The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

Suppose you could gain everything in the whole world, and lost your soul. Was it worth it?

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.

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.

It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.

There’s no one thing that is true. They’re all true.

I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think.

What do you want a meaning for? Life is a desire, not a meaning.

After your death you will be what you were before your birth.

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes… and the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.

The higher the sun ariseth, the less shadow doth he cast; even so the greater is the goodness, the less doth it covet praise; yet cannot avoid its rewards in honours.

I’m an idealist without illusions.

The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.

How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?

Little things console us because little things afflict us.

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.

A box without hinges, key, or lid, yet golden treasure inside is hid.

The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.

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

I don’t pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.

I have an existential map. It has ‚You are here‘ written all over it.

Why do I not seek some real good; one which I could feel, not one which I could display?

What goes up must come down.

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

Everything that happens happens as it should, and if you observe carefully, you will find this to be so.

Truth is a pathless land.

I don’t think there is any philosophy that suggests having polio is a good thing.

Philosophy is the highest music.

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming.

Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: ‚War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.‘

I can control my destiny, but not my fate. Destiny means there are opportunities to turn right or left, but fate is a one-way street. I believe we all have the choice as to whether we fulfil our destiny, but our fate is sealed.

Assuming if there’s such a thing as reality, if you have a false relationship with it, how can you do anything but fail?

If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.

I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

I’m an atheist, and the concept of god for me is all part of what I call ‚the last illusion.‘ The last illusion is someone knows what is going on. Nearly everyone has that illusion somewhere, and it manifests not only in the terms of the idea that there is a god but that it knows what’s going on but that the planets know what’s going on.

Hell is other people.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.

I will govern my life and thoughts as if the whole world were to see the one and read the other, for what does it signify to make anything a secret to my neighbor, when to God, who is the searcher of our hearts, all our privacies are open?

Infinites, when considered absolutely without any restriction or limitation, are neither equal nor unequal, nor have any certain proportion one to another, and therefore, the principle that all infinites are equal is a precarious one.

Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety.

So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

The formula ‚Two and two make five‘ is not without its attractions.

Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.

I believe everyone should have a broad picture of how the universe operates and our place in it. It is a basic human desire. And it also puts our worries in perspective.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue.

Who would set a limit to the mind of man? Who would dare assert that we know all there is to be known?

It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.

Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.