I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greek and Roman leave to us.

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

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

It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

Thought is the parent of the deed.

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

If you think in terms of a year, plant a seed; if in terms of ten years, plant trees; if in terms of 100 years, teach the people.

What do you want a meaning for? Life is a desire, not a meaning.

No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.

Change alone is unchanging.

Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.

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.

Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.

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

There never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am I certain it is desirable that there should be.

Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers.

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

Truth is what works.

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

All who think cannot but see there is a sanction like that of religion which binds us in partnership in the serious work of the world.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt.

Hell is other people.

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

The state comes into existence for the sake of life and continues to exist for the sake of good life.

There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.

It’s not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren’t doing.

Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.

All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

The love of economy is the root of all virtue.

Law is mind without reason.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

The art is long, life is short.

To live is to think.

Life is a series of commas, not periods.

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

Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.

Courage is a mean with regard to fear and confidence.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

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

Truth is a good dog; but always beware of barking too close to the heels of an error, lest you get your brains kicked out.

Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.

If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once.

Death is a commingling of eternity with time; in the death of a good man, eternity is seen looking through time.

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

How could man rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of men?

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.

Risk is a part of God’s game, alike for men and nations.

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don’t be.