States are not moral agents.

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.

Where do the evils like corruption arise from? It comes from the never-ending greed. The fight for corruption-free ethical society will have to be fought against this greed and replace it with ‚what can I give‘ spirit.

Good men by nature, wish to know. I know that many will call this useless work… men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of that of wisdom, which is the food and only true riches of the mind.

Such as we are made of, such we be.

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

If anyone offers conjectures about the truth of things from the mere possibility of hypotheses, I do not see by what stipulation anything certain can be determined in any science, since one or another set of hypotheses may always be devised which will appear to supply new difficulties.

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.

For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions, even on important subjects, which I once thought right but found to be otherwise.

Is science of any value? I think a power to do something is of value. Whether the result is a good thing or a bad thing depends on how it is used, but the power is a value.

The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.

To me, if life boils down to one thing, it’s movement. To live is to keep moving.

There is nothing good or evil save in the will.

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

The unnatural, that too is natural.

The act of dying is one of the acts of life.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

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

Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

The union of the Word and the Mind produces that mystery which is called Life… Learn deeply of the Mind and its mystery, for therein lies the secret of immortality.

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

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.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

Rather leave the crime of the guilty unpunished than condemn the innocent.

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

Ought we not to ask the media to agree among themselves a voluntary code of conduct, under which they would not say or show anything which could assist the terrorists‘ morale or their cause while the hijack lasted.

I feel a distaste for hunting, first because of a kind of Buddhist respect for the unity and sacredness of all life, and also because the pursuit of a hare or chamois strikes me as a kind of ‚escape of energy,‘ that is, the expenditure of our effort in an illusory end, one devoid of profit.

The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.

It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.

Surely our job while we’re here on Earth is to learn about the world, not to create parallel universes.

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

Where a man can live, he can also live well.

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

Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.

What difference is there between us, save a restless dream that follows my soul but fears to come near you?

Life is a series of commas, not periods.

Let’s pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.

To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else’s type of thinking.

Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?

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

It is possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard.

Truth is a good dog; but always beware of barking too close to the heels of an error, lest you get your brains kicked out.

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

Often one postulates that a priori, all states are equally probable. This is not true in the world as we see it. This world is not correctly described by the physics which assumes this postulate.

The man who has won millions at the cost of his conscience is a failure.

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

We are not the sum of our possessions.

Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.

The man of science is a poor philosopher.

Religion and philosophy are to be preserved distinct. We are not to introduce divine revelations into philosophy, nor philosophical opinions into religion.

My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.

He who steals a little steals with the same wish as he who steals much, but with less power.

Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without.

Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt.

I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

God is a concept by which we measure our pain.