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

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person.

The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty. The young are slaves to dreams; the old servants of regrets. Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

We should not be so taken up in the search for truth, as to neglect the needful duties of active life; for it is only action that gives a true value and commendation to virtue.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophies. My brain and my heart are my temples; my philosophy is kindness.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

I still think like a Marxist in many ways.

Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are, and to make new things like them.

Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

The senses are of the earth, the reason stands apart from them in contemplation.

The main purpose of life is to live rightly, think rightly, act rightly. The soul must languish when we give all our thought to the body.

Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.

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.

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

Everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.

The love of economy is the root of all virtue.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

Courage is a mean with regard to fear and confidence.

I don’t believe in death, neither in flesh nor in spirit.

Such as we are made of, such we be.

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

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

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

Man is made to adore and to obey: but if you will not command him, if you give him nothing to worship, he will fashion his own divinities, and find a chieftain in his own passions.

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.

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

And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last.

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

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.

There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.

I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

Rules are not necessarily sacred, principles are.

The future influences the present just as much as the past.

Moderation is the center wherein all philosophies, both human and divine, meet.

What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man’s soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.

God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.

It is impossible to reason without arriving at a Supreme Being.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

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

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.

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

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.

What then is freedom? The power to live as one wishes.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.

Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.

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

The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it – basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.

What’s the good of drawing in the next breath if all you do is let it out and draw in another?

The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.

The word ‚happy‘ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

We are not the sum of our possessions.