Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.

If life is a checker game, someone else is moving the pieces. It isn’t us. Don’t be surprised by amazing coincidences. There are no accidents. Consider, as I learned to do, the incredible interconnectedness of all of life.

Death is not the worst that can happen to men.

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

Why was I born with such contemporaries?

Nothing cannot exist forever.

In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it.

Wonder is the feeling of the philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.

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

If you’re in favour of any policy – reform, revolution, stability, regression, whatever – if you’re at least minimally moral, it’s because you think it’s somehow good for people. And good for people means conforming to their fundamental nature.

Culture of the mind must be subservient to the heart.

You’ve got to reach a hand of friendship across the aisle and across philosophies in this country.

If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.

Man is unable to see himself entirely unrelated to mankind, neither is he able to see mankind unrelated to life, nor life unrelated to the universe.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

It is more fitting for a man to laugh at life than to lament over it.

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

For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.

All genuinely intellectual work is humorous.

The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.

Sorry, I’m still a dialectical materialist.

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

In a way, the whole tangible universe itself is a vast residue, a skeleton of countless lives that have germinated in it and have left it, leaving behind them only a trifling, infinitesimal part of their riches.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

Intuition and concepts constitute… the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

I think the brain is essentially a computer and consciousness is like a computer program. It will cease to run when the computer is turned off. Theoretically, it could be re-created on a neural network, but that would be very difficult, as it would require all one’s memories.

Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.

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

It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.

Justice in the life and conduct of the State is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens.

There’s this lingering philosophy that movie stars shouldn’t do TV.

Little things console us because little things afflict us.

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

A jug fills drop by drop.

It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral.

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.

I just know what is right and I want to do what is right.

Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‚But how can it be like that?‘ because you will get ‚down the drain,‘ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth.

A well governed appetite is the greater part of liberty.

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.

Doctors will have more lives to answer for in the next world than even we generals.

Only our individual faith in freedom can keep us free.

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

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

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

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.

The ultimate authority must always rest with the individual’s own reason and critical analysis.

When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable thing possible: one thereby almost deserves to live.

Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.

Because of lack of moral principle, human life becomes worthless. Moral principle, truthfulness, is a key factor. If we lose that, then there is no future.

I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty.

My theory has always been, that if we are to dream, the flatteries of hope are as cheap, and pleasanter, than the gloom of despair.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.

Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.

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