The perception of beauty is a moral test.

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.

There never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am I certain it is desirable that there should be.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

I have lived long enough to satisfy both nature and glory.

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.

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.

If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.

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

No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.

If anyone offers conjectures about the truth of things from the mere possibility of hypotheses, I do not see by what stipulation anything certain can be determined in any science, since one or another set of hypotheses may always be devised which will appear to supply new difficulties.

We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once.

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

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.

To see and listen to the wicked is already the beginning of wickedness.

For me, my secularism is, India first. I say, the philosophy of my party is ‚Justice to all. Appeasement to none.‘ This is our secularism.

What goes up must come down.

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.

Religions get lost as people do.

All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.

The proper study of Mankind is Man.

If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.

Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.

Religion and philosophy are to be preserved distinct. We are not to introduce divine revelations into philosophy, nor philosophical opinions into religion.

Law is mind without reason.

All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.

If you change and adapt your persona, you are seen as inauthentic; if you stay the angry young man, you fade from attention or seem tiresome.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome; to be got over.

In today’s world, having money has allowed people who are extremely uncool to think that they’re cool and carry it like that. People who really are cool and people who really are artists and have ideas have to literally turn in their cool card to society just to make it past the age of 28.

There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.

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.

The misfortune of the wise is better than the prosperity of the fool.

The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.

I think it’s a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.

After your death you will be what you were before your birth.

I believe Karl Marx could have subscribed to the Sermon on the Mount.

To find out your real opinion of someone, judge the impression you have when you first see a letter from them.

Beauty is not caused. It is.

Truth is what works.

For, if a good speaker, never so eloquent, does not see into the fact, and is not speaking the truth of that – is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

Virtue is relative to the actions and ages of each of us in all that we do.

Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.

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

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottage princes‘ palaces.

Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.

What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness.

You are a child of the sun, you come from the sun, and that is something true with the Earth also… your relationship with the Earth is so deep, and the Earth is in you and this is something not very difficult, much less difficult then philosophy.

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause.