I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.

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

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

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.

The false is nothing but an imitation of the true.

There was something undifferentiated and yet complete, which existed before Heaven and Earth. Soundless and formless, it depends on nothing and does not change. It operates everywhere and is free from danger. It may be considered the mother of the universe. I do not know its name; I call it Tao.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

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

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.

Christmas time! That man must be a misanthrope indeed, in whose breast something like a jovial feeling is not roused – in whose mind some pleasant associations are not awakened – by the recurrence of Christmas.

The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.

To meditate means to go home to yourself. Then you know how to take care of the things that are happening inside you, and you know how to take care of the things that happen around you.

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?

I always wonder when it was that I was embraced.

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.

One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people’s minds.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

I think I lived those years very impersonally. It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the president’s wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House.

Things in themselves have no life in them. A car can’t comfort or encourage you. A house means nothing if there’s no life and love inside.

Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief.

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.

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.

Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man’s resources?

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

You know, it’s not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.

Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.

Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune.

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

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

Our life is made by the death of others.

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.

The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.

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

Call it Nature, Fate, Fortune; all these are names of the one and selfsame God.

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

There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.

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.

I’ve always felt that if I examine myself too much, I’ll find out what I know and don’t know, and I’ll burst the bubble. I’ve gotten so lucky relying on my animal instincts, I’d rather keep a little bit of the animal alive.

Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.

Philosophy begins in wonder.

If we do discover a complete theory, it should be in time understandable in broad principle by everyone. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people be able to take part in the discussion of why we and the universe exist.

Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain, our thoughts are linked by many a hidden chain; awake but one, and in, what myriads rise!

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

What then is freedom? The power to live as one wishes.

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

Our faith is faith in someone else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.

My three children have brought me great joy.

Every spirit makes its house, and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant.

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 order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

Love, we say, is life; but love without hope and faith is agonizing death.

‚Kiss Land‘ wasn’t about what people wanted to hear on the radio. It was the state of mind I was in – introverted, like David Cronenberg’s ‚Naked Lunch.‘ You didn’t know if you were hearing a chorus or a verse. It was just my thoughts.