Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

A man who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary.

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.

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

Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does after the effect.

There is nothing permanent except change.

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

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?

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

Humor is reason gone mad.

Death is a commingling of eternity with time; in the death of a good man, eternity is seen looking through time.

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.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

God does not play dice.

One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.

The spiritual is the parent of the practical.

If we are to take for the criterion of truth the majority of suffrages, they ought to be gotten from those philosophic and patriotic citizens who cultivate their reason.

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

There is no love of life without despair of life.

I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?

The word ‚belief‘ is a difficult thing for me. I don’t believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it – I don’t need to believe it.

A tomb now suffices him for whom the whole world was not sufficient.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased.

There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.

It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist.

I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.

All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.

Justice is a temporary thing that must at last come to an end; but the conscience is eternal and will never die.

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

To know yet to think that one does not know is best; Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

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

It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

Science is not only a disciple of reason but, also, one of romance and passion.

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

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.

He who has made a fair compact with poverty is rich.

The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.

But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.

If there is no God, everything is permitted.

Love, we say, is life; but love without hope and faith is agonizing death.

Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.

Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge.

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.

From wonder into wonder existence opens.

When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.

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.

All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small.

To go to the world below, having a soul which is like a vessel full of injustice, is the last and worst of all the evils.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be named is not the eternal name. The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth; the Named is the mother of all things.

Knowledge is true opinion.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

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

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

No man was ever wise by chance.

If the people are happy, united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the rest. We conclude that to be good from whence good is derived.