The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us.

The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.

I believe things cannot make themselves impossible.

The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.

Upon the subjects of which I have treated, I have spoken as I have thought. I may be wrong in regard to any or all of them; but, holding it a sound maxim that it is better only sometimes to be right than at all times to be wrong, so soon as I discover my opinions to be erroneous, I shall be ready to renounce them.

Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.

Well, the future for me is already a thing of the past.

If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?

If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?

I can do no other than be reverent before everything that is called life. I can do no other than to have compassion for all that is called life. That is the beginning and the foundation of all ethics.

He who has made a fair compact with poverty is rich.

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

A useless life is an early death.

Doubt is the incentive to truth and inquiry leads the way.

I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong.

I believe Karl Marx could have subscribed to the Sermon on the Mount.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.

Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing.

Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.

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

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

Philosophy is common sense with big words.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.

The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground.

The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

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

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

But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.

The fool wonders, the wise man asks.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

It is natural to die as to be born.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.

You’ve got to reach a hand of friendship across the aisle and across philosophies in this country.

Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.

I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.

There is a fundamental question we all have to face. How are we to live our lives; by what principles and moral values will we be guided and inspired?

Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, and of every good to man.

If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.

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

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

‚Evil men have no songs.‘ How is it that the Russians have songs?

To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.

What is imponderable in the world is greater than what we can handle.

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

Fear is the mother of morality.

All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.

All men are equal before fish.

There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself.

Nothing can be divided into more parts than it can possibly be constituted of. But matter (i.e. finite) cannot be constituted of infinite parts.

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

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.

To go to the world below, having a soul which is like a vessel full of injustice, is the last and worst of all the evils.