Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

The lie is a condition of life.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?

To live is to think.

Words are loaded pistols.

No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.

Such is the feebleness of humanity, such is its perversity, that doubtless it is better for it to be subject to all possible superstitions, as long as they are not murderous, than to live without religion.

Here’s something that’s contrary to popular belief: I actually don’t like thinking. I think people think I like to think a lot. And I don’t. I do not like to think at all.

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

However far back I go into my childhood, nothing seems to me more characteristic of, or more familiar in, my interior economy than the appetite or irresistible demand for some ‚Unique all-sufficing and necessary reality.‘

Falsehood is a perennial spring.

I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness; I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too. I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more.

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to recieve all the great truths which atheism would deny.

What if nothing exists and we’re all in somebody’s dream?

Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.

No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?

I won’t do something unless I can get at least two or three good laughs out of it. If I can’t, it’s not gonna make the team.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

Those who don’t know how to weep with their whole heart, don’t know how to laugh either.

It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.

If you think in terms of a year, plant a seed; if in terms of ten years, plant trees; if in terms of 100 years, teach the people.

Information is not knowledge.

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

The healthy man does not torture others – generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

What then in the last resort are the truths of mankind? They are the irrefutable errors of mankind.

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.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

To a guy like me, a laugh is full of information.

All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.

Many a man thinks he is patient when, in reality, he is indifferent.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.

Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.

Power is the measure of the degree of control you have over circumstances in your life and the actions of the people around you. It is a skill that is developed by a deep understanding of human nature, of what truly motivates people, and of the manipulations necessary for advancement and protection.

There is no principle worth the name if it is not wholly good.

But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.

My theory has always been, that if we are to dream, the flatteries of hope are as cheap, and pleasanter, than the gloom of despair.

Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.

The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.

We often want one thing and pray for another, not telling the truth even to the gods.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.

It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.

Temperance is a mean with regard to pleasures.

What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!

What’s the good of drawing in the next breath if all you do is let it out and draw in another?

We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows.

Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.

The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.

What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find.