighbors.

In the game of cricket, a hero is a person who respects the game and does not corrupt the game. The one who doesn’t or corrupts the game, they are the villain. They should be punished, and they have been punished in the past.

Who is the wisest man? He who neither knows or wishes for anything else than what happens.

Reverence for life is the highest court of appeal.

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 absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

Little things console us because little things afflict us.

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.

The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever – this is a somewhat new kind of religion.

It is the strange fate of man, that even in the greatest of evils the fear of the worst continues to haunt him.

Everything in excess is opposed to nature.

The precepts of the law are these: to live honestly, to injure no one, and to give everyone else his due.

A sense is what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter, in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold.

Sometimes we look at gay being a bigger sin than being proud or not telling the truth. I don’t think God categorizes sins.

The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.

Honesty is for the most part less profitable than dishonesty.

At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.

Knowledge is true opinion.

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

I give the name of cosmic sense to the more or less confused affinity that binds us psychologically to the All which envelops us. The existence of this feeling is indubitable, and apparently as old as the beginning of thought… The cosmic sense must have been born as soon as man found himself facing the forest, the sea and the stars.

Have you ever thought how humiliating and distressing it was to be placed upon a sphere? For friendship it is a boon never to be able to be further apart than the antipodes. But suppose that you are leaving together to go on and on; it is impossible. To go beyond a certain point is to return to where you began.

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?

The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.