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

By indignities men come to dignities.

I believe Karl Marx could have subscribed to the Sermon on the Mount.

Man is unable to see himself entirely unrelated to mankind, neither is he able to see mankind unrelated to life, nor life unrelated to the universe.

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

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty – his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.

We do not know what is really good or bad fortune.

The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort.

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

What we need is a system of thought – you might even call it a religion – that can bind humans together. A system that would fit the Republic of Chad as well as the United States: a system that would supply our idealistic young people with something to believe in.

Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.

Friendship is the marriage of the soul, and this marriage is liable to divorce.

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

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.

All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory; they have no power over the substance of original justice.

Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle.

The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.

The words of truth are always paradoxical.

Evil is whatever distracts.

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.

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

One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

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

God is a concept by which we measure our pain.

After your death you will be what you were before your birth.

There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.

The important question is not, what will yield to man a few scattered pleasures, but what will render his life happy on the whole amount.

Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

Would that I were a dry well, and that the people tossed stones into me, for that would be easier than to be a spring of flowing water that the thirsty pass by, and from which they avoid drinking.

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.

The last act is bloody, however pleasant all the rest of the play is: a little earth is thrown at last upon our head, and that is the end forever.

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve.

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.

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.

I have thought there was some advantage even in death, by which we mingle with the herd of common men.

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

Without feelings of respect, what is there to distinguish men from beasts?

He that is giddy thinks the world turns round.

The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green.

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.

When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.

I’m fascinated by the fact that we can’t grasp anything about time.

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

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

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

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.

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.

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

Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.