Man is unable to see himself entirely unrelated to mankind, neither is he able to see mankind unrelated to life, nor life unrelated to the universe.

It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.

Who shall decide when doctors disagree, And soundest casuists doubt, like you and me?

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased.

I had rather believe all the Fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a Mind.

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

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

Let’s pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.

There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

Non-violence, which is the quality of the heart, cannot come by an appeal to the brain.

Many people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

Rules are not necessarily sacred, principles are.

I’m an atheist, and the concept of god for me is all part of what I call ‚the last illusion.‘ The last illusion is someone knows what is going on. Nearly everyone has that illusion somewhere, and it manifests not only in the terms of the idea that there is a god but that it knows what’s going on but that the planets know what’s going on.

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

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

The word ‚happy‘ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active – not more happy – nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

We do not know what is really good or bad fortune.

While discipline and freedom seem like they sit on opposite sides of the spectrum, they are actually very connected.

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory; they have no power over the substance of original justice.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

Moderation is the center wherein all philosophies, both human and divine, meet.

In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.

All variety of created objects which represent order and life in the universe could happen only by the willful reasoning of its original Creator, whom I call the ‚Lord God.‘

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

The good is the beautiful.

The world is round so that friendship may encircle it.

He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.

Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.

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

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?

There is neither spirit nor matter in the world. The stuff of the universe is spirit-matter. No other substance but this could have produced the human molecule.

I love hugging people. I still hug everybody in my meet-and-greet lines.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.

In art, at a certain level, there is no ‚better than.‘ It’s just about trying to operate for yourself on the most supreme level, artistically, that you can and hoping that people get it. Trusting that, just because of the way people are built and how interconnected we are, greatness will translate and symmetry will be recognised.

There is in general good reason to suppose that in several respects the gods could all benefit from instruction by us human beings. We humans are – more humane.

The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: ‚If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?‘ But… the good Samaritan reversed the question: ‚If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?‘

The human heart is the same the world over.

We all dream. We dream vividly, depending on our nature. Our existence is beyond our explanation, whether we believe in God or we have religion or we’re atheist.

There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.

I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

Man’s true nature being lost, everything becomes his nature; as, his true good being lost, everything becomes his good.

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

I want get across to not just the church world. I want to get outside those walls to everyday people.

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

While physics and mathematics may tell us how the universe began, they are not much use in predicting human behavior because there are far too many equations to solve. I’m no better than anyone else at understanding what makes people tick, particularly women.

Falsehood is a perennial spring.

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.

We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war or there won’t be a world – at least, a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering of others.

If co-operation is a duty, I hold that non-co-operation also under certain conditions is equally a duty.

And yet it moves.

You may say, ‚Well, dragons don’t exist.‘ It’s, like, yes they do – the category ‚predator‘ and the category ‚dragon‘ are the same category. It absolutely exists. It’s a superordinate category. It exists absolutely more than anything else. In fact, it really exists.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

What really raises one’s indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.

To be more childlike, you don’t have to give up being an adult. The fully integrated person is capable of being both an adult and a child simultaneously. Recapture the childlike feelings of wide-eyed excitement, spontaneous appreciation, cutting loose, and being full of awe and wonder at this magnificent universe.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

Modern science says: ‚The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.‘ From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.