Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.

I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.

Wisdom alone is the science of other sciences.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

I give the name of cosmic sense to the more or less confused affinity that binds us psychologically to the All which envelops us. The existence of this feeling is indubitable, and apparently as old as the beginning of thought… The cosmic sense must have been born as soon as man found himself facing the forest, the sea and the stars.

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

If it is surely the means to the highest end we know, can any work be humble or disgusting? Will it not rather be elevating as a ladder, the means by which we are translated?

‚Happiness‘ is a pointless goal.

It is only a man’s own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else’s meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.

What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it’s a drag? But you see, that’s what people do.

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue.

The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

Men would be angels, angels would be gods.

Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

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

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

Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of man will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza’s God, it won’t love us in return.

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.

The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair.

First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.

Death to me means nothing as long as I can die fast.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

The truth is of course is that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time.

The act of dying is one of the acts of life.

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

Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed was the ninth beatitude.

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.

He who doesn’t pray to the Lord prays to the devil.

Couples are wholes and not wholes, what agrees disagrees, the concordant is discordant. From all things one and from one all things.

Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing.

The fool wonders, the wise man asks.

The higher the sun ariseth, the less shadow doth he cast; even so the greater is the goodness, the less doth it covet praise; yet cannot avoid its rewards in honours.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.

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

No legacy is so rich as honesty.

All truth is simple… is that not doubly a lie?

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart.

Reason is the enemy of faith.

We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal’s ‚Pensees‘ and read, ‚I am the great silent spaces between worlds.‘

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

It is impossible to love and to be wise.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.

To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

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.

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

True virtue is life under the direction of reason.