Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life.

I’m a strict, strict agnostic. It’s very different from a casual, ‚I don’t know.‘ It’s that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can’t present it as fact.

The longer I live, the more I feel that true repose consists in ‚renouncing‘ one’s own self, by which I mean making up one’s mind to admit that there is no importance whatever in being ‚happy‘ or ‚unhappy‘ in the usual meaning of the words.

Everything deep is also simple and can be reproduced simply as long as its reference to the whole truth is maintained. But what matters is not what is witty but what is true.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution.

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

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.

Lo! The poor Indian, whose untutored mind sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind.

I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.

The U.S. is off the spectrum in religious commitment.

There is no such thing as part freedom.

The question of whether or not there is a God or truth or reality or whatever you like to call it, can never be answered by books, by priests, philosopher’s or saviours. Nobody and nothing can answer the question but you yourself, and that is why you must know yourself – Immaturity lies only in total ignorance of self.

Well, we can’t say any more than we can say there is no god, there is no afterlife. We can only say there is no persuasive evidence for or argument for it.

To live outside the law, you must be honest.

God tells us not to judge one another, no matter what anyone’s sexual preferences are or if they’re black, brown or purple.

The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.

Only those are fit to live who are not afraid to die.

Dying is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down.

I don’t pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

I think, for years, people have been pushed down by religion, and I don’t say that disrespectfully, but they’ve been shown a God that you can’t measure up to.

In a democracy, the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority.

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.

It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly. And it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living a pleasant life.

All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

A jug fills drop by drop.

Religion was instituted to make us happy in this life and in the other. What must we do to be happy in the life to come? Be just.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

When I hear Mitt Romney say that he believes that Jesus is the Son of God, that He’s the Christ, raised from the dead, that He’s his savior – that’s good enough for me.

Man is made to adore and to obey: but if you will not command him, if you give him nothing to worship, he will fashion his own divinities, and find a chieftain in his own passions.

The higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him.

I’m a Christian – I really don’t believe in UFOs.

Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature (which is the proper object of philosophy) is the way to elevate one’s gaze.

As long as your body is healthy and under control and death is distant, try to save your soul; when death is immanent what can you do?

We must not reduce the bosom of the universal church to a nest protecting our mediocrity.

I didn’t want to submit to the army and then, on the day of judgment, have God say to me, ‚Why did you do that?‘ This life is a trial, and you realize that what you do is going to be written down for Judgment Day.

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottage princes‘ palaces.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the ‚Not Me,‘ that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, ‚Nature.‘

Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.

All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

As I approached my 95th birthday, I was burdened to write a book that addressed the epidemic of ‚easy believism.‘ There is a mindset today that if people believe in God and do good works, they are going to Heaven.

Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.

To go beyond is as wrong as to fall short.

Ignorant people see life as either existence or non-existence, but wise men see it beyond both existence and non-existence to something that transcends them both; this is an observation of the Middle Way.

Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.

God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight.

When men do not have healthy notions of the Divinity, false ideas supplant them, just as in bad times one uses counterfeit money when there is no good money.

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

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.

Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence.

Christianity supplies a Hell for the people who disagree with you and a Heaven for your friends.

Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.

In books lies the soul of the whole past time.