If particulars are to have meaning, there must be universals.

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

Change alone is unchanging.

Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

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.

The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It’s a battle you can’t hope to win – it’s a battle that’s going to go on forever. It’s part of the human condition.

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.

Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are… than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

Life is wasted on the living.

Sin cannot be conceived in a natural state, but only in a civil state, where it is decreed by common consent what is good or bad.

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.

I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion.

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

And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.

There is in general good reason to suppose that in several respects the gods could all benefit from instruction by us human beings. We humans are – more humane.

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.

If you pursue good with labor, the labor passes away but the good remains; if you pursue evil with pleasure, the pleasure passes away and the evil remains.

In the affairs of this world, men are saved not by faith, but by the want of it.

The first book I ever really read was Plato’s ‚Republic,‘ and then I had to go over that five times or something.

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.

If one way be better than another, that you may be sure is nature’s way.

This is the truth: as from a fire aflame thousands of sparks come forth, even so from the Creator an infinity of beings have life and to him return again.

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

The Hindu religions gave me the impression of a vast well into which one plunges in order to grasp the reflection of the sun.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

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

No man can reveal to you nothing but that which already lies half-asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

What is the Tao Te Ching? Five hundred years before the birth of Jesus, a God-realized being named Lao-tzu in ancient China dictated 81 verses which are regarded by many as the ultimate commentary on the nature of existence.

But if nothing but soul, or in soul mind, is qualified to count, it is impossible for there to be time unless there is soul, but only that of which time is an attribute, i.e. if change can exist without soul.

It is a strange desire, to seek power, and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man’s self.

A weak man is just by accident. A strong but non-violent man is unjust by accident.

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.

The only objects of practical reason are therefore those of good and evil. For by the former is meant an object necessarily desired according to a principle of reason; by the latter one necessarily shunned, also according to a principle of reason.

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.

Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.

Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all.

There is nothing permanent except change.

Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination.

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

To see and listen to the wicked is already the beginning of wickedness.

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.

Religion is the frozen thought of man out of which they build temples.

Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind.

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

We usually lose today, because there has been a yesterday, and tomorrow is coming.

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

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

Words are loaded pistols.

Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.