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

It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.

What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth.

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

The words of truth are always paradoxical.

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

Electrical science has disclosed to us the more intimate relation existing between widely different forces and phenomena and has thus led us to a more complete comprehension of Nature and its many manifestations to our senses.

I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

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.

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

‚Pure experience‘ is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.

Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

I have wondered about time all my life.

We should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time’s carcass.

Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.

Temperance is a mean with regard to pleasures.

What goes up must come down.

There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

Infinites, when considered absolutely without any restriction or limitation, are neither equal nor unequal, nor have any certain proportion one to another, and therefore, the principle that all infinites are equal is a precarious one.

Good men by nature, wish to know. I know that many will call this useless work… men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of that of wisdom, which is the food and only true riches of the mind.

Truth is a good dog; but always beware of barking too close to the heels of an error, lest you get your brains kicked out.

God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.

Free will carried many a soul to hell, but never a soul to heaven.

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.

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.

I am a little too absorbed by science to be able to philosophise much; but the more I look into myself, the more I find myself possessed by the conviction that it is only the science of Christ running through all things, that is to say true mystical science, that really matters. I let myself get caught up in the game when I geologise.

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

Dying is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down.

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

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods.

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

If we don’t know life, how can we know death?

Who would ever think that so much went on in the soul of a young girl?

I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.

A well governed appetite is the greater part of liberty.

No one can outrun death. It will catch up to all of us eventually.

A weak man is just by accident. A strong but non-violent man is unjust by accident.

The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.

How can one preach goodness and love to men without at the same time offering them an interpretation of the World that justifies this goodness and this love?

The end is the beginning of all things, Suppressed and hidden, Awaiting to be released through the rhythm Of pain and pleasure.

Whatever the universal nature assigns to any man at any time is for the good of that man at that time.

Spiritual worldliness kills! It kills the soul! It kills the Church!

I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion.

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?

Knowledge which is divorced from justice, may be called cunning rather than wisdom.

Nor shall derision prove powerful against those who listen to humanity or those who follow in the footsteps of divinity, for they shall live forever. Forever.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.

Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principle of morality.

Never in any case say I have lost such a thing, but I have returned it. Is your child dead? It is a return. Is your wife dead? It is a return. Are you deprived of your estate? Is not this also a return?

I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and Non-violence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to try experiments in both on as vast a scale as I could.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes… and the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.

For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul?

You’ve got to reach a hand of friendship across the aisle and across philosophies in this country.

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.