Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.

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.

I have thought there was some advantage even in death, by which we mingle with the herd of common men.

Revolutions are the locomotives of history.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

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

A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.

What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?

Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.

If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and of Hiroshima.

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will’s freedom after it.

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

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.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

Of all virtues and dignities of the mind, goodness is the greatest, being the character of the Deity; and without it, man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing.

Base souls have no faith in great individuals.

In the history of medicine, it is not always the great scientist or the learned doctor who goes forward to discover new fields, new avenues, new ideas.

Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.

I spent my life studying communism and Soviet systems.

How can one preach goodness and love to men without at the same time offering them an interpretation of the World that justifies this goodness and this love?

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

It is more fitting for a man to laugh at life than to lament over it.

This life, which had been the tomb of his virtue and of his honour, is but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Happiness is a virtue, not its reward.

Peace is liberty in tranquillity.

The Bible is full of warnings about false prophets and false messiahs. These satanically inspired people have appeared in almost every generation of history.

The wise man does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life – knowing that under certain conditions it is not worthwhile to live.

When you cease to exist, then who will you blame?

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.

I had rather believe all the Fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a Mind.

There is no principle worth the name if it is not wholly good.

I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong.

Reason is the enemy of faith.

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?

The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be first to inquire diligently into the properties of things, and establishing those properties by experiments, and then to proceed more slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them.

Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.

I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.

When I meet people who say – which they do all of the time – ‚I must just tell you, my great aunt had cancer of the elbow and the doctors gave her 10 seconds to live, but last I heard she was climbing Mount Everest,‘ and so forth, I switch off quite early.

It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn’t get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.

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

NATO’s brutal military alliance has become the most perfidious instrument of repression known in the history of humankind.

My dear wife has, I would say, probably never opened a religious book, and seems to be one of those people to whom the whole idea is utterly remote and absurd.

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

There was something undifferentiated and yet complete, which existed before Heaven and Earth. Soundless and formless, it depends on nothing and does not change. It operates everywhere and is free from danger. It may be considered the mother of the universe. I do not know its name; I call it Tao.

We are not makers of history. We are made by history.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.

And yet it moves.

No obligation to do the impossible is binding.

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

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it.

There never was a truly great man that was not at the same time truly virtuous.

To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.

How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?