Falsehood is a perennial spring.

We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.

Half a truth is often a great lie.

Old age is just a record of one’s whole life.

Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.

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

Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt.

Even death is not to be feared by one who has lived wisely.

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

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?

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

A lie cannot live.

Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable longing to see the truth.

The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.

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

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

I believe in believing. My coach John Kavanagh is a big atheist, and he is always trying to persuade people to his way of thinking, and I think, ‚What a waste of energy.‘ If people want to believe in this god or that god, that’s fine by me; believe away. But I think we can be our own gods. I believe in myself.

What really raises one’s indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.

What goes up must come down.

Animals, in their generation, are wiser than the sons of men; but their wisdom is confined to a few particulars, and lies in a very narrow compass.

He who obtains has little. He who scatters has much.

A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

Clever men are good, but they are not the best.

If a man could have half of his wishes, he would double his troubles.

Change alone is unchanging.

Men’s ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.

I’m too busy acting like I’m not Naive. I’ve seen it all, I was here first.

And I love that even in the toughest moments, when we’re all sweating it – when we’re worried that the bill won’t pass, and it seems like all is lost – Barack never lets himself get distracted by the chatter and the noise. Just like his grandmother, he just keeps getting up and moving forward… with patience and wisdom, and courage and grace.

When you cease to exist, then who will you blame?

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

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men’s imperfections, and conceal your own.

It is a strange desire, to seek power, and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man’s self.

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

The man who makes everything that leads to happiness depends upon himself, and not upon other men, has adopted the very best plan for living happily. This is the man of moderation, the man of manly character and of wisdom.

Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.

Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.

There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

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

I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him.

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

Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.

Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish. Do not overdo it.

To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

Teach us that wealth is not elegance, that profusion is not magnificence, that splendor is not beauty.

Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know.

Heaven is long-enduring, and earth continues long. The reason why heaven and earth are able to endure and continue thus long is because they do not live of, or for, themselves.

The way up and the way down are one and the same.

Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?

We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom… in a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.