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

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

The good opinion of mankind, like the lever of Archimedes, with the given fulcrum, moves the world.

I can control my destiny, but not my fate. Destiny means there are opportunities to turn right or left, but fate is a one-way street. I believe we all have the choice as to whether we fulfil our destiny, but our fate is sealed.

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.

Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms.

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.

Will and intellect are one and the same thing.

Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.

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.

A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.

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

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

The mouth obeys poorly when the heart murmurs.

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

If a man loses his reverence for any part of life, he will lose his reverence for all of life.

Who ever is out of patience is out of possession of their soul.

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.

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

In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

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.

The desire to annoy no one, to harm no one, can equally well be the sign of a just as of an anxious disposition.

Man – a being in search of meaning.

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

Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that’s what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.

We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers.

Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.

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

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

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

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

The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.

Dreams are the guiding words of the soul. Why should I henceforth not love my dreams and not make their riddling images into objects of my daily consideration?

How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.

Small amounts of philosophy lead to atheism, but larger amounts bring us back to God.

Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

To do a great right do a little wrong.

Temperance is a mean with regard to pleasures.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

I read Plato’s ‚Republic.‘ I read it through about five times until I could actually understand it.

We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever.

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

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.

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.

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

I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do.

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

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.

Doubt is the incentive to truth and inquiry leads the way.

A sense is what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter, in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

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

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?