Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

Upon the subjects of which I have treated, I have spoken as I have thought. I may be wrong in regard to any or all of them; but, holding it a sound maxim that it is better only sometimes to be right than at all times to be wrong, so soon as I discover my opinions to be erroneous, I shall be ready to renounce them.

Non-violence requires a double faith, faith in God and also faith in man.

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

All men are equal before fish.

Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.

The way to see by Faith is to shut the Eye of Reason.

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

The marvel of the Bhagavad-Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life’s wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion.

I have wondered about time all my life.

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

Virtue is relative to the actions and ages of each of us in all that we do.

He who gives away shall have real gain. He who subdues himself shall be free; he shall cease to be a slave of passions. The righteous man casts off evil, and by rooting out lust, bitterness, and illusion do we reach Nirvana.

We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.

No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

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

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

If life is a checker game, someone else is moving the pieces. It isn’t us. Don’t be surprised by amazing coincidences. There are no accidents. Consider, as I learned to do, the incredible interconnectedness of all of life.

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

When I was very young I was sort of floored by the fact that my mother and my father and everyone I knew was going to die one day, and myself too. I had a sort of a philosophical crisis. I couldn’t believe that we were mortal.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.

Any man is liable to err, only a fool persists in error.

Maybe stories are just data with a soul.

Time stays, we go.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.

There is nothing good or evil save in the will.

The lie is a condition of life.

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

The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

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.

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.

It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.

Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.

If one has a good disposition, what other virtue is needed? If a man has fame, what is the value of other ornamentation?

The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the Infinite.

You are the universe, you aren’t in the universe.

There is no principle worth the name if it is not wholly good.

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.

It is not living that matters, but living rightly.

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man’s being unable to sit still in a room.

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

The book, ’12 Rules For Life,‘ is a very serious book. There’s elements of humor in it, but I’m trying to struggle with things at the deepest possible level and to explain to people why it’s necessary to live a upstanding and noble and moral and truthful and responsible life, and why there’s hell to pay if you don’t do that.

When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.

Things in themselves have no life in them. A car can’t comfort or encourage you. A house means nothing if there’s no life and love inside.

I really believe in the philosophy that you create your own universe. I’m just trying to create a good one for myself.

The way up and the way down are one and the same.

There is nothing so stable as change.

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.