Morality is the basis of things and truth is the substance of all morality.

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.

Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks.

As far as I’m concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue.

I am a little too absorbed by science to be able to philosophise much; but the more I look into myself, the more I find myself possessed by the conviction that it is only the science of Christ running through all things, that is to say true mystical science, that really matters. I let myself get caught up in the game when I geologise.

I know of nothing more despicable and pathetic than a man who devotes all the hours of the waking day to the making of money for money’s sake.

There is still much debate about whether torture has been effective in eliciting information – the assumption being, apparently, that if it is effective, then it may be justified.

Absence and death are the same – only that in death there is no suffering.

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

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.

Don’t lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.

Truly, I would not hang a dog by my will, much more a man who hath any honesty in him.

Morality which depends upon the helplessness of a man or woman has not much to recommend it. Morality is rooted in the purity of our hearts.

Laws control the lesser man… Right conduct controls the greater one.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

Whether if soul did not exist time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted, so that evidently there cannot be number; for number is either what has been, or what can be, counted.

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.

I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things.

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever will be born must destroy a world.

After many years of great mercy, after tasting of the powers of the world to come, we still are so weak, so foolish; but, oh! when we get away from self to God, there all is truth and purity and holiness, and our heart finds peace, wisdom, completeness, delight, joy, victory.

More gold has been mined from the thoughts of men than has been taken from the earth.

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

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

Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge.

An individual’s refusal to carry out the criminal acts of his government sets the stage, in the most effective way possible, for the attempt to demonstrate the criminal nature of these acts.

A well governed appetite is the greater part of liberty.

If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.

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.

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

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

All the religions of the world, while they may differ in other respects, unitedly proclaim that nothing lives in this world but Truth.

We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.

The brain is wider than the sky.

Fear is the mother of morality.

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

The question of whether or not there is a God or truth or reality or whatever you like to call it, can never be answered by books, by priests, philosopher’s or saviours. Nobody and nothing can answer the question but you yourself, and that is why you must know yourself – Immaturity lies only in total ignorance of self.

Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses.

There is some self-interest behind every friendship. There is no friendship without self-interests. This is a bitter truth.

The essence of lying is in deception, not in words.

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be named is not the eternal name. The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth; the Named is the mother of all things.

There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.

Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.

Nonviolence is a good policy when the conditions permit.

If I am judged for my work, many myths about me as an autocrat or otherwise would become clearer. I feel false propaganda will not last, and truth will ultimately prevail.

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.

I think most defense attorneys know, to some extent, their clients are guilty.

Richard Nixon is a no good, lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he’d lie just to keep his hand in.

Each life makes its own immitation of immortality.

A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.

They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice… that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.

In golf, the player, coach and official are rolled into one, and they overlap completely. Golf really is the best microcosm of life – or at least the way life should be.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

If you gain, you gain all. If you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then, without hesitation, that He exists.

Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.

Sorry, I’m still a dialectical materialist.