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.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: ‚War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.‘

We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.

No one can outrun death. It will catch up to all of us eventually.

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.

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

Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed was the ninth beatitude.

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

Who would set a limit to the mind of man? Who would dare assert that we know all there is to be known?

Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

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

If you think only of evil, then you become pessimistic and hopeless like Freud. But if you think there is no evil, then you’re just one more deluded Pollyanna.

Well, the future for me is already a thing of the past.

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.

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

Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.

Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.

Only the ideas that we really live have any value.

To see and listen to the wicked is already the beginning of wickedness.

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Nothing can be divided into more parts than it can possibly be constituted of. But matter (i.e. finite) cannot be constituted of infinite parts.

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

Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.

I have thought there was some advantage even in death, by which we mingle with the herd of common men.

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

You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand.

I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

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

If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.

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

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

Intuition and concepts constitute… the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge.

I don’t think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking theres some kind of change.

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.

Philosophy is the highest music.

To me, if life boils down to one thing, it’s movement. To live is to keep moving.

This is the truth: as from a fire aflame thousands of sparks come forth, even so from the Creator an infinity of beings have life and to him return again.

The longer I live, the more I feel that true repose consists in ‚renouncing‘ one’s own self, by which I mean making up one’s mind to admit that there is no importance whatever in being ‚happy‘ or ‚unhappy‘ in the usual meaning of the words.

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.

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination.

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.

Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are, and to make new things like them.

Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.

There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.

There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.

Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt.

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?

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

There is no principle worth the name if it is not wholly good.

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

Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

Absence and death are the same – only that in death there is no suffering.

And yet it moves.