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

Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.

Religions get lost as people do.

If we do discover a complete theory, it should be in time understandable in broad principle by everyone. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people be able to take part in the discussion of why we and the universe exist.

There is nothing permanent except change.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.

The act of dying is one of the acts of life.

I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live as if there isn’t and to die to find out that there is.

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

That’s another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it’s as if things were coming together in my mind. It’s like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature, and when you feel that nature articulated, it’s it’s like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together.

The brain is wider than the sky.

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

You cannot step into the same river twice.

Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.

Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.

Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.

It is the eye of other people that ruin us. If I were blind I would want, neither fine clothes, fine houses or fine furniture.

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

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

Man was made at the end of the week’s work, when God was tired.

Liking money like I like it, is nothing less than mysticism. Money is a glory.

I did used to have nightmares about the idea that when I die, there is a spark of consciousness which basically creates the world. ‚Is the world going to disappear if this spark of consciousness disappears? And how do I know it won’t? How do I know there’s anything there except what I’m conscious of?‘

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

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

The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

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.

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.

Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.

Error is always more busy than truth.

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.

I read Plato’s ‚Republic.‘ I read it through about five times until I could actually understand it.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

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.

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

If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?

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.

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

I feel a distaste for hunting, first because of a kind of Buddhist respect for the unity and sacredness of all life, and also because the pursuit of a hare or chamois strikes me as a kind of ‚escape of energy,‘ that is, the expenditure of our effort in an illusory end, one devoid of profit.

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

Toleration is the greatest gift of the mind; it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

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

Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.

Life is warfare.

A man who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary.

You forget that the fruits belong to all and that the land belongs to no one.

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.

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

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

There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.

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.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

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