I am against nature. I don’t dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can’t touch with decay.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

I call him free who is led solely by reason.

There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.

That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory; they have no power over the substance of original justice.

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.

To free a person from error is to give, and not to take away.

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man’s being unable to sit still in a room.

No notice is taken of a little evil, but when it increases it strikes the eye.

I believe Karl Marx could have subscribed to the Sermon on the Mount.

It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‚try to be a little kinder.‘

Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.

Forever is composed of nows.

To do a great right do a little wrong.

I didn’t go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school.

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

If you dream the proper dreams, and share the myths with people, they will want to grow up to be like you.

All art is but imitation of nature.

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

I will govern my life and thoughts as if the whole world were to see the one and read the other, for what does it signify to make anything a secret to my neighbor, when to God, who is the searcher of our hearts, all our privacies are open?

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

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

I can control my destiny, but not my fate. Destiny means there are opportunities to turn right or left, but fate is a one-way street. I believe we all have the choice as to whether we fulfil our destiny, but our fate is sealed.

He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason.

The pagan loves the earth in order to enjoy it and confine himself within it; the Christian in order to make it purer and draw from it the strength to escape from it.

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

Assuming if there’s such a thing as reality, if you have a false relationship with it, how can you do anything but fail?

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.

Even though I write about the human race, the further away from them, the better I feel. Two miles is great; two thousand miles is beautiful.

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.

Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?

My theory is 98 percent of all human endeavor is killing time.

We do not know what is really good or bad fortune.

I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do.

Over the years, I had nurtured the hope to be able to fly; to handle a machine as it rose higher and higher in the stratosphere was my dearest dream.

Nothing can be beautiful which is not true.

To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.

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.

When you look at the sun during your walking meditation, the mindfulness of the body helps you to see that the sun is in you; without the sun there is no life at all and suddenly you get in touch with the sun in a different way.

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.

Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

From my perspective, I absolutely believe in a greater spiritual power, far greater than I am, from which I have derived strength in moments of sadness or fear. That’s what I believe, and it was very, very strong in the forest.

It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

My philosophy is, it’s always very rewarding when you can make an audience laugh. I don’t mind making fun of myself. I like self-deprecating comedy. But I’d like you to laugh with me occasionally, too.

Dreams are the touchstones of our character.

Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

Every natural object is a conductor of divinity and only by coming into contact with them… may we be filled with the Holy Ghost.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn’t wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.

Why was I born with such contemporaries?

Information is not knowledge.

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.