Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence.

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

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

All men are equal before fish.

Man is not born to atheism. He is born to believe.

All the gold which is under or upon the earth is not enough to give in exchange for virtue.

Plato is my friend; Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

I have an existential map. It has ‚You are here‘ written all over it.

You cannot make a sinner into a saint by killing him. He who does not live as a saint here will never live as a saint hereafter.

Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again.

Couples are wholes and not wholes, what agrees disagrees, the concordant is discordant. From all things one and from one all things.

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

Some day science may have the existence of mankind in power, and the human race can commit suicide by blowing up the world.

Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.

All women have a perception much more developed than men. So all women somehow, being repressed for so many millennia, they ended up by developing this sixth sense and contemplation and love. And this is something that we have a hard time to accept as part of our society.

No one can be happy who has been thrust outside the pale of truth. And there are two ways that one can be removed from this realm: by lying, or by being lied to.

The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.

To live outside the law, you must be honest.

What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth.

Why was I born with such contemporaries?

Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man’s nature – opposition to it is his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely, as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

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

The wise man does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life – knowing that under certain conditions it is not worthwhile to live.

The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.

The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.

Having nothing, nothing can he lose.

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

We are not the sum of our possessions.

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.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

There is an orderliness in the universe, there is an unalterable law governing everything and every being that exists or lives. It is no blind law; for no blind law can govern the conduct of living beings.

Desire of having is the sin of covetousness.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

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

Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.

It is better to die than to preserve this life by incurring disgrace. The loss of life causes but a moment’s grief, but disgrace brings grief every day of one’s life.

Life is our dictionary.

And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

The universe is not indifferent to our existence – it depends on it.

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.

Each life makes its own immitation of immortality.

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

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.

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

Morality is the basis of things and truth is the substance of all morality.

Life is about conduct and how we conduct ourselves. But two wrongs never make a right.

I have never entered into any controversy in defense of my philosophical opinions; I leave them to take their chance in the world. If they are right, truth and experience will support them; if wrong, they ought to be refuted and rejected. Disputes are apt to sour one’s temper and disturb one’s quiet.

Conservatism discards Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress; having rejected all respect for antiquity, it offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future.

It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.

But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.