Law is mind without reason.

The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.

Mysteries are not necessarily miracles.

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

Philosophy is the highest music.

Men’s ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.

More gold has been mined from the thoughts of men than has been taken from the earth.

Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago.

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

Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.

Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion.

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.

There is no person in this room whose basic rights are not involved in any successful defiance to the carrying out of court orders.

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

Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.

Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.

Being is the great explainer.

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.

Know then this truth, enough for man to know virtue alone is happiness below.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.

Humor is reason gone mad.

It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.

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

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

If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do.

Hell is other people.

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

Religion is more than life. Remember that his own religion is the truest to every man even if it stands low in the scales of philosophical comparison.

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world.

The false is nothing but an imitation of the true.

Our faith is faith in someone else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.

Only the ideas that we really live have any value.

Sincere words are not fine; fine words are not sincere.

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

And whether you’re an honest man, or whether you’re a thief, depends on whose solicitor has given me my brief.

I tried being reasonable, I didn’t like it.

There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

Egoism is the very essence of a noble soul.

To do all that one is able to do, is to be a man; to do all that one would like to do, is to be a god.

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

The ‚I think‘ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‚I breathe‘ which actually does accompany them.

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

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

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

It is impossible to love and to be wise.

Who, being loved, is poor?

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing.

All things in the world come from being. And being comes from non-being.

The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.

Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, and of every good to man.

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.