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

Real living is living for others.

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

Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms – in themselves such judgments are stupidities.

A man who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary.

Those whom the gods love grow young.

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza’s God, it won’t love us in return.

There is in general good reason to suppose that in several respects the gods could all benefit from instruction by us human beings. We humans are – more humane.

The words of truth are always paradoxical.

Alas! You complain that your soul is out of tune. Then ask the Master to tune the heart-strings.

To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to recieve all the great truths which atheism would deny.

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

Grace is not part of consciousness; it is the amount of light in our souls, not knowledge nor reason.

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

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.

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

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

We do not need to proselytise either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study.

There is no such thing as justice in the abstract; it is merely a compact between men.

When there’s justice and change, you start to see the cleansing of the soul, and that is what I want for people, and I hope it’s okay for me to say those things.

The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.

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

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me.

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

One who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.

Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.

Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.

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

If particulars are to have meaning, there must be universals.

But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.

To the dumb question, ‚Why me?‘ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, ‚Why not?‘

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

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

‚Evil men have no songs.‘ How is it that the Russians have songs?

Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.

Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory.

If you die you’re completely happy and your soul somewhere lives on. I’m not afraid of dying. Total peace after death, becoming someone else is the best hope I’ve got.

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.

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.

Once you appreciate one of your blessings, one of your senses, your sense of hearing, then you begin to respect the sense of seeing and touching and tasting, you learn to respect all the senses.

The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.

I call him free who is led solely by reason.

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

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

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

Life is hard. After all, it kills you.

Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.

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.

Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.

Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.

The wise man does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life – knowing that under certain conditions it is not worthwhile to live.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and – since there is no other metaphor – also the soul.

I’m a strict, strict agnostic. It’s very different from a casual, ‚I don’t know.‘ It’s that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can’t present it as fact.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.

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