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

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.

Those who don’t know how to weep with their whole heart, don’t know how to laugh either.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

The object of the superior man is truth.

Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.

Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.

It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know.

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

The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.

When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable thing possible: one thereby almost deserves to live.

Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that.

Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.

Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it.

Language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has, for good or evil, happened to us.

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

If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me.

The words of truth are always paradoxical.

The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

Where knowledge ends, religion begins.

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.

Sorry, I’m still a dialectical materialist.

Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough.

Different men seek after happiness in different ways and by different means, and so make for themselves different modes of life and forms of government.

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

In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself – limits where minds meet, and in meeting, begin to exist.

The way to see by Faith is to shut the Eye of Reason.

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

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

I have to write because if I don’t get something down then after a while I feel it’s going to bang the side of my head off.

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.

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

When the water starts boiling it is foolish to turn off the heat.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life.

Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.

I happen to believe there is evil in the world.

You are the universe, you aren’t in the universe.

Man is not born to atheism. He is born to believe.

My philosophy is, it’s always very rewarding when you can make an audience laugh. I don’t mind making fun of myself. I like self-deprecating comedy. But I’d like you to laugh with me occasionally, too.

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.

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That’s always been the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

There is in general good reason to suppose that in several respects the gods could all benefit from instruction by us human beings. We humans are – more humane.

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do.

Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms – in themselves such judgments are stupidities.

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.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.

Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.

The great quest of life has always been to discover truth.

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does after the effect.

We must conceive of this whole universe as one commonwealth of which both gods and men are members.

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God – but to create him.

Whether we are New Dealer, Old Dealer, Liberty Leaguer or Red, whether we agree or not, we still have the right to think and speak how we feel.

The great question of our time is, ‚Will we be motivated by materialistic philosophy or by spiritual power?‘

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.