There are no facts, only interpretations.

The foolish man conceives the idea of ‚self.‘ The wise man sees there is no ground on which to build the idea of ‚self;‘ thus, he has a right conception of the world and well concludes that all compounds amassed by sorrow will be dissolved again, but the truth will remain.

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about dying, but I like to think that I’ve – if it did occur – that I would die peacefully and not make too much of a fuss about it.

It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved.

Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.

If pleasures are greatest in anticipation, just remember that this is also true of trouble.

It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us – dreamers and indolent… It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich – these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.

Life is hard. After all, it kills you.

Wisdom is found only in truth.

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

If we are to take for the criterion of truth the majority of suffrages, they ought to be gotten from those philosophic and patriotic citizens who cultivate their reason.

There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.

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?

The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.

Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms.

There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known.

The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.

Purity is the feminine, truth the masculine of honor.

Love, we say, is life; but love without hope and faith is agonizing death.

I don’t see myself as a philosopher. That’s awfully boring.

No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.

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

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

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!

I tried being reasonable, I didn’t like it.

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

Sweet are the uses of adversity which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head.

All things in the world come from being. And being comes from non-being.

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

‚Pure experience‘ is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

I like being able to be on the inside of music, rather than on the outside listening to it.

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.

Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.

The spiritual is the parent of the practical.

Nature is not human hearted.

He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion.

We have communion with Christ in His thoughts, views, and purposes; for His thoughts are our thoughts according to our capacity and sanctity. Believers take the same view of matters as Jesus does; that which pleases Him pleases them, and that which grieves His grieves them also.

Truth cannot be brought down; rather, the individual must make the effort to ascend to it. You cannot bring the mountaintop to the valley. If you would attain to the mountaintop, you must pass through the valley, climb the steeps, unafraid of the dangerous precipices.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

To the dumb question, ‚Why me?‘ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, ‚Why not?‘

The art is long, life is short.

Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good.

We should not be so taken up in the search for truth, as to neglect the needful duties of active life; for it is only action that gives a true value and commendation to virtue.

In so far as the mind is stronger than the body, so are the ills contracted by the mind more severe than those contracted by the body.

Courage is a mean with regard to fear and confidence.

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That’s always been the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

We can come to look upon the deaths of our enemies with as much regret as we feel for those of our friends, namely, when we miss their existence as witnesses to our success.

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.

As for gun control advocates, I have no hope whatever that any facts whatever will make the slightest dent in their thinking – or lack of thinking.

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.

Part of the reason there’s an injunction to the truth, for example, is that if you’re in a circumstance of extreme uncertainty, your best weapon, let’s say, or your best tool or your best defense is the truth, because it keeps things simpler.

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.

Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.

Each part of my life provided respite from the other and gave me a sense of proportion that classmates trained only on law studies lacked.

Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.

Plato was a bore.

All truth is simple… is that not doubly a lie?