It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

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

God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.

Evil is whatever distracts.

You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand.

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

It is a strange desire, to seek power, and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man’s self.

Don’t join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

The fact that a man is a newspaper reporter is evidence of some flaw of character.

Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride.

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.

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

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.

To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he might have the less.

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

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

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.

Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

To God everything is beautiful, good, and just; humans, however, think some things are unjust and others just.

There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

All who think cannot but see there is a sanction like that of religion which binds us in partnership in the serious work of the world.

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

There was something undifferentiated and yet complete, which existed before Heaven and Earth. Soundless and formless, it depends on nothing and does not change. It operates everywhere and is free from danger. It may be considered the mother of the universe. I do not know its name; I call it Tao.

Expecting is the greatest impediment to living. In anticipation of tomorrow, it loses today.

We moralize among ruins.

When it’s your time, it is your time.

The words of truth are always paradoxical.

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.

If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?

Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

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.

Upon the subjects of which I have treated, I have spoken as I have thought. I may be wrong in regard to any or all of them; but, holding it a sound maxim that it is better only sometimes to be right than at all times to be wrong, so soon as I discover my opinions to be erroneous, I shall be ready to renounce them.

It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.

As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all.

I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.

It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand.

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.

To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.

The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?

There is nothing so stable as change.

Any man is liable to err, only a fool persists in error.

The word ‚racism‘ is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything – and demanding evidence makes you a ‚racist.‘

No evil propensity of the human heart is so powerful that it may not be subdued by discipline.

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

I argue thee that love is life. And life hath immortality.

It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‚try to be a little kinder.‘

Culture of the mind must be subservient to the heart.

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

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.