Ignorant people see life as either existence or non-existence, but wise men see it beyond both existence and non-existence to something that transcends them both; this is an observation of the Middle Way.

It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

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

Experience teaches us that it is much easier to prevent an enemy from posting themselves than it is to dislodge them after they have got possession.

The word ‚happy‘ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.

I will govern my life and thoughts as if the whole world were to see the one and read the other, for what does it signify to make anything a secret to my neighbor, when to God, who is the searcher of our hearts, all our privacies are open?

If my survival caused another to perish, then death would be sweeter and more beloved.

We should not fret for what is past, nor should we be anxious about the future; men of discernment deal only with the present moment.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil.

All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical part.

It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

He that will enjoy the brightness of sunshine, must quit the coolness of the shade.

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.

Tricks and treachery are the practice of fools, that don’t have brains enough to be honest.

Life is our dictionary.

He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.

I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn’t wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.

I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge.

There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.

There is nothing so stable as change.

Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.

We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal’s ‚Pensees‘ and read, ‚I am the great silent spaces between worlds.‘

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods.

One whose knowledge is confined to books and whose wealth is in the possession of others, can use neither his knowledge nor wealth when the need for them arises.

It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.

The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all.

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

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

O wretched man, wretched not just because of what you are, but also because you do not know how wretched you are!

You’ve got to reach a hand of friendship across the aisle and across philosophies in this country.

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

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

There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.

The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort.

If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?

You know, my Grandpop Finnegan used to have an expression: he used to say, ‚Joey, the guy in Olyphant’s out of work, it’s an economic slowdown. When your brother-in-law’s out of work, it’s a recession. When you’re out of work, it’s a depression.‘

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.

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

Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.

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

Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but vengeful; and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm.

But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

Anger dwells only in the bosom of fools.

The more extensive a man’s knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his power of knowing what to do.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the ‚Not Me,‘ that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, ‚Nature.‘

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

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased.

To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to recieve all the great truths which atheism would deny.