In everything one thing is impossible: rationality.

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza’s God, it won’t love us in return.

Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again.

There is nothing good or evil save in the will.

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That’s always been the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.

Reality is a sliding door.

All things in the world come from being. And being comes from non-being.

Wisdom is found only in truth.

The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.

Man is a universe within himself.

It is the eye of other people that ruin us. If I were blind I would want, neither fine clothes, fine houses or fine furniture.

Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.

It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.

You cannot step into the same river twice.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.

We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.

We must conceive of this whole universe as one commonwealth of which both gods and men are members.

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

If you think only of evil, then you become pessimistic and hopeless like Freud. But if you think there is no evil, then you’re just one more deluded Pollyanna.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

Nothing can come of nothing.

Reason is the enemy of faith.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.

No man enjoys the true taste of life, but he who is ready and willing to quit it.

Religion and philosophy are to be preserved distinct. We are not to introduce divine revelations into philosophy, nor philosophical opinions into religion.

Moderation is the center wherein all philosophies, both human and divine, meet.

We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.

Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.

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

The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.

There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Non-violence, which is the quality of the heart, cannot come by an appeal to the brain.

The world embarrasses me, and I cannot dream that this watch exists and has no watchmaker.

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.

One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does after the effect.

And, after all, what is a lie? ‚Tis but the truth in a masquerade.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

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.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

Certain defects are necessary for the existence of individuality.

Sorry, I’m still a dialectical materialist.

I have nothing to ask but that you would remove to the other side, that you may not, by intercepting the sunshine, take from me what you cannot give.

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

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.

Means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.

I do think there must be some kind of interaction between your living life and the life that goes on from here.

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.

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

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty – his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.

The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be first to inquire diligently into the properties of things, and establishing those properties by experiments, and then to proceed more slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them.

If co-operation is a duty, I hold that non-co-operation also under certain conditions is equally a duty.

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.

Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.

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