Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.

You sort of start thinking anything’s possible if you’ve got enough nerve.

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

Many people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.

A tree’s a tree. How many more do you need to look at?

In this quest to seek and find God in all things, there is still an area of uncertainty. There must be. If a person says that he met God with total certainty and is not touched by a margin of uncertainty, then this is not good.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

Small amounts of philosophy lead to atheism, but larger amounts bring us back to God.

There is nothing insignificant in the world. It all depends on the point of view.

We think when God speaks to us, there’s going to be a boom out of Heaven or we’re going to get some chill bumps, but I really believe God’s talking to us all the time. He’s talking to us right in here. I call it our heart, our conscience, but it’s the Holy Spirit talking to us.

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.

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

The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.

The best augury of a man’s success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

Nature teaches us that tens of billions of light years may have passed, and life in all of its expressions has always been subjected to an incredible combination of matter and radiation.

All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.

I believe many people feel like God is mad at them. One day I put a post on Facebook that said, ‚God is not mad at you.‘ Within a few hours, we literally had thousands of positive responses from people saying things like, ‚That is exactly what I needed to hear today.‘ Obviously, this is a message we need to hear.

I think if we didn’t contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.

He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature (which is the proper object of philosophy) is the way to elevate one’s gaze.

The highest revelation is that God is in every man.

Thought can be so seductive and hypnotic that it absorbs your attention totally, so you become your thoughts.

How could man rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of men?

It is easier to feel than to realize, or in any way explain, Yosemite grandeur. The magnitudes of the rocks and trees and streams are so delicately harmonized, they are mostly hidden.

Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.

I have never believed much in luck, and my sense of humor has tended to walk on the dark side.

Words are loaded pistols.

Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?

I claim to be a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal. I own, however, that I have humility enough in me to confess my errors and to retrace my steps.

No one can be happy who has been thrust outside the pale of truth. And there are two ways that one can be removed from this realm: by lying, or by being lied to.

In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself – limits where minds meet, and in meeting, begin to exist.

I am a generous man, by nature, and far more trusting than I should be. Indeed. The real world is risky territory for people with generosity of spirit. Beware.

Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.

Yesterday’s just a memory, tomorrow is never what it’s supposed to be.

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

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.

Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.

It is possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard.

You shall, I question not, find a way to the top if you diligently seek for it; for nature hath placed nothing so high that it is out of the reach of industry and valor.

Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.

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

I know a lot of people say they always believed they could get into F1, but I didn’t quite believe that, certainly not when I was 7 and maybe not until I was 14. It was always so far away.

Association with human beings lures one into self-observation.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

If anyone offers conjectures about the truth of things from the mere possibility of hypotheses, I do not see by what stipulation anything certain can be determined in any science, since one or another set of hypotheses may always be devised which will appear to supply new difficulties.

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.

Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.

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

One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.

For my own part, I would rather excel in knowledge of the highest secrets of philosophy than in arms.

Go on thinking that you don’t need to be read and you’ll find that it may become quite true: no one will feel the need tom read it because it is written for yourself alone; and the public won’t feel any impulse to gate crash such a private party.

I don’t believe in icons.

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.

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.