One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.

To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one’s experiences in common.

The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.

Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief.

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

Fear is the mother of morality.

Admiration is the daughter of ignorance.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

The quietly pacifist peaceful always die to make room for men who shout.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

Understand: any phenomenon in the world is by nature complex. The people you deal with are equally complex. Any action sets off a limitless chain of reactions. It is never so simple as A leads to B. B will lead to C, D and beyond.

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.

It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.

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

At the heart of the Irish economy has always been the philosophy of tax competitiveness. On the cranky left, that is very annoying; I can see that.

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

I wonder how many decisions we make every day. I believe it’s probably hundreds. We decide whether or not to get out of bed, what we’ll eat, what we’ll do, what we’ll think about, what we’ll say… and on and on.

Throughout my career, I fed off the fuel of people not being able to understand me.

Depression runs in my family on both sides, and I have to be wary.

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

Whether for life or death, do your own work well.

I was inspired to spend an entire year – my 65th year – reading, researching, and meditating on Lao-tzu’s messages, practicing them and ultimately writing down these insights as I felt Lao-tzu wanted us to know them.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

I’m an atheist, and the concept of god for me is all part of what I call ‚the last illusion.‘ The last illusion is someone knows what is going on. Nearly everyone has that illusion somewhere, and it manifests not only in the terms of the idea that there is a god but that it knows what’s going on but that the planets know what’s going on.

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.

If you believe in science, like I do, you believe that there are certain laws that are always obeyed.

Non-violence is not a garment to be put on and off at will. Its seat is in the heart, and it must be an inseparable part of our being.

Do everything as in the eye of another.

A man should be upright, not be kept upright.

If you’re in business or politics, you need to have an intense understanding of what’s going on around you.

He who is not just is severe, he who is not wise is sad.

With my childhood, it’s a wonder I’m not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.

The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.

I believe everyone should have a good death. You know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. Because after all, tears are appropriate on a death bed. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.

To be social is to be forgiving.

I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.

Who, being loved, is poor?

I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It’s the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs.

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

If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.

Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.

I had slumps that lasted into the winter.

I’ve had no problem harnessing anger.

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

Wonder is the feeling of the philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.

There are more things to alarm us than to harm us, and we suffer more often in apprehension than reality.

If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?

I suppose for a very long time I’ve been trying to understand how it is that people might make sense out of their lives and make meaning and make their lives meaningful in the face of the trouble that life brings.

Every day we have plenty of opportunities to get angry, stressed or offended. But what you’re doing when you indulge these negative emotions is giving something outside yourself power over your happiness. You can choose to not let little things upset you.

Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.

I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.

Happiness is a virtue, not its reward.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.

We begin to see, therefore, the importance of selecting our environment with the greatest of care, because environment is the mental feeding ground out of which the food that goes into our minds is extracted.

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.