The lie is a condition of life.

To know yet to think that one does not know is best; Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty.

Infinites, when considered absolutely without any restriction or limitation, are neither equal nor unequal, nor have any certain proportion one to another, and therefore, the principle that all infinites are equal is a precarious one.

So near is falsehood to truth that a wise man would do well not to trust himself on the narrow edge.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and must therefore be treated with great caution.

Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.

It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.

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

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

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?

The important question is not, what will yield to man a few scattered pleasures, but what will render his life happy on the whole amount.

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

Conservatism discards Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress; having rejected all respect for antiquity, it offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future.

The Joker that Christopher Nolan created in ‚The Dark Knight‘ had the scar across his mouth, and the first time you heard his explanation for it, he makes you believe that’s how he got it. But then you get into the film, and every time he talks about his scar, it’s a totally different story.

Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest, without a passion, without business, without entertainment, without care.

The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be first to inquire diligently into the properties of things, and establishing those properties by experiments, and then to proceed more slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them.

Any man may easily do harm, but not every man can do good to another.

But blind to former as to future fate, what mortal knows his pre-existent state?

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.

Through my films I’m eventually trying to one day tell the truth. I don’t know if I’m ever going to get there, but I’m slowly letting pieces of myself out there and then maybe by the time I’m 85, I’ll look back and say, ‚All right, that about sums it up.‘

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

What if nothing exists and we’re all in somebody’s dream?

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.

A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.

There is never vulgarity in a whole truth, however commonplace. It may be unimportant or painful. It cannot be vulgar. Vulgarity is only in concealment of truth, or in affectation.

I believe things cannot make themselves impossible.

The Tao teaches us not to intervene and interfere. The things we love we have to learn to leave alone. And the people we love we have to learn to let them be.

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

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.

The thing that I fear discriminating against is humor and truth.

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

As I approve of a youth that has something of the old man in him, so I am no less pleased with an old man that has something of the youth. He that follows this rule may be old in body, but can never be so in mind.

Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.

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.

Our existence is beyond our explanation, whether we believe in God or we have religion or we’re atheist. Our existence is beyond our understanding. No one has an answer.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

Live truth instead of professing it.

Confront a corpse at least once. The absolute absence of life is the most disturbing and challenging confrontation you will ever have.

What I’ve discovered is that in art, as in music, there’s a lot of truth-and then there’s a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It’s the moment that the audience falls in love.

The trust of the innocent is the liar’s most useful tool.

Tell the children the truth.

Everything is political. I will never be a politician or even think political. Me just deal with life and nature. That is the greatest thing to me.

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.

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.

The only objects of practical reason are therefore those of good and evil. For by the former is meant an object necessarily desired according to a principle of reason; by the latter one necessarily shunned, also according to a principle of reason.

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

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

If one has a good disposition, what other virtue is needed? If a man has fame, what is the value of other ornamentation?

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.

In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.

Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.