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

Courage is a mean with regard to fear and confidence.

I believe things cannot make themselves impossible.

I had rather believe all the Fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a Mind.

This has always been my life and no one else’s, and that’s how it’s always been since the day I came in it.

True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

To free a person from error is to give, and not to take away.

I have an existential map. It has ‚You are here‘ written all over it.

A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.

What we need is a system of thought – you might even call it a religion – that can bind humans together. A system that would fit the Republic of Chad as well as the United States: a system that would supply our idealistic young people with something to believe in.

Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.

The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.

Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.

I have thought there was some advantage even in death, by which we mingle with the herd of common men.

All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green.

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.

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

We should not be so taken up in the search for truth, as to neglect the needful duties of active life; for it is only action that gives a true value and commendation to virtue.

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

Different men seek after happiness in different ways and by different means, and so make for themselves different modes of life and forms of government.

I look upon death to be as necessary to our constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning.

To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.

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

The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice.

Man was made at the end of the week’s work, when God was tired.

There was something undifferentiated and yet complete, which existed before Heaven and Earth. Soundless and formless, it depends on nothing and does not change. It operates everywhere and is free from danger. It may be considered the mother of the universe. I do not know its name; I call it Tao.

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

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.

I don’t believe in an outside agent that creates the world, then walks away. But I feel very strongly there is an intelligence at work in every flower, in every blade of grass, in every cell of my body. And it is that intelligence that, I wouldn’t say created the universe. It is creating the universe. It’s an ongoing process.

The drama and the trauma of the relationship you have when you’re 16 can mirror the one you have when you’re 26. Life repeats itself.

I don’t expect to live forever, but I do intend to hang on as long as possible.

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.

The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.

Religions get lost as people do.

‚Pure experience‘ is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.

Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.

God does not play dice.

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

Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.

Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.

A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short.

I did used to have nightmares about the idea that when I die, there is a spark of consciousness which basically creates the world. ‚Is the world going to disappear if this spark of consciousness disappears? And how do I know it won’t? How do I know there’s anything there except what I’m conscious of?‘

Words are loaded pistols.

What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.

What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.

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.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

If my survival caused another to perish, then death would be sweeter and more beloved.

No one can pass through life, any more than he can pass through a bit of country, without leaving tracks behind, and those tracks may often be helpful to those coming after him in finding their way.

You accept that this civilisation could be abolished and life will begin later on after a few thousand years because that is something that has happened in the history of this planet. When you have peace in yourself and accept, then you are calm enough to do something, but if you are carried by despair there is no hope.

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

Nothing can come of nothing.

Death is one moment, and life is so many of them.

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.

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.

Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.

I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.

It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself.

It’s really easy to have a nice philosophy about openness, but moving the world in that direction is a different thing. It requires both understanding where you want to go and being pragmatic about getting there.