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

Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.

Time stays, we go.

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

I have wondered about time all my life.

Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair.

When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

In less than a hundred years, we have found a new way to think of ourselves. From sitting at the center of the universe, we now find ourselves orbiting an average-sized sun, which is just one of millions of stars in our own Milky Way galaxy.

To be more childlike, you don’t have to give up being an adult. The fully integrated person is capable of being both an adult and a child simultaneously. Recapture the childlike feelings of wide-eyed excitement, spontaneous appreciation, cutting loose, and being full of awe and wonder at this magnificent universe.

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.

Truth is a pathless land.

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

My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

A man’s felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessing of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.

Light troubles speak; the weighty are struck dumb.

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are… than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.

I really believe in the philosophy that you create your own universe. I’m just trying to create a good one for myself.

The object of the superior man is truth.

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.

For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.

I understood at a very early age that in nature, I felt everything I should feel in church but never did. Walking in the woods, I felt in touch with the universe and with the spirit of the universe.

When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?

Thinking fragments reality – it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces.

All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small.

Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know.

He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature (which is the proper object of philosophy) is the way to elevate one’s gaze.

That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

The book, ’12 Rules For Life,‘ is a very serious book. There’s elements of humor in it, but I’m trying to struggle with things at the deepest possible level and to explain to people why it’s necessary to live a upstanding and noble and moral and truthful and responsible life, and why there’s hell to pay if you don’t do that.

Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed was the ninth beatitude.

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?

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

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.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

The truth is lived, not taught.

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

In the affairs of this world, men are saved not by faith, but by the want of it.

It is better to die than to preserve this life by incurring disgrace. The loss of life causes but a moment’s grief, but disgrace brings grief every day of one’s life.

It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.

Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

It’s not morbid to talk about death. Most people don’t worry about death, they worry about a bad death.

By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

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.

At the heart of the Irish economy has always been the philosophy of tax competitiveness. On the cranky left, that is very annoying; I can see that.

It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

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.

But if nothing but soul, or in soul mind, is qualified to count, it is impossible for there to be time unless there is soul, but only that of which time is an attribute, i.e. if change can exist without soul.

Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can’t vent any anger against them; I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence.

Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons.

Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.

I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion.