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

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.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

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

I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.

It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly. And it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living a pleasant life.

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.

Fear is the mother of morality.

The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.

One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.

To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction.

Any man may easily do harm, but not every man can do good to another.

To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don’t be.

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.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

Then not only custom, but also nature affirms that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice, and that justice is equality.

Abortion is clearly wrong.

It makes a great deal of difference whether one wills not to sin or has not the knowledge to sin.

There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge – that is everywhere.

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

Peace is liberty in tranquillity.

Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.

The natural desire of good men is knowledge.

If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza’s God, it won’t love us in return.

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

I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil.

It is perfectly possible to live a very moral life without a belief in God, and I think it’s perfectly possible to live a life peppered with ill-doing and believe in God.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It’s also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.

Philosophy is common sense with big words.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.

That’s another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it’s as if things were coming together in my mind. It’s like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature, and when you feel that nature articulated, it’s it’s like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together.

Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.

Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.

The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.

To me, the extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way, and martial arts is nothing at all special; the closer to the true way of martial arts, the less wastage of expression there is.

There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.

What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

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.

Life is a series of commas, not periods.

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

I think we’re going to the moon because it’s in the nature of the human being to face challenges. It’s by the nature of his deep inner soul… we’re required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

What then do you call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot of yourselves, without revelation, admit the existence within you of anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and thinking.

A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.

A leader who doesn’t hesitate before he sends his nation into battle is not fit to be a leader.

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

For my part, I desire to see the time when education – and by its means, morality, sobriety, enterprise and industry – shall become much more general than at present, and should be gratified to have it in my power to contribute something to the advancement of any measure which might have a tendency to accelerate the happy period.

Nothing can come of nothing.

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

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

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.

The fool wonders, the wise man asks.

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

The greatest tragedy in mankind’s entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.