Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.

I still think like a Marxist in many ways.

It takes a smart man to play dumb.

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

Evil is whatever distracts.

A man’s character is his guardian divinity.

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green.

What you see, but can’t see over is as good as infinite.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

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

If I err in belief that the souls of men are immortal, I gladly err, nor do I wish this error which gives me pleasure to be wrested from me while I live.

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.

Whoever feels predestined to see and not to believe will find all believers too noisy and pushy: he guards against them.

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

Character is destiny.

States are not moral agents.

I’m not really concerned with portraying this tough warrior – I mean, that’s part of my job and I take that very seriously. But I don’t have anything to hide, and I’m not concerned with what people think.

How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me.

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything.

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

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.

The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.

In the past there were people who were not rich but contented with their living style, laughing and happy all day. But when the new rich people appear, people look at them and ask, ‚why don’t I have a life like that too, a beautiful house, car and garden,‘ and they abandon their values.

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.

Before you try to keep up with the Joneses, be sure they’re not trying to keep up with you.

Hell is a half-filled auditorium.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed was the ninth beatitude.

Certain defects are necessary for the existence of individuality.

Our existence is beyond our explanation, whether we believe in God or we have religion or we’re atheist. Our existence is beyond our understanding. No one has an answer.

There is nothing good or evil save in the will.

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

Chaos is inherent in all compounded things. Strive on with diligence.

Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.

It is really funny when people say you’d be obvious for a great villain.

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

Surely our job while we’re here on Earth is to learn about the world, not to create parallel universes.

There is no such thing as part freedom.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.

Such as we are made of, such we be.

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Expecting is the greatest impediment to living. In anticipation of tomorrow, it loses today.

During most of my freelancing, I made what I would have made in charge of the cafeteria at a pretty good junior-high school.

The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

In the United States, we can do almost anything we want. It’s not like Egypt, where you’re going to get murdered by the security forces.

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

See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise, you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

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.

You are a child of the sun, you come from the sun, and that is something true with the Earth also… your relationship with the Earth is so deep, and the Earth is in you and this is something not very difficult, much less difficult then philosophy.

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.

Gentleness doesn’t get work done unless you happen to be a hen laying eggs.

And yet it moves.