The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.

Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

Communism doesn’t work because people like to own stuff.

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.

I happen to believe there is evil in the world.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

We often want one thing and pray for another, not telling the truth even to the gods.

It is better to take what does not belong to you than to let it lie around neglected.

It is impossible to love and to be wise.

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.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!

Life is warfare.

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

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

Only the ideas that we really live have any value.

It is better to live rich than to die rich.

Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

Opinion has caused more trouble on this little earth than plagues or earthquakes.

I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

True virtue is life under the direction of reason.

All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.

Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.

Most shareholders have little if any control over the companies in which they own stock, even if they own a million shares.

Nothing is further than earth from heaven, and nothing is nearer than heaven to earth.

There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.

The word ‚happy‘ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

How can one preach goodness and love to men without at the same time offering them an interpretation of the World that justifies this goodness and this love?

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.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

But if nothing but soul, or in soul mind, is qualified to count, it is impossible for there to be time unless there is soul, but only that of which time is an attribute, i.e. if change can exist without soul.

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.

I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

My theory is 98 percent of all human endeavor is killing time.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

Many readers fail to realize this, but ‚The Color Purple‘ is a theological text. It is about the reclamation of one’s original God: the earth and nature.

The natural desire of good men is knowledge.

It is as necessary for man to live in beauty rather than ugliness as it is necessary for him to have food for an aching belly or rest for a weary body.

Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.

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.

Your philosophy determines whether you will go for the disciplines or continue the errors.

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

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.

In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself – limits where minds meet, and in meeting, begin to exist.

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.

Earth might one day soon resemble the planet Venus.

No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.

Modern science says: ‚The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.‘ From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.

Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.

Atheism shows strength of mind, but only to a certain degree.

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.

What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.