No obligation to do the impossible is binding.

Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

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

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.

Have you ever thought how humiliating and distressing it was to be placed upon a sphere? For friendship it is a boon never to be able to be further apart than the antipodes. But suppose that you are leaving together to go on and on; it is impossible. To go beyond a certain point is to return to where you began.

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.

I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

The dropping of bombs on people – isn’t that terrorism?

Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.

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

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

Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man’s nature – opposition to it is his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely, as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.

There is a specter haunting Europe, the specter of Communism.

I don’t believe in an outside agent that creates the world, then walks away. But I feel very strongly there is an intelligence at work in every flower, in every blade of grass, in every cell of my body. And it is that intelligence that, I wouldn’t say created the universe. It is creating the universe. It’s an ongoing process.

As far as I’m concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue.

No people is wholly civilized where a distinction is drawn between stealing an office and stealing a purse.

The lie is a condition of life.

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

It’s so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

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.

Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.

Justice is truth in action.

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

I have never entered into any controversy in defense of my philosophical opinions; I leave them to take their chance in the world. If they are right, truth and experience will support them; if wrong, they ought to be refuted and rejected. Disputes are apt to sour one’s temper and disturb one’s quiet.

My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.

True virtue is life under the direction of reason.

Justice in the life and conduct of the State is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens.

If it is surely the means to the highest end we know, can any work be humble or disgusting? Will it not rather be elevating as a ladder, the means by which we are translated?

Time stays, we go.

I know of only one duty, and that is to love.

A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives.

All men are equal before fish.

There are minds so impatient of inferiority that their gratitude is a species of revenge, and they return benefits, not because recompense is a pleasure, but because obligation is a pain.

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.

No public man can be just a little crooked.

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

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

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

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

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

Our character is what we do when we think no one is looking.

For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions, even on important subjects, which I once thought right but found to be otherwise.

Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.

I have lived long enough to satisfy both nature and glory.

Means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.

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

We may consider each generation as a distinct nation, with a right, by the will of its majority, to bind themselves, but none to bind the succeeding generation, more than the inhabitants of another country.

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

To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

Falsehood is a perennial spring.

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

If you’re in favour of any policy – reform, revolution, stability, regression, whatever – if you’re at least minimally moral, it’s because you think it’s somehow good for people. And good for people means conforming to their fundamental nature.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

I want to do a certain thing in the world, and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.

We do not know what is really good or bad fortune.