If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.

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

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.

Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men.

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.

The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.

Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.

If you think in terms of a year, plant a seed; if in terms of ten years, plant trees; if in terms of 100 years, teach the people.

To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don’t be.

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

It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair.

The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.

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

We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.

Study men, not historians.

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

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.

Our faith is faith in someone else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.

Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.

Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

Plato is my friend; Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.

Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle.

How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

In my opinion, there is no aspect of reality beyond the reach of the human mind.

Knowledge which is divorced from justice, may be called cunning rather than wisdom.

The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.

Truth is a pathless land.

He that is giddy thinks the world turns round.

Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.

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

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

Man consists of two parts, his mind and his body, only the body has more fun.

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.

Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.

Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.

Man was made at the end of the week’s work, when God was tired.

No notice is taken of a little evil, but when it increases it strikes the eye.

What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness.

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

It is impossible to love and to be wise.

Every man is his own hell.

The natural desire of good men is knowledge.

Atheism shows strength of mind, but only to a certain degree.

It is folly for an eminent man to think of escaping censure, and a weakness to be affected with it. All the illustrious persons of antiquity, and indeed of every age in the world, have passed through this fiery persecution.

When you give, it comes back to you.

For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

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.

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.

Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion.

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.

I call him free who is led solely by reason.

Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough.

We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.

The man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for.

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever – this is a somewhat new kind of religion.