Plato was a bore.

Don’t judge other people. For example, if you want God’s anointing to be on you for parenting, you need to be careful not to criticize other parents.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

You can be obsessed with the bad things people say and the good things; either way, you’re obsessed with yourself, and I’m not – you can become unhinged so easily.

I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and Non-violence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to try experiments in both on as vast a scale as I could.

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.

Sometimes I can’t figure designers out. It’s as if they flunked human anatomy.

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

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses.

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.

Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.

No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.

Death is not the worst that can happen to men.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.

I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

What really raises one’s indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.

A true artist is expected to be all that is noble-minded, and this is not altogether a mistake; on the other hand, however, in what a mean way are critics allowed to pounce upon us.

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

There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

There is nothing good or evil save in the will.

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

I believe in believing. My coach John Kavanagh is a big atheist, and he is always trying to persuade people to his way of thinking, and I think, ‚What a waste of energy.‘ If people want to believe in this god or that god, that’s fine by me; believe away. But I think we can be our own gods. I believe in myself.

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever – this is a somewhat new kind of religion.

Watch out for the joy-stealers: gossip, criticism, complaining, faultfinding, and a negative, judgmental attitude.

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

I’m fascinated by the fact that we can’t grasp anything about time.

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

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.

My philosophy is simple: It’s a down-home, common, horse-sense approach to things.

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.

It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death.

O God, O God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!

That government is best which governs least.

Man is not born to atheism. He is born to believe.

It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?

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.

What I think is fair to say is that, coming out of the Republican camp, there have been efforts to suggest that perhaps I’m not who I say I am when it comes to my faith – something which I find deeply offensive, and that has been going on for a pretty long time.

What is the Tao Te Ching? Five hundred years before the birth of Jesus, a God-realized being named Lao-tzu in ancient China dictated 81 verses which are regarded by many as the ultimate commentary on the nature of existence.

Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

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.

For me, my secularism is, India first. I say, the philosophy of my party is ‚Justice to all. Appeasement to none.‘ This is our secularism.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

I don’t believe in death, neither in flesh nor in spirit.

Life is warfare.

My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.

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

You cannot step into the same river twice.

The state comes into existence for the sake of life and continues to exist for the sake of good life.

From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.