The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.

It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentionally lying that there is so much falsehood in the world.

People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.

There will be no prison which can hold our movement down.

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.

A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people.

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.

It is the eye of other people that ruin us. If I were blind I would want, neither fine clothes, fine houses or fine furniture.

Nothing is more noble, nothing more venerable than fidelity. Faithfulness and truth are the most sacred excellences and endowments of the human mind.

To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world.

Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.

Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.

If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.

I’m an idealist without illusions.

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

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

A man is but the product of his thoughts, what he thinks he becomes.

I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.

And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

I got a fancy reputation. During high school, every puzzle that was known to man must have come to me. Every damn, crazy conundrum that people had invented, I knew.

Call it Nature, Fate, Fortune; all these are names of the one and selfsame God.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.

Only those are fit to live who are not afraid to die.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

Death is not the worst that can happen to men.

We are wiser than we know.

It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical part.

God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.

This is the truth: as from a fire aflame thousands of sparks come forth, even so from the Creator an infinity of beings have life and to him return again.

Freedom is a man’s natural power of doing what he pleases, so far as he is not prevented by force or law.

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.

I’m strictly for Stevenson. I don’t dig the intellectual bit, but I’m telling you, man, he knows the most.

Knowledge will give you power, but character respect.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down.

Temperance is a mean with regard to pleasures.

From wonder into wonder existence opens.

What then is freedom? The power to live as one wishes.

All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.

If you do things, whether it’s acting or music or painting, do it without fear – that’s my philosophy. Because nobody can arrest you and put you in jail if you paint badly, so there’s nothing to lose.

Study men, not historians.

In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.

In everything one thing is impossible: rationality.

Slave to no sect, who takes no private road, But looks through Nature up to Nature’s God.

It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.