Premature certainty is the enemy of the truth.

Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.

A weak man is just by accident. A strong but non-violent man is unjust by accident.

I think any statement about stock prices is always suspect unless it’s made by Warren Buffett.

It’s really easy to have a nice philosophy about openness, but moving the world in that direction is a different thing. It requires both understanding where you want to go and being pragmatic about getting there.

Don’t be too harsh to these poems until they’re typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.

Certain defects are necessary for the existence of individuality.

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

I have thought there was some advantage even in death, by which we mingle with the herd of common men.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

Religions get lost as people do.

Wisdom begins in wonder.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.

Reality has a way of intruding. Reality eventually intrudes on everything.

The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.

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

A God without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but fate and nature.

We cannot conceive of matter being formed of nothing, since things require a seed to start from… Therefore there is not anything which returns to nothing, but all things return dissolved into their elements.

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

And yet it moves.

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

If I err in belief that the souls of men are immortal, I gladly err, nor do I wish this error which gives me pleasure to be wrested from me while I live.

Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.

Justice is truth in action.

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be named is not the eternal name. The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth; the Named is the mother of all things.

Religion is the frozen thought of man out of which they build temples.

There is not a truth existing which I fear… or would wish unknown to the whole world.

Our life is made by the death of others.

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

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

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

In whatever adulation you get, there’s truth and there’s not truth. And wherever they dog you, and they say it was horrible – there’s truth and there’s not truth. It’s human nature to like to read the adulation more.

I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion.

All of the people in my life whom I consider to be close friends or colleagues are good thinkers.

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

Children say that people are hung sometimes for speaking the truth.

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

Worthless people live only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.

I have finally decided to write my book on the spiritual life. I mean to put down as simply as possible the sort of ascetical or mystical teaching that I have been living and preaching so long. I call it ‚Le Milieu Divin,‘ but I am being careful to include nothing esoteric and the minimum of explicit philosophy.

Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.

Of life’s two chief prizes, beauty and truth, I found the first in a loving heart and the second in a laborer’s hand.

Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that.

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!

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.

Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, – till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.

The thing about the truth is, not a lot of people can handle it.

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.

There’s no point in saying anything but the truth.

An overflow of good converts to bad.

We must accept what science tells us, that man was born from the earth. But, more logical than the scientists who lecture us, we must carry this lesson to its conclusion: that is to say, accept that man was born entirely from the world – not only his flesh and bones but his incredible power of thought.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

I want to know why the universe exists, why there is something greater than nothing.