The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

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

Every man is his own hell.

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly. And it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living a pleasant life.

Falsehood is a perennial spring.

Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair.

To do all that one is able to do, is to be a man; to do all that one would like to do, is to be a god.

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

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

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

Man consists of two parts, his mind and his body, only the body has more fun.

A man’s felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessing of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

God does not play dice.

How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.

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

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.

I’m not convinced that women have the education or the sense of their own history enough or that they understand the cruelty of which men are capable and the delight that many men will take in seeing you choose to chain yourself – then they get to say ‚See, you did it yourself.‘

Therefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics.

I believe in the Golden Rule – The Man with the Gold… Rules.

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

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

I don’t think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking theres some kind of change.

Good men by nature, wish to know. I know that many will call this useless work… men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of that of wisdom, which is the food and only true riches of the mind.

We should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time’s carcass.

I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.

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

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.

Everything is the product of one universal creative effort. There is nothing dead in Nature. Everything is organic and living, and therefore the whole world appears to be a living organism.

Nothing can come of nothing.

The fact is, when men carry the same ideals in their hearts, nothing can isolate them – neither prison walls nor the sod of cemeteries. For a single memory, a single spirit, a single idea, a single conscience, a single dignity will sustain them all.

First and last, what is demanded of genius is love of truth.

Small is the number of people who see with their eyes and think with their minds.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

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

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Having nothing, nothing can he lose.

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

It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.

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.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.

All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.

That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.

In the affairs of this world, men are saved not by faith, but by the want of it.

Character is destiny.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

My philosophy in life is, Decide what you want to do. You have to have something to hope for.

I don’t suffer of anything that I’ve lost.

There is no wealth but life.

Sin is geographical.

I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.