No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.

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

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.

Different men seek after happiness in different ways and by different means, and so make for themselves different modes of life and forms of government.

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

Death is just life’s next big adventure.

Science is but an image of the truth.

I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.

Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.

It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.

If the people are happy, united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the rest. We conclude that to be good from whence good is derived.

Between falsehood and useless truth there is little difference. As gold which he cannot spend will make no man rich, so knowledge which cannot apply will make no man wise.

Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil.

To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

Man lives freely only by his readiness to die, if need be, at the hands of his brother, never by killing him.

It is a strange desire, to seek power, and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man’s self.

To live outside the law, you must be honest.

Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

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

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.

Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.

Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are… than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

Non-violence is not a garment to be put on and off at will. Its seat is in the heart, and it must be an inseparable part of our being.

Error is always more busy than truth.

Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.

Falsehood is a perennial spring.

One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.

Why do I not seek some real good; one which I could feel, not one which I could display?

In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth – often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

The answer is, who you are cannot be defined through thinking or mental labels or definitions, because it’s beyond that. It is the very sense of being, or presence, that is there when you become conscious of the present moment. In essence, you and what we call the present moment are, at the deepest level, one.

When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.

Absence and death are the same – only that in death there is no suffering.

I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.

The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

Freedom without limits is just a word.

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

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.

Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.