If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

Sin is geographical.

It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.

The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.

It is not living that matters, but living rightly.

Every man is his own hell.

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

It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.

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

The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.

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

Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.

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

So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.

He that is giddy thinks the world turns round.

My philosophy is that if I have any money I invest it in new ventures and not have it sitting around.

I’m interested in that drive, that rush to judgment, that is so prevalent in our society. We all know that pleasurable rush that comes from condemning, and in the short term it’s quite a satisfying thing to do, isn’t it?

It is possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard.

What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?

To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else’s type of thinking.

Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.

Truth is what works.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.

Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

I gave ‚em a sword. And they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I had been in their position, I’d have done the same thing.

There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.

Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago.

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

Satisfaction consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of life.

Truth is a pathless land.

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

Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.

There is nothing so stable as change.

Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you’ve conquered human nature.

An overflow of good converts to bad.

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.

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

I have long understood that losing always comes with the territory when you wander into the gambling business, just as getting crippled for life is an acceptable risk in the linebacker business. They both are extremely violent sports, and pain is part of the bargain. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

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

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

Modern science says: ‚The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.‘ From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

A jug fills drop by drop.

Fashion is very important. It is life-enhancing and, like everything that gives pleasure, it is worth doing well.

That government is best which governs least.

Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear.

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

If danger arises in the present moment, there may be an emotion. There may even be pain. But that’s a challenge, not a problem. For a problem to exist, you need time and repetitive mind activity.

Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‚But how can it be like that?‘ because you will get ‚down the drain,‘ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.

Small is the number of people who see with their eyes and think with their minds.

When you give, it comes back to you.

War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

The God of this world is riches, pleasure and pride.

I want to know why the universe exists, why there is something greater than nothing.

The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.