The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.

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

Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.

As you get older, time speeds up but life slows down.

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.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.

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.

I have been influenced in my thinking by both west and east.

The future influences the present just as much as the past.

Heathenism is a state of mind. You can take it that I’m referring to one who does not see his world. He has no mental light. He destroys almost unwittingly. He cannot feel any Gods presence in his life. He is the 21st century man.

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal’s ‚Pensees‘ and read, ‚I am the great silent spaces between worlds.‘

To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.

It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.

If you think in terms of a year, plant a seed; if in terms of ten years, plant trees; if in terms of 100 years, teach the people.

There are no such things as Flowers there are only gladdened Leaves.

A tomb now suffices him for whom the whole world was not sufficient.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

The union of the Word and the Mind produces that mystery which is called Life… Learn deeply of the Mind and its mystery, for therein lies the secret of immortality.

The bad fortune of the good turns their faces up to heaven; the good fortune of the bad bows their heads down to the earth.

The superior man does not, even for the space of a single meal, act contrary to virtue. In moments of haste, he cleaves to it. In seasons of danger, he cleaves to it.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

It’s the philosophies of being an athlete that carry me today.

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice… that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.

When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.

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

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

The way up and the way down are one and the same.

What is important in life is life, and not the result of life.

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

Human life is far more important than just getting to the top of a mountain.

I don’t have people following me around, like bodyguards. I don’t know how people live like that. Maybe the young movie stars have to live like that, I don’t know. But it seems a little crazy to me. I don’t think you need all that stuff.

Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.

Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‚But how can it be like that?‘ because you will get ‚down the drain,‘ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

Contrary to the claims of some of my critics and some of the editorial pages, I am an ardent believer in the free market.

Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

Man has throughout the ages been seeking something beyond himself, beyond material welfare – something we call truth or God or reality, a timeless state – something that cannot be disturbed by circumstances, by thought or by human corruption.

We usually lose today, because there has been a yesterday, and tomorrow is coming.

To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to recieve all the great truths which atheism would deny.

The label ‚liberal‘ or ‚conservative,‘ any – every time I hear that, I think of the great Gilbert and Sullivan song from ‚Iolanthe.‘ It goes, ‚Every gal and every boy that’s born alive is either a little liberal or else a little conservative.‘ What do those labels mean? It depends on whose ox is being gored.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.

The worst men often give the best advice.

If it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.

As we know, while our species remains alive, everybody has the sacred duty to be optimistic. Ethically, any other behaviour wouldn’t be admissible.

I am against nature. I don’t dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can’t touch with decay.

I was a peripheral visionary. I could see the future, but only way off to the side.

There is no such thing as justice in the abstract; it is merely a compact between men.

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

Here is the rule to remember in the future, When anything tempts you to be bitter: not, ‚This is a misfortune‘ but ‚To bear this worthily is good fortune.‘