If we don’t know life, how can we know death?

All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.

I draw pleasure in governance, in doing new things and bringing people together. That pleasure is all I need from life.

Life is one grand, sweet song, so start the music.

Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.

Do you know the only value life has is what life puts on itself?

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.

My life is mine to remember.

We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.

Then not only custom, but also nature affirms that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice, and that justice is equality.

My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.

Death obsesses me, yes it does. I can’t really understand why it doesn’t obsess everyone – I think it does really, I’m just a little more out about it.

All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

It’s really easy to have a nice philosophy about openness, but moving the world in that direction is a different thing. It requires both understanding where you want to go and being pragmatic about getting there.

To free a person from error is to give, and not to take away.

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.

The spiritual is the parent of the practical.

All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory; they have no power over the substance of original justice.

Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!

Hell is other people.

Man is unable to see himself entirely unrelated to mankind, neither is he able to see mankind unrelated to life, nor life unrelated to the universe.

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.

Life is precious.

Men would be angels, angels would be gods.

In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.

Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.

Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.

Sometimes we look back and 10 years from now we think, ‚Boy, those were great old days.‘ Well, you know, we’re living in the good old days.

There is no such thing as accident; it is fate misnamed.

A worthy woman personifies the truly noble and worthwhile attributes of life.

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

Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get.

Paradise was made for tender hearts; hell, for loveless hearts.

We all die, we all get sick, we all feel hunger and lust and pain, and therefore human life is consistent from one generation to the other. We all – most of us, anyway – want connections with other people and spend our lives looking for them.

Violent men have not been known in history to die to a man. They die up to a point.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

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?

You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.

Non-violence requires a double faith, faith in God and also faith in man.

Alas, I am dying beyond my means.

As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into Heaven, into Hell.

Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering.

I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

To go to the world below, having a soul which is like a vessel full of injustice, is the last and worst of all the evils.

Singleness of purpose is one of the chief essentials for success in life, no matter what may be one’s aim.

We should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time’s carcass.

For my own part, I would rather excel in knowledge of the highest secrets of philosophy than in arms.

I believe things cannot make themselves impossible.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

Youth is to all the glad season of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.

Very often, say what you will, a knave is only a fool.

Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else.

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

I restore myself when I’m alone.

Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting. And you don’t do that by sitting around.

A man is born alone and dies alone; and he experiences the good and bad consequences of his karma alone; and he goes alone to hell or the Supreme abode.

The fool wonders, the wise man asks.