Temperance is a mean with regard to pleasures.

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

O wretched man, wretched not just because of what you are, but also because you do not know how wretched you are!

When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.

Freedom without limits is just a word.

You may be able to read Bernard Shaw’s plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?

Control thy passions lest they take vengence on thee.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods.

The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.

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.

The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.

God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.

I don’t pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.

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

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

The longer I live, the more I feel that true repose consists in ‚renouncing‘ one’s own self, by which I mean making up one’s mind to admit that there is no importance whatever in being ‚happy‘ or ‚unhappy‘ in the usual meaning of the words.

Honor thy error as a hidden intention.

No policy that does not rest upon some philosophical public opinion can be permanently maintained.

Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.

We usually lose today, because there has been a yesterday, and tomorrow is coming.

Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

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

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.

Blushing is the color of virtue.

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

The man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for.

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand.

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man’s being unable to sit still in a room.

To the dumb question, ‚Why me?‘ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, ‚Why not?‘

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue.

The utmost extent of man’s knowledge, is to know that he knows nothing.

There is no such thing as justice in the abstract; it is merely a compact between men.

The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.

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.

To know yet to think that one does not know is best; Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty.

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

It is a strange desire, to seek power, and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man’s self.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

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.

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle.

Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.

My kids are normal. If they could eat burgers and fries and ice cream every day, they would. And so would I. But that doesn’t sustain us.

One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.

It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.

If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.

Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

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.

In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth – often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.

There are no facts, only interpretations.