The good is the beautiful.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.

Ankles are nearly always neat and good-looking, but knees are nearly always not.

My skin is 24 karat gold when a sun hit it.

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.

Life is wasted on the living.

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.

God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world.

What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.

Use, do not abuse… neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.

Science is beautiful when it makes simple explanations of phenomena or connections between different observations. Examples include the double helix in biology and the fundamental equations of physics.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.

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

Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.

Man is a universe within himself.

Toleration is the greatest gift of the mind; it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle.

My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.

It is the superfluous things for which men sweat, – superfluous things that wear our togas theadbare, that force us to grow old in camp, that dash us upon foreign shores.

Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved.

Thinking fragments reality – it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces.

I do not concern myself with gods and spirits either good or evil nor do I serve any.

God doesn’t love me any more or less because I had some work done on my face.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.

My philosophy is simple: It’s a down-home, common, horse-sense approach to things.

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.

There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

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.

Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

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.

The way to see by Faith is to shut the Eye of Reason.

Plato is my friend; Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.

A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we’re children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they’re scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it’s pretty much in the eye of the beholder.

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

I will buy any creme, cosmetic, or elixir from a woman with a European accent.

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

One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

Suppose you could gain everything in the whole world, and lost your soul. Was it worth it?

Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms.

Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow.

For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.

Wisdom begins in wonder.

Of all that is good, sublimity is supreme. Succeeding is the coming together of all that is beautiful. Furtherance is the agreement of all that is just. Perseverance is the foundation of all actions.

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.

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

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

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.

Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.

A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music – these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.