She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

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

I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.

I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.

What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness.

It is not living that matters, but living rightly.

How could man rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of men?

One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

It is impossible to reason without arriving at a Supreme Being.

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.

I believe God’s keeping the records, and I believe you will be rewarded even in this life. Somehow, some way, God will make it up to you. It may be He protected you from an accident you never knew. You can’t give God something without God giving you more in return, whether it’s peace or joy or satisfaction.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

I have written too much history to have faith in it; and if anyone thinks I’m wrong, I am inclined to agree with him.

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.

Plato is my friend; Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.

Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.

Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.

It’s the repetition of affirmations that leads to belief. And once that belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen.

We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.

I don’t believe in conspiracy theories. I’m just a cold-blooded investigator.

It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

Men often take their imagination for their heart; and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted.

My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.

My philosophy is simple: It’s a down-home, common, horse-sense approach to things.

I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.

Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

As I approve of a youth that has something of the old man in him, so I am no less pleased with an old man that has something of the youth. He that follows this rule may be old in body, but can never be so in mind.

What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth.

Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

I would believe only in a God that knows how to Dance.

It is possible to provide security against other ills, but as far as death is concerned, we men live in a city without walls.

Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.

Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.

Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

It is the superfluous things for which men sweat, – superfluous things that wear our togas theadbare, that force us to grow old in camp, that dash us upon foreign shores.

Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them.

He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason.

We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork, you must make a decision.

I can tell you, honest friend, what to believe: believe life; it teaches better that book or orator.

A man’s felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessing of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.

The love of economy is the root of all virtue.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Today we say that the law of relativity is supposed to be true at all energies, but someday somebody may come along and say how stupid we were.

All philosophy lies in two words, sustain and abstain.

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right.

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

Sure I believe in God and the Devil, but they don’t have to have pitchforks and a long white beard.

First and last, what is demanded of genius is love of truth.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it.

What if nothing exists and we’re all in somebody’s dream?

Nothing can be divided into more parts than it can possibly be constituted of. But matter (i.e. finite) cannot be constituted of infinite parts.

He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.