Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

Justice is a temporary thing that must at last come to an end; but the conscience is eternal and will never die.

That government is best which governs least.

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

I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

I do think there must be some kind of interaction between your living life and the life that goes on from here.

There is nothing good or evil save in the will.

From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.

In the affairs of this world, men are saved not by faith, but by the want of it.

Law is mind without reason.

I call him free who is led solely by reason.

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.

Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.

And, after all, what is a lie? ‚Tis but the truth in a masquerade.

Who shall decide when doctors disagree, And soundest casuists doubt, like you and me?

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

I am against nature. I don’t dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can’t touch with decay.

Small amounts of philosophy lead to atheism, but larger amounts bring us back to God.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.

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

The love of economy is the root of all virtue.

Say not, ‚I have found the truth,‘ but rather, ‚I have found a truth.‘

There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.

We must conceive of this whole universe as one commonwealth of which both gods and men are members.

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.

I have nothing to ask but that you would remove to the other side, that you may not, by intercepting the sunshine, take from me what you cannot give.

We do not learn; and what we call learning is only a process of recollection.

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.

It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.

To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.

I’m an idealist without illusions.

When you draw or paint a tree, you do not imitate the tree; you do not copy it exactly as it is, which would be mere photography. To be free to paint a tree or a flower or a sunset, you have to feel what it conveys to you: the significance, the meaning of it.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.

Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?

What we live by we die by.

To go beyond is as wrong as to fall short.

Nothing can be beautiful which is not true.

It is impossible to love and to be wise.

If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once.

The wise man does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life – knowing that under certain conditions it is not worthwhile to live.

Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.

Ignorant people see life as either existence or non-existence, but wise men see it beyond both existence and non-existence to something that transcends them both; this is an observation of the Middle Way.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

Assuming if there’s such a thing as reality, if you have a false relationship with it, how can you do anything but fail?

I still think like a Marxist in many ways.

There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge – that is everywhere.

I think, in many people’s minds, the Confederate battle flag is not only a memorial to our ancestors, which is perfectly OK, but also a symbol of white superiority and an inclination for people to believe that even slavery would’ve been OK.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

A tomb now suffices him for whom the whole world was not sufficient.

I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.

The natural desire of good men is knowledge.

The union of the Word and the Mind produces that mystery which is called Life… Learn deeply of the Mind and its mystery, for therein lies the secret of immortality.