There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

Religion is more than life. Remember that his own religion is the truest to every man even if it stands low in the scales of philosophical comparison.

My life as a child did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.

The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

There is no such thing as Something for nothing.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.

History is more or less bunk.

It is dangerous for mortal beauty, or terrestrial virtue, to be examined by too strong a light. The torch of Truth shows much that we cannot, and all that we would not, see.

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

The wise man does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life – knowing that under certain conditions it is not worthwhile to live.

Old age, believe me, is a good and pleasant thing. It is true you are gently shouldered off the stage, but then you are given such a comfortable front stall as spectator.

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.

There is nothing insignificant in the world. It all depends on the point of view.

Instead of comparing our lot with that of those who are more fortunate than we are, we should compare it with the lot of the great majority of our fellow men. It then appears that we are among the privileged.

The Public is merely a multiplied ‚me.‘

There was something undifferentiated and yet complete, which existed before Heaven and Earth. Soundless and formless, it depends on nothing and does not change. It operates everywhere and is free from danger. It may be considered the mother of the universe. I do not know its name; I call it Tao.

There was a while when I was feeling like, ‚Damn, if I’d just been born black, I would not have to go through all this‘.

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

Worthless people live only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.

I long for the time when all human history is taught as one history, because it really is.

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

I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottage princes‘ palaces.

I think the idea of art kills creativity.

What is the Tao Te Ching? Five hundred years before the birth of Jesus, a God-realized being named Lao-tzu in ancient China dictated 81 verses which are regarded by many as the ultimate commentary on the nature of existence.

When I’m a director, I look at myself the actor as a completely different person. It’s somebody else up there, an actor playing a role. I keep myself out of it.

If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.

Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

First and last, what is demanded of genius is love of truth.

The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight, but has no vision.

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you… Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.

To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.

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

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.

Too many people measure how successful they are by how much money they make or the people that they associate with. In my opinion, true success should be measured by how happy you are.

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the ‚Not Me,‘ that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, ‚Nature.‘

Little minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds in the commonplace.

An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.

You can be a rank insider as well as a rank outsider.

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

From my perspective, I absolutely believe in a greater spiritual power, far greater than I am, from which I have derived strength in moments of sadness or fear. That’s what I believe, and it was very, very strong in the forest.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It’s also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

God reigns when we take a liberal view, when a liberal view is presented to us.

Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.