Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.

One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.

Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms – in themselves such judgments are stupidities.

From my perspective, I absolutely believe in a greater spiritual power, far greater than I am, from which I have derived strength in moments of sadness or fear. That’s what I believe, and it was very, very strong in the forest.

What springs from earth dissolves to earth again, and heaven-born things fly to their native seat.

Knowledge is true opinion.

Rules are not necessarily sacred, principles are.

Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.

I mean, Hawaii is beautiful, but the world is full of beautiful places.

A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us.

Plato is my friend; Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.

All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

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

The earth is supported by the power of truth; it is the power of truth that makes the sun shine and the winds blow; indeed all things rest upon truth.

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome; to be got over.

All men are equal before fish.

Nature abhors annihilation.

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.

Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.

How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.

That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees.

Science is but an image of the truth.

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.

Oh, this base heart of ours! Hath it not enough tinder in it to set on fire the course of nature? If a spark do but fall into it, any one of our members left to itself would dishonour Christ, deny the Lord that bought us, and turn back into perdition.

Being is the great explainer.

The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

It is the nature of every person to error, but only the fool perseveres in error.

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

Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you don’t find out til too late that he’s been playing with two queens all along.

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.

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

To be admitted to Nature’s hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.

Nature is the incarnation of thought. The world is the mind precipitated.

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.

May you live your life as if the maxim of your actions were to become universal law.

I want to know all Gods thoughts; all the rest are just details.

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?

It is possible to provide security against other ills, but as far as death is concerned, we men live in a city without walls.

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

The unnatural, that too is natural.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

Take a course in good water and air; and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.

If life is a checker game, someone else is moving the pieces. It isn’t us. Don’t be surprised by amazing coincidences. There are no accidents. Consider, as I learned to do, the incredible interconnectedness of all of life.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.

Slave to no sect, who takes no private road, But looks through Nature up to Nature’s God.

The good opinion of mankind, like the lever of Archimedes, with the given fulcrum, moves the world.