The deed is everything, the glory is naught.

The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.

True glory takes root, and even spreads; all false pretences, like flowers, fall to the ground; nor can any counterfeit last long.

We are all born for love. It is the principle of existence, and its only end.

You forget that the fruits belong to all and that the land belongs to no one.

What then is freedom? The power to live as one wishes.

No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.

The greater our knowledge increases the more our ignorance unfolds.

A sense is what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter, in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold.

Better a little which is well done, than a great deal imperfectly.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.

Call it Nature, Fate, Fortune; all these are names of the one and selfsame God.

To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one’s family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one’s own mind. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him.

The superior man does not, even for the space of a single meal, act contrary to virtue. In moments of haste, he cleaves to it. In seasons of danger, he cleaves to it.

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.

I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do.

It would be a terrific innovation if you could get your mind to stretch a little further than the next wisecrack.

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are… than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.

Glory lies in the attempt to reach one’s goal and not in reaching it.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.

He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature (which is the proper object of philosophy) is the way to elevate one’s gaze.

Hatreds not vowed and concealed are to be feared more than those openly declared.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

I do think there must be some kind of interaction between your living life and the life that goes on from here.

He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason.

After your death you will be what you were before your birth.

Wisdom is nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.

It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.

Unity can only be manifested by the Binary. Unity itself and the idea of Unity are already two.

The wise have always said the same things, and fools, who are the majority have always done just the opposite.

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.

Let me smile with the wise, and feed with the rich.

I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.

For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all.

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

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and Non-violence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to try experiments in both on as vast a scale as I could.

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

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

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.

A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.

Reason commands us far more imperiously than a master; for in disobeying the one we are unfortunate, and in disobeying the other we are fools.

Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principle of morality.

I know of nothing more despicable and pathetic than a man who devotes all the hours of the waking day to the making of money for money’s sake.

The worst men often give the best advice.

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God – but to create him.

Temperance is a mean with regard to pleasures.

The community which has neither poverty nor riches will always have the noblest principles.

God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.

A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient, nor does he take it ill to be railed at by a man in fever. Just so should a wise man treat all mankind, as a physician does his patient, and look upon them only as sick and extravagant.

All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.

A tomb now suffices him for whom the whole world was not sufficient.

Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again.

Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.

You definitely want your kids to understand their heritage, but I don’t want my kids to just focus on being black. They are people. I don’t want them to judge other people or to be judged. I want them to be good people, so good people will treat them accordingly. I preach that to my kids and everything else falls into place.

I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active – not more happy – nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.