It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

Truth is what works.

To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.

One can know a man from his laugh, and if you like a man’s laugh before you know anything of him, you may confidently say that he is a good man.

Seemingly, man has learned to live without God, preoccupied and indifferent toward Him and concerned only about material security and pleasure.

Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principle of morality.

We should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time’s carcass.

Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as you will.

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

The book, ’12 Rules For Life,‘ is a very serious book. There’s elements of humor in it, but I’m trying to struggle with things at the deepest possible level and to explain to people why it’s necessary to live a upstanding and noble and moral and truthful and responsible life, and why there’s hell to pay if you don’t do that.

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

My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.

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

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

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

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Such is the feebleness of humanity, such is its perversity, that doubtless it is better for it to be subject to all possible superstitions, as long as they are not murderous, than to live without religion.

It’s possible – you can never know – that the universe exists only for me. If so, it’s sure going well for me, I must admit.

I’m very free-spirited.

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 foolish to tear one’s hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.

Truth is a good dog; but always beware of barking too close to the heels of an error, lest you get your brains kicked out.

What’s the use of happiness? It can’t buy you money.

Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you’re aboard, there’s nothing you can do.

We might as well die as to go on living like this.

An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.

When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

As far as I’m concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue.

There is no wealth but life.

Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge.

The infinitely little have a pride infinitely great.

Every man is his own hell.

You can’t have it all, all at once. Who – man or woman – has it all, all at once? Over my lifespan, I think I have had it all. But in different periods of time, things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.

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.

Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years.

Which death is preferably to every other? ‚The unexpected‘.

In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.

No man was ever wise by chance.

Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

I was inspired to spend an entire year – my 65th year – reading, researching, and meditating on Lao-tzu’s messages, practicing them and ultimately writing down these insights as I felt Lao-tzu wanted us to know them.

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

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.

The future influences the present just as much as the past.

To me, constructive criticism is when people take ownership of their ideas. That’s why I don’t listen to anything that’s anonymous. But it’s hard; when there’s something hurtful out there, I still want to read it over and over and memorize it and explain my point of view to the person.

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever – this is a somewhat new kind of religion.

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

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

If a man or woman is born ten years sooner or later, their whole aspect and performance shall be different.

There is no such things as ‚best‘ in the world of individuals.

So far is it from being true that men are naturally equal, that no two people can be half an hour together, but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.

As I approve of a youth that has something of the old man in him, so I am no less pleased with an old man that has something of the youth. He that follows this rule may be old in body, but can never be so in mind.

Wisdom begins in wonder.

I have been ever of opinion that revolutions are not to be evaded.