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

If you understand the universe, you control it, in a way.

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.

It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.

You may be able to read Bernard Shaw’s plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.

Which death is preferably to every other? ‚The unexpected‘.

Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

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

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?

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.

There is no such thing as justice in the abstract; it is merely a compact between men.

The love of economy is the root of all virtue.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

By the sole fact of his entering into ‚Thought,‘ man represents something entirely singular and absolutely unique in the field of our experience. On a single planet, there could not be more than one centre of emergence for reflexion.

The Hindu religions gave me the impression of a vast well into which one plunges in order to grasp the reflection of the sun.

The first thing which I can record concerning myself is, that I was born. These are wonderful words. This life, to which neither time nor eternity can bring diminution – this everlasting living soul, began. My mind loses itself in these depths.

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

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.

The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.

Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.

When you know a thing, to hold that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it – this is knowledge.

I still think like a Marxist in many ways.

I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.

If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me.

In the affairs of this world, men are saved not by faith, but by the want of it.

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.

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.

Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. 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 blindfolded fear.

The world itself is the will to power – and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power – and nothing else!

If there is no God, everything is permitted.

Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.

The good is the beautiful.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

If you do things, whether it’s acting or music or painting, do it without fear – that’s my philosophy. Because nobody can arrest you and put you in jail if you paint badly, so there’s nothing to lose.

I feel a distaste for hunting, first because of a kind of Buddhist respect for the unity and sacredness of all life, and also because the pursuit of a hare or chamois strikes me as a kind of ‚escape of energy,‘ that is, the expenditure of our effort in an illusory end, one devoid of profit.

A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.

War is never a lasting solution for any problem.

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

A man should be upright, not be kept upright.

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.

Behold, at this hour our moral history is being preserved for eternity. Processes are at work which will perpetuate our every act and word and thought.

Whether if soul did not exist time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted, so that evidently there cannot be number; for number is either what has been, or what can be, counted.

The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.

The end of life is to be like God, and the soul following God will be like Him.

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

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

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

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.

The superior man does not, even for the space of a single meal, act contrary to virtue. In moments of haste, he cleaves to it. In seasons of danger, he cleaves to it.

One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice; and it is not right to return an injury, or to do evil to any man, however much we have suffered from him.

I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greek and Roman leave to us.

Sin is geographical.

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.