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

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

When you are a beginning film maker you are desperate to survive. The most important thing in the end is survival and being able to get to your next picture.

I come from a poor family, I have seen poverty. The poor need respect, and it begins with cleanliness.

Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.

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.

My philosophy in life is, Decide what you want to do. You have to have something to hope for.

We moralize among ruins.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

I’ve been through natural disasters. I lived down in Miami and was down there for Hurricane Andrew which was a Category 5. There were members of my family that thought they were going to die. Everyone was in the bathtub.

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

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

Life is a gamble. You can get hurt, but people die in plane crashes, lose their arms and legs in car accidents; people die every day. Same with fighters: some die, some get hurt, some go on. You just don’t let yourself believe it will happen to you.

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

My philosophy is: It’s none of my business what people say of me and think of me.

My first big mission for UNICEF in Ethiopia was just to attract attention, before it was too late, to conditions which threatened the whole country. My role was to inform the world, to make sure that the people of Ethiopia were not forgotten.

Nothing can be beautiful which is not true.

No man was ever wise by chance.

Between falsehood and useless truth there is little difference. As gold which he cannot spend will make no man rich, so knowledge which cannot apply will make no man wise.

Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.

Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet.

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

If we don’t know life, how can we know death?

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.

In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued – they may be essential to survival.

Man – a being in search of meaning.

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

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

Don’t dress to kill, dress to survive.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

It has actually been suggested that warfare may have been the principle evolutionary pressure that created the huge gap between the human brain and that of our closest living relatives, the anthropoid apes. Whole groups of hominids with inferior brains could not win wars and were therefore exterminated.

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.

Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action.

To live outside the law, you must be honest.

The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.

Heaven is dumb, echoing only the dumb.

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.

Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination.

The fool wonders, the wise man asks.

We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.

Knowledge which is divorced from justice, may be called cunning rather than wisdom.

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

It’s not called quitting if you quit while you ahead. It’s about being aware and being strategic enough to know that you got to get out the pool at some point. You got to put your clothes back on and dry off.

It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.

When ignorance gets started it knows no bounds.

I don’t suffer of anything that I’ve lost.

We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

When you’re drowning, you don’t say ‚I would be incredibly pleased if someone would have the foresight to notice me drowning and come and help me,‘ you just scream.

Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.

You’re born. You suffer. You die. Fortunately, there’s a loophole.

Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.

There is nothing so stable as change.

You are a child of the sun, you come from the sun, and that is something true with the Earth also… your relationship with the Earth is so deep, and the Earth is in you and this is something not very difficult, much less difficult then philosophy.

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.