If anyone offers conjectures about the truth of things from the mere possibility of hypotheses, I do not see by what stipulation anything certain can be determined in any science, since one or another set of hypotheses may always be devised which will appear to supply new difficulties.

All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?

I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?

Conservatism discards Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress; having rejected all respect for antiquity, it offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future.

The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.

The lawyer’s truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.

The brain is wider than the sky.

I’m interested in two things. I’m interested in truth and I’m interested in fairness.

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.

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.

It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.

As long as your body is healthy and under control and death is distant, try to save your soul; when death is immanent what can you do?

There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophies. My brain and my heart are my temples; my philosophy is kindness.

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

There are as many opinions as there are experts.

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.

You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

Plato was a bore.

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.

What goes up must come down.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

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

Wisdom is found only in truth.

Non-violence, which is the quality of the heart, cannot come by an appeal to the brain.

Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.

Assuming if there’s such a thing as reality, if you have a false relationship with it, how can you do anything but fail?

The way to see by Faith is to shut the Eye of Reason.

Lying is not only saying what isn’t true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

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

Not everyone can see the truth, but he can be it.

The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

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

Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.

The most successful war seldom pays for its losses.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self-sustained.

I believe that every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises.

When you give, it comes back to you.

Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing. It is a matter of chance which we are in.

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

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.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

I have been a professor, and I have been a policymaker, and as a professor, you think in terms of truth or absolutes.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

Look at situations from all angles, and you will become more open.

Forever is composed of nows.

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.

The union of the Word and the Mind produces that mystery which is called Life… Learn deeply of the Mind and its mystery, for therein lies the secret of immortality.

The hungry judges soon the sentence sign, and wretches hang that jurymen may dine.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.