Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.

Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind.

My philosophy is, it’s always very rewarding when you can make an audience laugh. I don’t mind making fun of myself. I like self-deprecating comedy. But I’d like you to laugh with me occasionally, too.

Death is a commingling of eternity with time; in the death of a good man, eternity is seen looking through time.

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

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

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

Death to me means nothing as long as I can die fast.

I have always held firmly to the thought that each one of us can do a little to bring some portion of misery to an end.

An overflow of good converts to bad.

I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live as if there isn’t and to die to find out that there is.

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

Writing means sharing. It’s part of the human condition to want to share things – thoughts, ideas, opinions.

There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known.

The good opinion of mankind, like the lever of Archimedes, with the given fulcrum, moves the world.

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

Only the ideas that we really live have any value.

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.

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

I believe that every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises.

There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.

It is as necessary for man to live in beauty rather than ugliness as it is necessary for him to have food for an aching belly or rest for a weary body.

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.

All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.

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.

The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.

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

Thought is the parent of the deed.

He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason.

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

For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.

It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.

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

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

It is folly for an eminent man to think of escaping censure, and a weakness to be affected with it. All the illustrious persons of antiquity, and indeed of every age in the world, have passed through this fiery persecution.

Everything that’s created comes out of silence. Your thoughts emerge from the nothingness of silence. Your words come out of this void. Your very essence emerged from emptiness. All creativity requires some stillness.

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

I’m an idealist without illusions.

The last act is bloody, however pleasant all the rest of the play is: a little earth is thrown at last upon our head, and that is the end forever.

In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth – often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground.

Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago.

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

Who would set a limit to the mind of man? Who would dare assert that we know all there is to be known?

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.

If God dropped acid, would he see people?

A weak man is just by accident. A strong but non-violent man is unjust by accident.

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

It’s the philosophies of being an athlete that carry me today.

It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.

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

I can control my destiny, but not my fate. Destiny means there are opportunities to turn right or left, but fate is a one-way street. I believe we all have the choice as to whether we fulfil our destiny, but our fate is sealed.

Death is not the worst that can happen to men.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once.

Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.