Sorry, I’m still a dialectical materialist.

To live outside the law, you must be honest.

The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.

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

To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one’s being added to that being.

I can control my destiny, but not my fate. Destiny means there are opportunities to turn right or left, but fate is a one-way street. I believe we all have the choice as to whether we fulfil our destiny, but our fate is sealed.

A useless life is an early death.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

Whether if soul did not exist time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted, so that evidently there cannot be number; for number is either what has been, or what can be, counted.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

My philosophy is: It’s none of my business what people say of me and think of me.

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

Science is nothing but perception.

All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory; they have no power over the substance of original justice.

The art of being a slave is to rule one’s master.

God does not play dice.

The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.

I believe everyone should have a broad picture of how the universe operates and our place in it. It is a basic human desire. And it also puts our worries in perspective.

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever will be born must destroy a world.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

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.

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

Non-violence, which is the quality of the heart, cannot come by an appeal to the brain.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

History should be written as philosophy.

We moralize among ruins.

If you do things, whether it’s acting or music or painting, do it without fear – that’s my philosophy. Because nobody can arrest you and put you in jail if you paint badly, so there’s nothing to lose.

In my opinion, there is no aspect of reality beyond the reach of the human mind.

All truth is simple… is that not doubly a lie?

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

Use, do not abuse… neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.

Honor thy error as a hidden intention.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.

The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down.

Then not only custom, but also nature affirms that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice, and that justice is equality.

A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.

Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.

Wisdom is found only in truth.

To see and listen to the wicked is already the beginning of wickedness.

If a man loses his reverence for any part of life, he will lose his reverence for all of life.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.

Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.

I was never ignorant, as far as being experienced in classrooms and learning about different subjects and actually soaking it up, so I checked into college for a little bit. I took classes at a community college in West L.A. I took psychology, English, and philosophy.

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

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.

That’s another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it’s as if things were coming together in my mind. It’s like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature, and when you feel that nature articulated, it’s it’s like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together.

To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

What then do you call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot of yourselves, without revelation, admit the existence within you of anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and thinking.

Nature cannot be tricked or cheated. She will give up to you the object of your struggles only after you have paid her price.