Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

If the people are happy, united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the rest. We conclude that to be good from whence good is derived.

I know my flaws before other people point them out to me.

If you are lonely when you’re alone, you are in bad company.

People who do not know how to laugh are always pompous and self-conceited.

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.

Know thyself? If I knew myself I would run away.

A lot of times, people make other people responsible for their joy: ‚You’re not making me happy, you’re not doing this, you’re not doing that.‘

‚Evil men have no songs.‘ How is it that the Russians have songs?

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it.

The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.

I don’t have any secrets I need kept any more.

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It’s also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

Nothing in life is promised except death.

There’s no reality except the one contained within us. That’s why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself.

At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want.

Within us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we ourselves.

Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.

I often wake up in the night, and I like to have something to think about.

If all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.

I spent most of the early years of my walk with God focused on what was wrong with me. Most of us probably do that, hoping to change ourselves.

You don’t need anybody to tell you who you are or what you are. You are what you are!

Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.

A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.

I guess every single word I’ve ever said is going to be dissected now.

I’m still living at least five parallel lives, honestly! I wonder about it. I have no idea how that happens.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

Suppose you could gain everything in the whole world, and lost your soul. Was it worth it?

Money does not change people, people change.

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

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

If I think too hard about a relationship, I’ll talk myself out of it.

The relationship to one’s fellow man is the relationship of prayer, the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving; it is from prayer that one draws the strength for one’s striving.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

I used to get the feeling, and sometimes I still get it, that sometimes I was fooling somebody; I don’t know who or what, maybe myself.

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

No, it’s not a very good story – its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.

I don’t think I get angry.

The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.

Breathing in, I am aware of my heart. Breathing out, I smile to my heart and know that my heart still functions normally. I feel grateful for my heart.

Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.

Falsehood is a perennial spring.

The best measure of a man’s honesty isn’t his income tax return. It’s the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.

Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all.

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.

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

If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.

To live is to think.

Justice is a temporary thing that must at last come to an end; but the conscience is eternal and will never die.

To live outside the law, you must be honest.

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

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.

Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is.