I don’t see myself as a philosopher. That’s awfully boring.

People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age, the face they deserve.

They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice… that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.

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

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

All nature is but art unknown to thee.

Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.

Nature is not human hearted.

A useless life is an early death.

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.

Law is mind without reason.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

The art of being a slave is to rule one’s master.

There is no wealth but life.

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.

Have you ever thought how humiliating and distressing it was to be placed upon a sphere? For friendship it is a boon never to be able to be further apart than the antipodes. But suppose that you are leaving together to go on and on; it is impossible. To go beyond a certain point is to return to where you began.

There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.

A well governed appetite is the greater part of liberty.

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be named is not the eternal name. The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth; the Named is the mother of all things.

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.

Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.

I never look at fashion magazines. I find them incredibly boring.

Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.

Blessedness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

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

It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.

We are not the sum of our possessions.

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.

Our existence is beyond our explanation, whether we believe in God or we have religion or we’re atheist. Our existence is beyond our understanding. No one has an answer.

The great question of our time is, ‚Will we be motivated by materialistic philosophy or by spiritual power?‘

Work is making a living out of being bored.

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.

To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one’s being added to that being.

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza’s God, it won’t love us in return.

When we are in love we seem to ourselves quite different from what we were before.

I am a little too absorbed by science to be able to philosophise much; but the more I look into myself, the more I find myself possessed by the conviction that it is only the science of Christ running through all things, that is to say true mystical science, that really matters. I let myself get caught up in the game when I geologise.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

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.

The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.

It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved.

I don’t like to be bored.

Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

There is nothing permanent except change.

Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.

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

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

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

Upon the subjects of which I have treated, I have spoken as I have thought. I may be wrong in regard to any or all of them; but, holding it a sound maxim that it is better only sometimes to be right than at all times to be wrong, so soon as I discover my opinions to be erroneous, I shall be ready to renounce them.

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.

Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.

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