I’m fascinated by the fact that we can’t grasp anything about time.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

‚I wish life was not so short,‘ he thought. ‚Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.‘

The best argument I know for an immortal life is the existence of a man who deserves one.

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.

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

If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.

Therefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics.

That’s the shock: All cliches are true. The years really do speed by. Life really is as short as they tell you it is. And there really is a God – so do I buy that one? If all the other cliches are true… Hell, don’t pose me that one.

The way of the Creative works through change and transformation, so that each thing receives its true nature and destiny and comes into permanent accord with the Great Harmony: this is what furthers and what perseveres.

There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.

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

They say somebody’s ‚street smart.‘ I feel like, if I got intelligence, it’s just a country smart.

Well, the future for me is already a thing of the past.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

Sometimes the heart sees what is invisible to the eye.

One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.

In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.

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?

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

O God, O God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!

Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

Love, we say, is life; but love without hope and faith is agonizing death.

Doubt is the incentive to truth and inquiry leads the way.

It takes a smart man to play dumb.

People talk to people who perceive nothing, who have open eyes and see nothing; they shall talk to them and receive no answer; they shall adore those who have ears and hear nothing; they shall burn lamps for those who do not see.

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.

What goes up must come down.

Nothing is so wretched or foolish as to anticipate misfortunes. What madness is it to be expecting evil before it comes.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.

Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.

I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.

The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.

I don’t mind making jokes, but I don’t want to look like one.

My friends tease me about the fact that if someone seems bad or shady or like they have a secret, I find them incredibly interesting.

Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself.

How we experience memory sometimes, it’s not linear. We’re not telling the stories to ourselves. We know the story; we’re just seeing it in flashes overlaid.

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

To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

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

Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.

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.

Sometimes there are no good guys. There are no bad guys. It seems like everybody is in the middle.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.

What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?

We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.

If my mother knew I did this for a living, she’d kill me. She thinks I’m selling dope.