Men’s ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.

Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men.

All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small.

Death is not the worst that can happen to men.

The important question is not, what will yield to man a few scattered pleasures, but what will render his life happy on the whole amount.

I look upon death to be as necessary to our constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning.

To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.

Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago.

There’s a personality trait known as agreeableness. Agreeable people are compassionate and polite. And agreeable people get paid less than disagreeable people for the same job. Women are more agreeable than men.

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.

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

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

Before God we are all equally wise – and equally foolish.

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.

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

While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.

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

All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.

The utmost extent of man’s knowledge, is to know that he knows nothing.

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.

It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‚try to be a little kinder.‘

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.

The false is nothing but an imitation of the true.

The highest proof of the spirit is love. Love the eternal thing which can already on earth possess as it really is.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

Life is wasted on the living.

From wonder into wonder existence opens.

When I was very young I was sort of floored by the fact that my mother and my father and everyone I knew was going to die one day, and myself too. I had a sort of a philosophical crisis. I couldn’t believe that we were mortal.

To go to the world below, having a soul which is like a vessel full of injustice, is the last and worst of all the evils.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.

In all seriousness, people think that it’s the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words – that’s how long a novel is.

And yet it moves.

Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.

We account the Scriptures of God to be the most sublime philosophy.

Toleration is the greatest gift of the mind; it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle.

A well governed appetite is the greater part of liberty.

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

I think there’s more women that watch me than men, but I don’t look at myself as just a minister to women. My ministry began that way, but I really feel like the Word of God is for everybody.

Things in themselves have no life in them. A car can’t comfort or encourage you. A house means nothing if there’s no life and love inside.

We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.

What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

A useless life is an early death.

If men can develop weapons that are so terrifying as to make the thought of global war include almost a sentence for suicide, you would think that man’s intelligence and his comprehension… would include also his ability to find a peaceful solution.

The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.

There is a fundamental question we all have to face. How are we to live our lives; by what principles and moral values will we be guided and inspired?

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

Men who have reached and passed forty-five, have a look as if waiting for the secret of the other world, and as if they were perfectly sure of having found out the secret of this.

Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

‚Evil men have no songs.‘ How is it that the Russians have songs?

Suppose you could gain everything in the whole world, and lost your soul. Was it worth it?

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.

Men are swayed more by fear than by reverence.

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

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.