If you understand the universe, you control it, in a way.

Nothing cannot exist forever.

The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

Man is made to adore and to obey: but if you will not command him, if you give him nothing to worship, he will fashion his own divinities, and find a chieftain in his own passions.

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.

Everything deep is also simple and can be reproduced simply as long as its reference to the whole truth is maintained. But what matters is not what is witty but what is true.

The end is the beginning of all things, Suppressed and hidden, Awaiting to be released through the rhythm Of pain and pleasure.

Life is wasted on the living.

A man is but the product of his thoughts, what he thinks he becomes.

Ours is a nation of laws: of citizens who live under them and for the citizens who enforce them. So, to a community in Ferguson that is rightly hurting and looking for answers, let me call once again for us to seek some understanding rather than simply holler at each other. Let’s seek to heal rather than to wound each other.

Philosophy is common sense with big words.

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

Nature cannot be tricked or cheated. She will give up to you the object of your struggles only after you have paid her price.

The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended-and not to take a hint when a hint isn’t intended.

If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.

To me, the extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way, and martial arts is nothing at all special; the closer to the true way of martial arts, the less wastage of expression there is.

I don’t control my writing – it controls me.

People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they’re not on your road doesn’t mean they’ve gotten lost.

Man does not control his own fate. The women in his life do that for him.

The world, we are told, was made especially for man – a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God’s universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

Heaven is long-enduring, and earth continues long. The reason why heaven and earth are able to endure and continue thus long is because they do not live of, or for, themselves.

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.

I draw from the Absurd three consequences: my revolt, my liberty, my passion.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

Each life makes its own immitation of immortality.

I don’t see myself as a philosopher. That’s awfully boring.

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.

Morality is the basis of things and truth is the substance of all morality.

At the heart of the Irish economy has always been the philosophy of tax competitiveness. On the cranky left, that is very annoying; I can see that.

Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.

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

You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand.

Conservatism discards Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress; having rejected all respect for antiquity, it offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

Is man one of God’s blunders? Or is God one of man’s blunders?

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

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.

Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved.

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

As long as your body is healthy and under control and death is distant, try to save your soul; when death is immanent what can you do?

Surely our job while we’re here on Earth is to learn about the world, not to create parallel universes.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

After one has been in prison, it is the small things that one appreciates: being able to take a walk whenever one wants, going into a shop and buying a newspaper, speaking or choosing to remain silent. The simple act of being able to control one’s person.

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

See things from the boy’s point of view.

I’ve studied authoritarianism for a very long time – for 40 years – and they’re started by people’s attempts to control the ideological and linguistic territory.

We’re in very bad trouble if we don’t understand the planet we’re trying to save.

I don’t suffer of anything that I’ve lost.

I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think.

Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.

There is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.