The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

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

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

A man should be upright, not be kept upright.

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

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

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

Couples are wholes and not wholes, what agrees disagrees, the concordant is discordant. From all things one and from one all things.

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.

We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.

If you have God on your side, everything becomes clear.

He who has made a fair compact with poverty is rich.

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

The last act is bloody, however pleasant all the rest of the play is: a little earth is thrown at last upon our head, and that is the end forever.

People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

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.

And, after all, what is a lie? ‚Tis but the truth in a masquerade.

I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.

Justice… is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed.

All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

Let us be absolutely clear about one thing: we must not confuse humility with false modesty or servility.

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

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.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

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

I have nothing to ask but that you would remove to the other side, that you may not, by intercepting the sunshine, take from me what you cannot give.

If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.

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

A well governed appetite is the greater part of liberty.

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.

I think the brain is essentially a computer and consciousness is like a computer program. It will cease to run when the computer is turned off. Theoretically, it could be re-created on a neural network, but that would be very difficult, as it would require all one’s memories.

There is nothing good or evil save in the will.

Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride.

Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.

Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.

If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time – a tremendous whack.

There is not a more unhappy being than a superannuated idol.

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

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

The deed is everything, the glory is naught.

Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.

A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?

The truth is lived, not taught.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be named is not the eternal name. The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth; the Named is the mother of all things.

Being is the great explainer.

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

Everything in excess is opposed to nature.

Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms.