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.

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

Call it Nature, Fate, Fortune; all these are names of the one and selfsame God.

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

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

We are taught you must blame your father, your sisters, your brothers, the school, the teachers – but never blame yourself. It’s never your fault. But it’s always your fault, because if you wanted to change you’re the one who has got to change.

Nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate.

Without deep reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people.

It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It’s called living.

Ignorant people see life as either existence or non-existence, but wise men see it beyond both existence and non-existence to something that transcends them both; this is an observation of the Middle Way.

Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.

There are some Christian people who taste and see and enjoy religion in their own souls, and who get at a deeper knowledge of it than books can ever give them, though they should search all their days.

God not only plays dice, He also sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen.

To do a great right do a little wrong.

You don’t look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.

I would rather die than do something which I know to be a sin, or to be against God’s will.

There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.

Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this.

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.

I don’t pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.

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.

Choosing an attitude of faith will release peace out of your spirit and into your soul.

There is no hope of anyone going to Heaven unless they believe this truth I am presenting. You cannot go to Heaven unless you believe with all your heart that Jesus took your place in Hell.

It was morning; through the high window I saw the pure, bright blue of the sky as it hovered cheerfully over the long roofs of the neighboring houses. It too seemed full of joy, as if it had special plans, and had put on its finest clothes for the occasion.

Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.

A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.

Myths can’t be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.

Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.

O wise man! Give your wealth only to the worthy and never to others. The water of the sea received by the clouds is always sweet.

‚I wish life was not so short,‘ he thought. ‚Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.‘

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

Time destroys the speculation of men, but it confirms nature.

No man is much good unless he believes in God and obeys His laws.

If you pursue good with labor, the labor passes away but the good remains; if you pursue evil with pleasure, the pleasure passes away and the evil remains.

No one knows Anne’s better side, and that’s why most people can’t stand me. Oh, I can be an amusing clown for an afternoon, but after that, everyone’s had enough of me to last a month.

Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.

As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into Heaven, into Hell.

What really matters is how God sees me. He isn’t concerned with labels; he is concerned about the state of man’s soul.

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.

How can I be useful, of what service can I be? There is something inside me, what can it be?

I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person’s life. God is in everyone’s life. Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs or anything else – God is in this person’s life. You can – you must – try to seek God in every human life.

Our faith is faith in someone else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.

I believe time wounds all heels.

For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?

We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.

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

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

Conversion is not my intention. Changing religion is not easy. You may develop some kind of confusion or difficulties.

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

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.

Courage is a mean with regard to fear and confidence.

Whatever one of us blames in another, each one will find in his own heart.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

The way of the Creative works through change and transformation, so that each thing receives its true nature and destiny and comes into permanent accord with the Great Harmony: this is what furthers and what perseveres.

I can do no other than be reverent before everything that is called life. I can do no other than to have compassion for all that is called life. That is the beginning and the foundation of all ethics.

A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others.

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man’s resources?

Rules are not necessarily sacred, principles are.