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

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.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.

Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them.

The answer is, who you are cannot be defined through thinking or mental labels or definitions, because it’s beyond that. It is the very sense of being, or presence, that is there when you become conscious of the present moment. In essence, you and what we call the present moment are, at the deepest level, one.

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.

There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophies. My brain and my heart are my temples; my philosophy is kindness.

Then not only custom, but also nature affirms that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice, and that justice is equality.

It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.

If one has a good disposition, what other virtue is needed? If a man has fame, what is the value of other ornamentation?

You’ve got to reach a hand of friendship across the aisle and across philosophies in this country.

I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.

I call him free who is led solely by reason.

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

The desire to annoy no one, to harm no one, can equally well be the sign of a just as of an anxious disposition.

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

One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.

We account the Scriptures of God to be the most sublime philosophy.

Couples are wholes and not wholes, what agrees disagrees, the concordant is discordant. From all things one and from one all things.

If co-operation is a duty, I hold that non-co-operation also under certain conditions is equally a duty.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores the better.

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.

When all is said and done, what constitutes the impregnable superiority of Christianity over all other types of Faith is that it is ever more consciously identified with a Christogenesis: in other words, with an awareness of the rise of a certain universal Presence which is at once immortalizing and unifying.

There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart.

The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that’s how we’ve got to live.

Admiration is the daughter of ignorance.

So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.

Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

Real living is living for others.

All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory; they have no power over the substance of original justice.

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like sand, creeds follow one another, but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons, a possession for all eternity.

I’m trying to keep a level head. You have to be careful out in the world. It’s so easy to get turned.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.

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

Nature abhors annihilation.

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

No obligation to do the impossible is binding.

The universe is not indifferent to our existence – it depends on it.

If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once.

If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.

There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.

Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

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

Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

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

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

That government is best which governs least.

The wisest hustler can suddenly fall for the worst tramp and lose all of his money on her. The hustler is aware of his own weaknesses and openings to con. This awareness is his edge.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.