The state comes into existence for the sake of life and continues to exist for the sake of good life.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.

I think the foundation of everything in my life is wonder.

I don’t think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films.

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

Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.

In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it.

Before God we are all equally wise – and equally foolish.

I happen to believe there is evil in the world.

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

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.

If he have faith, the believer cannot be restrained. He betrays himself. He breaks out. He confesses and teaches this gospel to the people at the risk of life itself.

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

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

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?

I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

Let’s pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.

Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering – and it’s all over much too soon.

Jesus lived a life that was full of joy and contradictions and fights, you know? If they were to paint a picture of Jesus without contradictions, the gospels would be fake, but the contradictions are a sign of authenticity.

Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.

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

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

We should not be so taken up in the search for truth, as to neglect the needful duties of active life; for it is only action that gives a true value and commendation to virtue.

It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.

Would that I were a dry well, and that the people tossed stones into me, for that would be easier than to be a spring of flowing water that the thirsty pass by, and from which they avoid drinking.

I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.

The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.

Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

Life is a lively process of becoming.

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

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

The more people rationalize cheating, the more it becomes a culture of dishonesty. And that can become a vicious, downward cycle. Because suddenly, if everyone else is cheating, you feel a need to cheat, too.

And whether you’re an honest man, or whether you’re a thief, depends on whose solicitor has given me my brief.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

Why was I born with such contemporaries?

From the dust of the earth, from the common elementary fund, the Creator has made Homo sapiens. From the same material he has made every other creature, however noxious and insignificant to us. They are earth-born companions and our fellow mortals.

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?

It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.

Life can be boring unless you put some effort into it.

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

Even with all the advantages of retrospect, and a lot of witnesses dead and gone, you can’t make your life look as if you intended it or you were consistent. All you can show is how you dealt with various hands.

Religion is the frozen thought of man out of which they build temples.

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.