Mysteries are not necessarily miracles.

If you pursue good with labor, the labor passes away but the good remains; if you pursue evil with pleasure, the pleasure passes away and the evil remains.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values.

In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

The state comes into existence for the sake of life and continues to exist for the sake of good life.

Sincere words are not fine; fine words are not sincere.

If you understand the universe, you control it, in a way.

Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.

There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.

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

How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?

The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal.

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.

From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.

Wisdom alone is the science of other sciences.

When you give, it comes back to you.

What difference is there between us, save a restless dream that follows my soul but fears to come near you?

Falsehood is a perennial spring.

It is best to rise from life as from a banquet, neither thirsty nor drunken.

To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.

The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.

You have to take risks. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.

The proper study of Mankind is Man.

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

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

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

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

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.

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.

It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist.

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

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

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.

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.

Religion and philosophy are to be preserved distinct. We are not to introduce divine revelations into philosophy, nor philosophical opinions into religion.

Honor thy error as a hidden intention.

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly. And it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living a pleasant life.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

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

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.

Obviously I faced the possibility of not returning when first I considered going. Once faced and settled there really wasn’t any good reason to refer to it.

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

Give yourself a gift of five minutes of contemplation in awe of everything you see around you. Go outside and turn your attention to the many miracles around you. This five-minute-a-day regimen of appreciation and gratitude will help you to focus your life in awe.

What’s the good of drawing in the next breath if all you do is let it out and draw in another?

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

Even Hubble hasn’t found yet the end of this universe, and we don’t know that it has any end.

To appreciate the noble is a gain which can never be torn from us.

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.

Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.

Premature certainty is the enemy of the truth.

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

Everything that happens happens as it should, and if you observe carefully, you will find this to be so.