Law is mind without reason.

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

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

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life.

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.

From wonder into wonder existence opens.

The way is long if one follows precepts, but short… if one follows patterns.

It is more fitting for a man to laugh at life than to lament over it.

I believe Karl Marx could have subscribed to the Sermon on the Mount.

Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.

Say not, ‚I have found the truth,‘ but rather, ‚I have found a truth.‘

What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this.

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.

Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.

There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.

Modesty forbids what the law does not.

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

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

Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.

To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to recieve all the great truths which atheism would deny.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

I think most defense attorneys know, to some extent, their clients are guilty.

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

What I like about the jokes, to me it’s a lot of logic, no matter how crazy they are. It has to make absolute sense, or it won’t be funny.

Sin is geographical.

Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them.

You are a child of the sun, you come from the sun, and that is something true with the Earth also… your relationship with the Earth is so deep, and the Earth is in you and this is something not very difficult, much less difficult then philosophy.

I feel a distaste for hunting, first because of a kind of Buddhist respect for the unity and sacredness of all life, and also because the pursuit of a hare or chamois strikes me as a kind of ‚escape of energy,‘ that is, the expenditure of our effort in an illusory end, one devoid of profit.

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

What’s the good of drawing in the next breath if all you do is let it out and draw in another?

Those whom the gods love grow young.

The great question of our time is, ‚Will we be motivated by materialistic philosophy or by spiritual power?‘

Never in any case say I have lost such a thing, but I have returned it. Is your child dead? It is a return. Is your wife dead? It is a return. Are you deprived of your estate? Is not this also a return?

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Truth is what works.

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

Everything that happens happens as it should, and if you observe carefully, you will find this to be so.

Fortitude is the marshal of thought, the armor of the will, and the fort of reason.

The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.

A man is but the product of his thoughts, what he thinks he becomes.

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.

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

The world itself is the will to power – and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power – and nothing else!

May you live your life as if the maxim of your actions were to become universal law.

Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.

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

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

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

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.

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

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

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

I really believe in the philosophy that you create your own universe. I’m just trying to create a good one for myself.

An overflow of good converts to bad.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.