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 unexamined life is not worth living.

It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself.

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

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

Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.

Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you’re going to say, ‚Where did we come from, what happens next?‘ The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future.

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

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

States are not moral agents.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

What goes up must come down.

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

Dying is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down.

We live in a world that has narrowed into a neighborhood before it has broadened into a brotherhood.

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

I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It’s a battle you can’t hope to win – it’s a battle that’s going to go on forever. It’s part of the human condition.

There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.

If it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.

I have thought there was some advantage even in death, by which we mingle with the herd of common men.

A man should be upright, not be kept upright.

Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?

Premature certainty is the enemy of the truth.

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.

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

I don’t like to commit myself about heaven and hell – you see, I have friends in both places.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

What is imponderable in the world is greater than what we can handle.

The proper study of Mankind is Man.

Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

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

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

Being is the great explainer.

The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice.

There is no such thing as Something for nothing.

How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.

Animation is different from other parts. Its language is the language of caricature. Our most difficult job was to develop the cartoon’s unnatural but seemingly natural anatomy for humans and animals.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

The act of dying is one of the acts of life.

As long as your body is healthy and under control and death is distant, try to save your soul; when death is immanent what can you do?

Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.

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

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

Music is the melody whose text is the world.

Music can change the world because it can change people.

It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.

Small amounts of philosophy lead to atheism, but larger amounts bring us back to God.

Death is not the worst that can happen to men.

I have wondered about time all my life.

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.

Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt.

You are doomed to make choices. This is life’s greatest paradox.

Use, do not abuse… neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.