Freedom without limits is just a word.

Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.

Little things console us because little things afflict us.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

I wish I could say to all those people who consider themselves anarchists or radicals: Please join the nonviolent movement. This is how Gandhi freed India. If Gandhi freed India, we can certainly free the United States from our racism, misogyny, and bigotry.

Knowledge is true opinion.

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

Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does after the effect.

Responsibility is the price of freedom.

It is with your aid, as the people, that I think we shall be able to preserve – not the country, for the country will preserve itself, but the institutions of the country – those institutions which have made us free, intelligent and happy – the most free, the most intelligent, and the happiest people on the globe.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

Therefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics.

For me, it’s about becoming a mogul, owning my own projects, and establishing myself as a funding producer. That’s what’s big to me. The movies and all that stuff are great, but the fact that I’m in a position to do what I want to do, however I want to do it and when I want to do it is bigger.

Freedom is not procured by a full enjoyment of what is desired, but by controlling the desire.

In my opinion, there is no aspect of reality beyond the reach of the human mind.

He does not seem to me to be a free man who does not sometimes do nothing.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.

We cannot expect that all nations will adopt like systems, for conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

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

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

Non-violence requires a double faith, faith in God and also faith in man.

My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.

We often want one thing and pray for another, not telling the truth even to the gods.

The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.

I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are… than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

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.

It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.

We cannot conceive of matter being formed of nothing, since things require a seed to start from… Therefore there is not anything which returns to nothing, but all things return dissolved into their elements.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

I know I got it made while the masses of black people are catchin‘ hell, but as long as they ain’t free, I ain’t free.

I believe this government cannot endure permanently, half slave and half free.

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

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

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

When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.

In a way, the whole tangible universe itself is a vast residue, a skeleton of countless lives that have germinated in it and have left it, leaving behind them only a trifling, infinitesimal part of their riches.

Theology is unnecessary.

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

No group and no government can properly prescribe precisely what should constitute the body of knowledge with which true education is concerned.

I was inspired to spend an entire year – my 65th year – reading, researching, and meditating on Lao-tzu’s messages, practicing them and ultimately writing down these insights as I felt Lao-tzu wanted us to know them.

So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.

Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.

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

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.

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

There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

What was God doing before the divine creation?

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

You know that being an American is more than a matter of where your parents came from. It is a belief that all men are created free and equal and that everyone deserves an even break.

How wonderful it is to be an American. We have known the best of times and the worst of times.

We are a nation founded as a rebuke to tyranny. A nation of revolutionaries who refused sovereign reign from afar. Hear me – we’re a nation that says give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. A nation built on our differences, guided by the belief that we’re all created equal.

If you gain, you gain all. If you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then, without hesitation, that He exists.

As I approve of a youth that has something of the old man in him, so I am no less pleased with an old man that has something of the youth. He that follows this rule may be old in body, but can never be so in mind.

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

The ‚I think‘ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‚I breathe‘ which actually does accompany them.