Means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.

Misfortune seldom intrudes upon the wise man; his greatest and highest interests are directed by reason throughout the course of life.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

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

Upon the subjects of which I have treated, I have spoken as I have thought. I may be wrong in regard to any or all of them; but, holding it a sound maxim that it is better only sometimes to be right than at all times to be wrong, so soon as I discover my opinions to be erroneous, I shall be ready to renounce them.

Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality.

The man who has won millions at the cost of his conscience is a failure.

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

That deep emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

It means, people who are in high and responsible positions, if they go against righteousness, righteousness itself will get transformed into a destroyer.

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

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well.

It’s very hard to live with yourself if you don’t stick with your moral code.

Nothing is so wretched or foolish as to anticipate misfortunes. What madness is it to be expecting evil before it comes.

Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.

I am not interested in power for power’s sake, but I’m interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

I want to know all Gods thoughts; all the rest are just details.

Man has throughout the ages been seeking something beyond himself, beyond material welfare – something we call truth or God or reality, a timeless state – something that cannot be disturbed by circumstances, by thought or by human corruption.

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.

I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.

God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.

Ingratitude is the essence of vileness.

Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores the better.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

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

Noble deeds that are concealed are most esteemed.

Philosophy begins in wonder.

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

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It’s a battle you can’t hope to win – it’s a battle that’s going to go on forever. It’s part of the human condition.

I will govern my life and thoughts as if the whole world were to see the one and read the other, for what does it signify to make anything a secret to my neighbor, when to God, who is the searcher of our hearts, all our privacies are open?

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will’s freedom after it.

Assuming if there’s such a thing as reality, if you have a false relationship with it, how can you do anything but fail?

If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn’t wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.

You cannot be in a position of power and destroy the life of another person.

The truth is lived, not taught.

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

No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expedience.

Love, we say, is life; but love without hope and faith is agonizing death.

We should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time’s carcass.

Judges ought to be more leaned than witty, more reverent than plausible, and more advised than confident. Above all things, integrity is their portion and proper virtue.

If a man loses his reverence for any part of life, he will lose his reverence for all of life.

The precepts of the law are these: to live honestly, to injure no one, and to give everyone else his due.

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

The violence in the Bible is appalling.

Live truth instead of professing it.

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

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.

The man who promises everything is sure to fulfil nothing, and everyone who promises too much is in danger of using evil means in order to carry out his promises, and is already on the road to perdition.

Wisdom begins in wonder.

What goes up must come down.