Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

I have an existential map. It has ‚You are here‘ written all over it.

In matters of truth and justice, there is no difference between large and small problems, for issues concerning the treatment of people are all the same.

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

Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

Chaos is inherent in all compounded things. Strive on with diligence.

My life is real.

I’m an idealist without illusions.

Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.

Men would be angels, angels would be gods.

Before God we are all equally wise – and equally foolish.

Truth is a pathless land.

Truth is weirder than any fiction I’ve seen.

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness.

I still think like a Marxist in many ways.

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

Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem.

One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.

I think that man has a fundamental obligation to extract from himself and from the earth all that it can give; and this obligation is all the more imperative that we are absolutely ignorant of what limits – they may still be very distant – God has imposed on our natural understanding and power.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.

A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.

If you pursue good with labor, the labor passes away but the good remains; if you pursue evil with pleasure, the pleasure passes away and the evil remains.

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects… totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.

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

Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.

The truth is something that burns. It burns off dead wood. And people don’t like having the dead wood burnt off, often because they’re 95 percent dead wood.

Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.

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 darkness is really out there. It’s not something that’s in my head, just. It’s in my work because it’s in the world.

Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without.

Death to me means nothing as long as I can die fast.

I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.

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

Children say that people are hung sometimes for speaking the truth.

Intense feeling too often obscures the truth.

If time is not real, then the dividing line between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.

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

I have found out in later years that we were very poor, but the glory of America is that we didn’t know it then.

To me, the extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way, and martial arts is nothing at all special; the closer to the true way of martial arts, the less wastage of expression there is.

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

When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you… Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

As long as poverty, injustice and gross inequality persist in our world, none of us can truly rest.

A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

States are not moral agents.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.

Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding.

You cannot step into the same river twice.

To appreciate the noble is a gain which can never be torn from us.

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

By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.