Existence precedes and rules essence.

The end is the beginning of all things, Suppressed and hidden, Awaiting to be released through the rhythm Of pain and pleasure.

Do you know the only value life has is what life puts on itself?

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.

All truth is simple… is that not doubly a lie?

Wisdom allows nothing to be good that will not be so forever; no man to be happy but he that needs no other happiness than what he has within himself; no man to be great or powerful that is not master of himself.

I was never ignorant, as far as being experienced in classrooms and learning about different subjects and actually soaking it up, so I checked into college for a little bit. I took classes at a community college in West L.A. I took psychology, English, and philosophy.

I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.

Without deep reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people.

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Wisdom is found only in truth.

Words are loaded pistols.

It is possible to provide security against other ills, but as far as death is concerned, we men live in a city without walls.

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

It is more fitting for a man to laugh at life than to lament over it.

It is impossible to reason without arriving at a Supreme Being.

A useless life is an early death.

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

I don’t believe in death, neither in flesh nor in spirit.

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

Everything is the product of one universal creative effort. There is nothing dead in Nature. Everything is organic and living, and therefore the whole world appears to be a living organism.

Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

Go up in an airplane. Go high enough, and it’s like we don’t even exist.

Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

Why was I born with such contemporaries?

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.

Admiration is the daughter of ignorance.

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

Surely our job while we’re here on Earth is to learn about the world, not to create parallel universes.

There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.

Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‚But how can it be like that?‘ because you will get ‚down the drain,‘ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

Silence is the mother of truth.

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.

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

It’s possible – you can never know – that the universe exists only for me. If so, it’s sure going well for me, I must admit.

If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophies. My brain and my heart are my temples; my philosophy is kindness.

One who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth – often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

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

Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms.

Worthless people live only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.

Man is made by his belief. As he believes, so he is.

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

Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

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

Protecting the rights of even the least individual among us is basically the only excuse the government has for even existing.

Honor thy error as a hidden intention.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?

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

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.