I still think like a Marxist in many ways.

I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.

He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature (which is the proper object of philosophy) is the way to elevate one’s gaze.

Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle.

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.

Life is hard. After all, it kills you.

Religion is more than life. Remember that his own religion is the truest to every man even if it stands low in the scales of philosophical comparison.

The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.

Any man is liable to err, only a fool persists in error.

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

A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.

There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.

There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.

The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

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

Capitalism is using its money; we socialists throw it away.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

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

Thinking fragments reality – it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces.

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.

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

From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.

Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that’s what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

It’s the philosophies of being an athlete that carry me today.

Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.

It’s impossible, I think, however much I’d become disillusioned politically or evolve into a post-political person, I don’t think I’d ever change my view that socialism is the best political moment humans have ever come up with.

Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.

I’m conservative, but I’m not a nut about it.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.

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

The way is long if one follows precepts, but short… if one follows patterns.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever will be born must destroy a world.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.

Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.

Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

We must conceive of this whole universe as one commonwealth of which both gods and men are members.

Truth is a pathless land.

Sorry, I’m still a dialectical materialist.

What really raises one’s indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

Science is nothing but perception.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.

It’s not morbid to talk about death. Most people don’t worry about death, they worry about a bad death.

Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.

How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?

Theology is unnecessary.

But your questions, which are unanswerable without exception, all spring from the same erroneous thinking.

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.

The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.