If I err in belief that the souls of men are immortal, I gladly err, nor do I wish this error which gives me pleasure to be wrested from me while I live.

Cursing is invoking the assistance of a spirit to help you inflict suffering. Swearing on the other hand, is invoking, only the witness of a spirit to an statement you wish to make.

Luck is believing you’re lucky.

Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes, Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn’t take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

The Italians and Spanish, the Chinese and Vietnamese see food as part of a larger, more essential and pleasurable part of daily life. Not as an experience to be collected or bragged about – or as a ritual like filling up a car – but as something else that gives pleasure, like sex or music, or a good nap in the afternoon.

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

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

Sometimes there are no good guys. There are no bad guys. It seems like everybody is in the middle.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

When you cease to exist, then who will you blame?

I’m fascinated by the fact that we can’t grasp anything about time.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased.

He that does good to another does good also to himself.

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

After your death you will be what you were before your birth.

The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.

I did used to have nightmares about the idea that when I die, there is a spark of consciousness which basically creates the world. ‚Is the world going to disappear if this spark of consciousness disappears? And how do I know it won’t? How do I know there’s anything there except what I’m conscious of?‘

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life.

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

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.

Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons.

Religion can be the enemy of God. It’s often what happens when God, like Elvis, has left the building.

The desire to annoy no one, to harm no one, can equally well be the sign of a just as of an anxious disposition.

For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all.

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

I believe things cannot make themselves impossible.

Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.

Men willingly believe what they wish.

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

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

When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.

Only the ideas that we really live have any value.

I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil.

Wisdom is found only in truth.

Knowledge is true opinion.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.

Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.

There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

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.

A man cannot become an atheist merely by wishing it.

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.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.

There is an afterlife. I am convinced of this.

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

Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.

The mind is the limit. As long as the mind can envision the fact that you can do something, you can do it, as long as you really believe 100 percent.

And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last.

Wisdom allows nothing to be good that will not be so forever; no man to be happy but he that needs no other happiness than what he has within himself; no man to be great or powerful that is not master of himself.

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

God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.

Sin is geographical.

Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right.

I have always believed in God.

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.