Science is nothing but perception.

Some people would claim that things like love, joy and beauty belong to a different category from science and can’t be described in scientific terms, but I think they can now be explained by the theory of evolution.

The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works.

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.

A man who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary.

From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.

As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into Heaven, into Hell.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

The more you explain it, the more I don’t understand it.

Science is not only a disciple of reason but, also, one of romance and passion.

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores the better.

It’s a tragedy, in a way, that Americans are brought up to think that they cannot feel for other people and other beings just because they are different. They think they’re different. It’s very limiting.

The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.

Only the educated are free.

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

Thought is the parent of the deed.

One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

The doors of wisdom are never shut.

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.

Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.

Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much, are the three pillars of learning.

I call him free who is led solely by reason.

We are not to give credit to the many, who say that none ought to be educated but the free; but rather to the philosophers, who say that the well-educated alone are free.

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

The object of the superior man is truth.

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.

We usually lose today, because there has been a yesterday, and tomorrow is coming.

The trouble with our Liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.

All writers are going to have to learn more about science, because it’s such an interesting part of their environment.

Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.

If there is no God, everything is permitted.

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.

I was a very keen reader of science fiction, and during the time I was going to libraries, it was good, written by people who knew their science.

Base souls have no faith in great individuals.

Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.

To believe in God is impossible not to believe in Him is absurd.

Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there’s a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.

The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.

‚Tis better to bear the ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.

Sin is geographical.

May you live your life as if the maxim of your actions were to become universal law.

We moralize among ruins.

Ordinary morality is innate in my view.

When you know a thing, to hold that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it – this is knowledge.

Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

Aptitude found in the understanding and is often inherited. Genius coming from reason and imagination, rarely.

The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.

The misfortune of the wise is better than the prosperity of the fool.

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

There are many things that I don’t understand.

We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.

Do everything as in the eye of another.