Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

We are not the sum of our possessions.

A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.

Sin cannot be conceived in a natural state, but only in a civil state, where it is decreed by common consent what is good or bad.

Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Couples are wholes and not wholes, what agrees disagrees, the concordant is discordant. From all things one and from one all things.

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

It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.

I have finally decided to write my book on the spiritual life. I mean to put down as simply as possible the sort of ascetical or mystical teaching that I have been living and preaching so long. I call it ‚Le Milieu Divin,‘ but I am being careful to include nothing esoteric and the minimum of explicit philosophy.

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.

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

Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else.

A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient, nor does he take it ill to be railed at by a man in fever. Just so should a wise man treat all mankind, as a physician does his patient, and look upon them only as sick and extravagant.

Culture makes people understand each other better. And if they understand each other better in their soul, it is easier to overcome the economic and political barriers. But first they have to understand that their neighbour is, in the end, just like them, with the same problems, the same questions.

I think a number of the leaders are, whether you like it or not, in the hip-hop generation. And when they understand enough, they’ll do wonders. I count on them.

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

Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil.

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

In so far as the mind is stronger than the body, so are the ills contracted by the mind more severe than those contracted by the body.

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

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.

I’m a strict, strict agnostic. It’s very different from a casual, ‚I don’t know.‘ It’s that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can’t present it as fact.

There was something undifferentiated and yet complete, which existed before Heaven and Earth. Soundless and formless, it depends on nothing and does not change. It operates everywhere and is free from danger. It may be considered the mother of the universe. I do not know its name; I call it Tao.

In the end, people are persuaded not by what we say, but by what they understand.

We have to continue to learn. We have to be open. And we have to be ready to release our knowledge in order to come to a higher understanding of reality.

My readers – and I get 400 emails for a day, my readers normally they say, well, you understand me, and I answer, you do understand me also. We are in the same level.

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

If God dropped acid, would he see people?

The beginnings and ends of shadow lie between the light and darkness and may be infinitely diminished and infinitely increased. Shadow is the means by which bodies display their form. The forms of bodies could not be understood in detail but for shadow.

We should play free football, defend lively with a passion, and have the best understanding in offence.

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

Proselytism is solemn nonsense; it makes no sense. We need to get to know each other, listen to each other and improve our knowledge of the world around us.

All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.

The earth is supported by the power of truth; it is the power of truth that makes the sun shine and the winds blow; indeed all things rest upon truth.

Gravitation is, so far, not understandable in terms of other phenomena.

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

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

Religion is the opium of the masses.

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.

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?

I have just got a new theory of eternity.

Plato is my friend; Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.

Why a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can’t make head nor tail out of it.

There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.

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

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

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

Courage is a mean with regard to fear and confidence.

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.

What air is to the body, to feel understood is to the heart.

When I understand myself, I understand you, and out of that understanding comes love.

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.

The lie is a condition of life.

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears.

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.