Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

It is as necessary for man to live in beauty rather than ugliness as it is necessary for him to have food for an aching belly or rest for a weary body.

Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.

One who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.

Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are, and to make new things like them.

Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.

The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.

He who gives away shall have real gain. He who subdues himself shall be free; he shall cease to be a slave of passions. The righteous man casts off evil, and by rooting out lust, bitterness, and illusion do we reach Nirvana.

It may be, it just may be, that life as we know it with its humanity is more unique than many have thought.

To me, the extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way, and martial arts is nothing at all special; the closer to the true way of martial arts, the less wastage of expression there is.

If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

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

My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.

The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.

The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

Millions of people die every day. Everyone’s got to go sometime.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

Nothing can be beautiful which is not true.

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.

Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence.

What do you want a meaning for? Life is a desire, not a meaning.

I believe in the Golden Rule – The Man with the Gold… Rules.

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.

Law is mind without reason.

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?

All who think cannot but see there is a sanction like that of religion which binds us in partnership in the serious work of the world.

Nature cannot be tricked or cheated. She will give up to you the object of your struggles only after you have paid her price.

For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.

There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.

As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into Heaven, into Hell.

There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart.

I argue thee that love is life. And life hath immortality.

I have just got a new theory of eternity.

We all die, we all get sick, we all feel hunger and lust and pain, and therefore human life is consistent from one generation to the other. We all – most of us, anyway – want connections with other people and spend our lives looking for them.

Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: ‚War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.‘

The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

The probability of apocalypse soon cannot be realistically estimated, but it is surely too high for any sane person to contemplate with equanimity.

Religions get lost as people do.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.

Contemplation of life after retirement and life after death can help you deal with contemporary challenges.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

It’s not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren’t doing.

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!

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.

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are… than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

Non-violence is the article of faith.

Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.

Egoism is the very essence of a noble soul.

‚Tis better to bear the ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.

I have always held firmly to the thought that each one of us can do a little to bring some portion of misery to an end.

Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.

It is possible to provide security against other ills, but as far as death is concerned, we men live in a city without walls.

Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.

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.

Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.

Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.

I am rather inclined to silence.