Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.

But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.

I like gaps; all my stories have gaps. It seems this is the way people’s lives present themselves.

Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.

Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.

If God dropped acid, would he see people?

If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.

There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November.

The future influences the present just as much as the past.

Life every man holds dear; but the dear man holds honor far more precious dear than life.

All men are equal before fish.

Life loves the liver of it.

I did used to have nightmares about the idea that when I die, there is a spark of consciousness which basically creates the world. ‚Is the world going to disappear if this spark of consciousness disappears? And how do I know it won’t? How do I know there’s anything there except what I’m conscious of?‘

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.

Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice; but only accident here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death.

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Man lives freely only by his readiness to die, if need be, at the hands of his brother, never by killing him.

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.

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.

The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

I happen to believe there is evil in the world.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

Those whom the gods love grow young.

Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego’s fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life.

Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?

In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down.

In everything one thing is impossible: rationality.

You are going to let the fear of poverty govern you life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.

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

Say not, ‚I have found the truth,‘ but rather, ‚I have found a truth.‘

The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.

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

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

There is no principle worth the name if it is not wholly good.

What goes up must come down.

No one can outrun death. It will catch up to all of us eventually.

Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television.

As the births of living creatures are at first ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.

And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough.

All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.

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

There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.

There is nothing good or evil save in the will.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.

My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the ‚light‘ and never mentioned the other, then as an artist, I would be a liar.

He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

I think any life can be interesting, any surroundings can be interesting. I don’t think I could have been so brave if I had been living in a town, competing with people on what can be called a generally higher cultural level.

My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.

A man should be upright, not be kept upright.