It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.

Wisdom alone is the science of other sciences.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

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.

Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.

Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.

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

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

The foolish man conceives the idea of ‚self.‘ The wise man sees there is no ground on which to build the idea of ‚self;‘ thus, he has a right conception of the world and well concludes that all compounds amassed by sorrow will be dissolved again, but the truth will remain.

People need good lies. There are too many bad ones.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.

I joyfully hasten to meet death. If it come before I have had opportunity to develop all my artistic faculties, it will come, my hard fate notwithstanding, too soon, and I should probably wish it later – yet even then I shall be happy, for will it not deliver me from a state of endless suffering?

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are, and to make new things like them.

Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.

What we live by we die by.

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

We account the Scriptures of God to be the most sublime philosophy.

You cannot step into the same river twice.

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.

The spiritual is the parent of the practical.

I don’t suffer of anything that I’ve lost.

It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It’s called living.

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.

Cowardice asks the question, is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because it is right.

A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion.

What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.

I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.

One of my proudest moments is I didn’t sell my soul for the sake of popularity.

Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence.

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.

I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.

It is wrong to assume that men of immense wealth are always happy.

There’s no point in saying anything but the truth.

Fun is good.

Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.

Mandela’s heroism is the heroism of a man who suffered so badly for what he thought of as freedom. And yet when he had the upper hand he has this incredible self-control and these incredible leadership qualities.

Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.

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.

All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.

Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.

I heard a definition once: Happiness is health and a short memory! I wish I’d invented it, because it is very true.

What difference is there between us, save a restless dream that follows my soul but fears to come near you?

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

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.

Probably the happiest period in life most frequently is in middle age, when the eager passions of youth are cooled, and the infirmities of age not yet begun; as we see that the shadows, which are at morning and evening so large, almost entirely disappear at midday.

If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.

Better a broken promise than none at all.

I’m a strict, strict agnostic. It’s very different from a casual, ‚I don’t know.‘ It’s that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can’t present it as fact.

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?

If we are to be happy, we must first react against our tendency to follow the line of least resistance, a tendency that causes us either to remain as we are, or to look primarily to activities external to ourselves for what will provide new impetus to our lives.

Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.