In a way, the whole tangible universe itself is a vast residue, a skeleton of countless lives that have germinated in it and have left it, leaving behind them only a trifling, infinitesimal part of their riches.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

The world itself is the will to power – and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power – and nothing else!

The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.

I’m an atheist, and the concept of god for me is all part of what I call ‚the last illusion.‘ The last illusion is someone knows what is going on. Nearly everyone has that illusion somewhere, and it manifests not only in the terms of the idea that there is a god but that it knows what’s going on but that the planets know what’s going on.

If you have the opportunity to play this game of life you need to appreciate every moment. A lot of people don’t appreciate the moment until it’s passed.

Life is abundant, and life is beautiful. And it’s a good place that we’re all in, you know, on this earth, if we take care of it.

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.

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.

Art is the proper task of life.

I do not know whether there are gods, but there ought to be.

Men’s ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.

I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.

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

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable longing to see the truth.

Thinking fragments reality – it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces.

People who don’t like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that’s how life is.

Seventy percent of success in life is showing up.

Happiness is a virtue, not its reward.

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

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.

Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, and of every good to man.

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 secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

Wisdom allows nothing to be good that will not be so forever; no man to be happy but he that needs no other happiness than what he has within himself; no man to be great or powerful that is not master of himself.

A man’s as miserable as he thinks he is.

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.

Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television.

I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.

We all get weary sometimes, and we tend to think that life is what makes us weary.

But if nothing but soul, or in soul mind, is qualified to count, it is impossible for there to be time unless there is soul, but only that of which time is an attribute, i.e. if change can exist without soul.

We do not know what love is. We know the symptoms of it, the pleasure, the pain, the fear, the anxiety and so on. We try to solve the symptoms, which becomes a wandering in darkness. We spend our days and nights in this, and it is soon over in death.

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.

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 proper study of Mankind is Man.

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

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.

The highest proof of the spirit is love. Love the eternal thing which can already on earth possess as it really is.

No one can outrun death. It will catch up to all of us eventually.

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.

All truth is simple… is that not doubly a lie?

That government is best which governs least.

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

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

My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.

Through space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; through thought I comprehend the world.

Mysterious love, uncertain treasure, hast thou more of pain or pleasure! Endless torments dwell about thee: Yet who would live, and live without thee!

I’m in awe of the universe, but I don’t necessarily believe there’s an intelligence or agent behind it. I do have a passion for the visual in religious rituals, though, even though they may be completely empty and bereft of substance.

My life is the road, man. I need to keep moving.

Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.

Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.

I’m an idealist without illusions.