Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.

Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.

Live to learn, and you will really learn to live.

Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence.

All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

Culture of the mind must be subservient to the heart.

Heaven is long-enduring, and earth continues long. The reason why heaven and earth are able to endure and continue thus long is because they do not live of, or for, themselves.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

A wise man is cured of ambition by ambition itself; his aim is so exalted that riches, office, fortune and favour cannot satisfy him.

In order that all men may be taught to speak the truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it.

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.

The union of the Word and the Mind produces that mystery which is called Life… Learn deeply of the Mind and its mystery, for therein lies the secret of immortality.

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

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.

Old age is just a record of one’s whole life.

Truth is so rare that it is delightful to tell it.

Ordinary morality is innate in my view.

It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.

Philosophy is common sense with big words.

Lies are sufficient to breed opinion, and opinion brings on substance.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.

The unsuccessful person is burdened by learning, and prefers to walk down familiar paths. Their distaste for learning stunts their growth and limits their influence.

If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values – that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control.

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.

If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.

I have lived long enough to satisfy both nature and glory.

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man’s being unable to sit still in a room.

It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.

There is no such thing as part freedom.

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

I learned from my dog long before I went to Gombe that we weren’t the only beings with personalities. What the chimps did was help me to persuade others.

Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

I’m an idealist without illusions.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

Religion is the frozen thought of man out of which they build temples.

I tell people, and it’s the truth, I could sit in my garage for a week and it won’t make me a car. And you can sit in church till your bottom is flat and that won’t make you a servant of Christ.

Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries.

A lot of psychological principles and even medical principles, you see them coming around to what the Bible said hundreds of years ago: a merry heart is good like a medicine.

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

Who, being loved, is poor?

In South Korea, they believe that when you turn 60, you’ve become a baby again and the rest of your life should be totally about joy and happiness, and people should leave you alone, and I just think that that’s the height of intelligence.

Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change.

I think carrying moral baggage is very dangerous for an artist. If you have a duty, it’s to be true and not cover up the cracks.

I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greek and Roman leave to us.

Heaven is dumb, echoing only the dumb.

Every step of life shows much caution is required.

Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.

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.

Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.

‚Tis education forms the common mind; just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.

My mind doesn’t work, my memories don’t work like a computer file where I can just retrieve them and, boy, there it is. My mind is selective in terms of memories. When I try to think back to college or high school, there are gaps. I try to fill them in. But I can’t tell you it’s always the truth.

The formula ‚Two and two make five‘ is not without its attractions.

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.