Reality is a sliding door.

In Italy they take cheap cloth and make it look expensive, but I take expensive cloth and make it look cheap. They just don’t understand.

To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn’t wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.

The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

Small is the number of people who see with their eyes and think with their minds.

If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?

To appreciate the noble is a gain which can never be torn from us.

In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.

When I say ‚Crush your enemy‘, I don’t literally mean it.

I don’t like to commit myself about heaven and hell – you see, I have friends in both places.

I look upon death to be as necessary to our constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.

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

It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.

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.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.

The fool wonders, the wise man asks.

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

People who say they don’t care what people think are usually desperate to have people think they don’t care what people think.

Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead, other times it will be behind. But brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product.

No policy that does not rest upon some philosophical public opinion can be permanently maintained.

I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.

If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do.

A jug fills drop by drop.

And, after all, what is a lie? ‚Tis but the truth in a masquerade.

A person hears only what they understand.

Social media has given us this idea that we should all have a posse of friends when in reality, if we have one or two really good friends, we are lucky.

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.

The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down.

Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice… that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.

I don’t care if people think I am an overactor, as long as they enjoy what I do. People who think that would call Van Gogh an overpainter.

To the women and children, T stands for tender. To the bad guys and thugs, it stands for tough.

The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

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

The sage does not hoard. The more he helps others, the more he benefits himself, The more he gives to others, the more he gets himself. The Way of Heaven does one good but never does one harm. The Way of the sage is to act but not to compete.

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.

There is in general good reason to suppose that in several respects the gods could all benefit from instruction by us human beings. We humans are – more humane.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

If one has a good disposition, what other virtue is needed? If a man has fame, what is the value of other ornamentation?

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.

In my opinion, there is no aspect of reality beyond the reach of the human mind.

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

They say somebody’s ‚street smart.‘ I feel like, if I got intelligence, it’s just a country smart.

If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.

Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you’re aboard, there’s nothing you can do.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people’s minds.

Thus so wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness… and so frivolous is he that, though full of a thousand reasons for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billiards or hitting a ball, is sufficient enough to amuse him.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

People may hear your words, but they feel your attitude.

I never set out to be weird. It was always other people who called me weird.

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.