Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.

The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice.

People have been fed this diet of pabulum, rights, and impulsive freedom. There’s just an absolute starvation for the other side of the story.

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.‘

All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.

By the sole fact of his entering into ‚Thought,‘ man represents something entirely singular and absolutely unique in the field of our experience. On a single planet, there could not be more than one centre of emergence for reflexion.

We know what works. Freedom Works. We know what’s right. Freedom is right.

Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.

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.

All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.

We are right to take alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties.

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

You cannot step into the same river twice.

What we need is a system of thought – you might even call it a religion – that can bind humans together. A system that would fit the Republic of Chad as well as the United States: a system that would supply our idealistic young people with something to believe in.

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.

Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.

To live outside the law, you must be honest.

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

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

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

Nothing cannot exist forever.

And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last.

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

Doubt is the incentive to truth and inquiry leads the way.

To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

The longer I live, the more I feel that true repose consists in ‚renouncing‘ one’s own self, by which I mean making up one’s mind to admit that there is no importance whatever in being ‚happy‘ or ‚unhappy‘ in the usual meaning of the words.

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.

Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal.

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.

What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.

When the prison doors are opened, the real dragon will fly out.

Humanity is still advancing; and it will probably continue to advance for hundreds of thousands of years more, always on condition that we know how to keep the same line of advance as our ancestors towards ever greater consciousness and complexity.

All I’m for is the liberty of the individual.

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.

Somehow, we have come to the erroneous belief that we are all but flesh, blood, and bones, and that’s all. So we direct our values to material things.

Admiration is the daughter of ignorance.

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

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

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.

The key to growth is the introduction of higher dimensions of consciousness into our awareness.

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

Let freedom reign. The sun never set on so glorious a human achievement.

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.

When it’s your time, it is your time.

Blessedness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself.

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever will be born must destroy a world.

Well, the future for me is already a thing of the past.

There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.

The spiritual is the parent of the practical.

That deep emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.

There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.

Time stays, we go.

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do.

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.

Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.

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