The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal.

Sorry, I’m still a dialectical materialist.

The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.

No man was ever wise by chance.

If we do discover a complete theory, it should be in time understandable in broad principle by everyone. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people be able to take part in the discussion of why we and the universe exist.

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

Change alone is unchanging.

So vast is art, so narrow human wit.

It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment.

Death is not the worst that can happen to men.

I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live as if there isn’t and to die to find out that there is.

A God without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but fate and nature.

No policy that does not rest upon some philosophical public opinion can be permanently maintained.

Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.

To go beyond is as wrong as to fall short.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

What really raises one’s indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will’s freedom after it.

Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself.

The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.

Never in any case say I have lost such a thing, but I have returned it. Is your child dead? It is a return. Is your wife dead? It is a return. Are you deprived of your estate? Is not this also a return?

As long as my music is real, it’s no limit to how many ears I can grab.

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

I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.

One who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

Everything deep is also simple and can be reproduced simply as long as its reference to the whole truth is maintained. But what matters is not what is witty but what is true.

There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

No notice is taken of a little evil, but when it increases it strikes the eye.

Justice is a temporary thing that must at last come to an end; but the conscience is eternal and will never die.

Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.

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

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else.

Non-violence, which is the quality of the heart, cannot come by an appeal to the brain.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.

For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions, even on important subjects, which I once thought right but found to be otherwise.

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

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.

Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death.

By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.

Expecting is the greatest impediment to living. In anticipation of tomorrow, it loses today.

It’s not morbid to talk about death. Most people don’t worry about death, they worry about a bad death.

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.

Non-violence requires a double faith, faith in God and also faith in man.

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

I believe that every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises.

Temperance is a mean with regard to pleasures.

Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet.

If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.

No one can be happy who has been thrust outside the pale of truth. And there are two ways that one can be removed from this realm: by lying, or by being lied to.

Law is mind without reason.