Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.

This is the truth: as from a fire aflame thousands of sparks come forth, even so from the Creator an infinity of beings have life and to him return again.

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

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

Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.

Know then this truth, enough for man to know virtue alone is happiness below.

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

I want to know why the universe exists, why there is something greater than nothing.

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

War is just when it is necessary; arms are permissible when there is no hope except in arms.

Religion is more than life. Remember that his own religion is the truest to every man even if it stands low in the scales of philosophical comparison.

The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.

I did used to have nightmares about the idea that when I die, there is a spark of consciousness which basically creates the world. ‚Is the world going to disappear if this spark of consciousness disappears? And how do I know it won’t? How do I know there’s anything there except what I’m conscious of?‘

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

Somehow, we have come to the erroneous belief that we are all but flesh, blood, and bones, and that’s all. So we direct our values to material things.

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

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

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

Nature abhors annihilation.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

The spiritual is the parent of the practical.

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 have a personal ambition to live my life honestly and honor the true love that I’ve had and also the people I’ve had around me. I want to stay hopeful, even though I get scared about why we’re even alive at all.

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

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

I believe in the Golden Rule – The Man with the Gold… Rules.

Most sets of values would give rise to universes that, although they might be very beautiful, would contain no one able to wonder at that beauty.

There is no such thing as accident; it is fate misnamed.

Upon the subjects of which I have treated, I have spoken as I have thought. I may be wrong in regard to any or all of them; but, holding it a sound maxim that it is better only sometimes to be right than at all times to be wrong, so soon as I discover my opinions to be erroneous, I shall be ready to renounce them.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

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

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

I argue thee that love is life. And life hath immortality.

Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principle of morality.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

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.

I’m an idealist without illusions.

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

And, after all, what is a lie? ‚Tis but the truth in a masquerade.

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.

Nature is not human hearted.

I don’t pretend to understand the Universe – it’s a great deal bigger than I am.

I give the name of cosmic sense to the more or less confused affinity that binds us psychologically to the All which envelops us. The existence of this feeling is indubitable, and apparently as old as the beginning of thought… The cosmic sense must have been born as soon as man found himself facing the forest, the sea and the stars.

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are… than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

We’re all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

There was something undifferentiated and yet complete, which existed before Heaven and Earth. Soundless and formless, it depends on nothing and does not change. It operates everywhere and is free from danger. It may be considered the mother of the universe. I do not know its name; I call it Tao.

Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, – till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.

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?

Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence.

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

All things in the world come from being. And being comes from non-being.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.

It’s possible – you can never know – that the universe exists only for me. If so, it’s sure going well for me, I must admit.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Peace is liberty in tranquillity.