Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

It is dangerous for mortal beauty, or terrestrial virtue, to be examined by too strong a light. The torch of Truth shows much that we cannot, and all that we would not, see.

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

We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.

To know yet to think that one does not know is best; Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty.

A God without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but fate and nature.

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

If you ever injected truth into politics you have no politics.

I was inspired to spend an entire year – my 65th year – reading, researching, and meditating on Lao-tzu’s messages, practicing them and ultimately writing down these insights as I felt Lao-tzu wanted us to know them.

Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.

I never fall in love.

Nothing can come of nothing.

I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

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

The object of the superior man is truth.

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up.

My philosophy in life is, Decide what you want to do. You have to have something to hope for.

There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.

Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self-sustained.

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principle of morality.

At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.

How hard, how bitter it is to become a man!

I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

He that is giddy thinks the world turns round.

By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.

God is a concept by which we measure our pain.

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Chaos is a friend of mine.

I was becoming post-ideological.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

I think, when you are growing up, you have to pull apart from what your mother wants or needs. You’ve got to go your own way, and that’s what I did.

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

Whatever the universal nature assigns to any man at any time is for the good of that man at that time.

What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I’m someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.

God, as Truth, has been for me a treasure beyond price. May He be so to every one of us.

The goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth.

Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

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

In order to heal others, we first need to heal ourselves. And to heal ourselves, we need to know how to deal with ourselves.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

My philosophy is that if I have any money I invest it in new ventures and not have it sitting around.

You could not step twice into the same rivers; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.

What then is freedom? The power to live as one wishes.

A lot of truth is said in jest.

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

Those whom the gods love grow young.

When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.

Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary ‚real‘ world.

No such thing as a man willing to be honest – that would be like a blind man willing to see.

The spirit is there in every boy; it has to be discovered and brought to light.