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.

Wisdom alone is the science of other sciences.

What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.

Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.

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

We humans are self-absorbed by nature, and spend most of our time focusing inwardly on our emotions, on our wounds, on our fantasies.

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.

Man takes his law from the Earth; the Earth takes its law from Heaven; Heaven takes its law from the Tao. The law of the Tao is its being what it is.

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.

The first rule of business is: Do other men for they would do you.

The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.

Whether if soul did not exist time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted, so that evidently there cannot be number; for number is either what has been, or what can be, counted.

I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don’t trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.

Virtue is relative to the actions and ages of each of us in all that we do.

I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.

The formula ‚Two and two make five‘ is not without its attractions.

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

Allah’s the Arabic term for God. Stand up for God, fight for God, work for God and do the right thing, and go the right way, things will end up in your corner.

I have always considered it as treason against the great republic of human nature, to make any man’s virtues the means of deceiving him.

Before God we are all equally wise – and equally foolish.

If I err in belief that the souls of men are immortal, I gladly err, nor do I wish this error which gives me pleasure to be wrested from me while I live.

People must have righteous principals in the first, and then they will not fail to perform virtuous actions.

From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.

A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

Nor shall derision prove powerful against those who listen to humanity or those who follow in the footsteps of divinity, for they shall live forever. Forever.

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

A God without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but fate and nature.

Ignorant people see life as either existence or non-existence, but wise men see it beyond both existence and non-existence to something that transcends them both; this is an observation of the Middle Way.

I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do.

Call it Nature, Fate, Fortune; all these are names of the one and selfsame God.

The most practical kind of politics is the politics of decency.

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

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.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

Where is the justice of political power if it executes the murderer and jails the plunderer, and then itself marches upon neighboring lands, killing thousands and pillaging the very hills?

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.

Sometimes we look at gay being a bigger sin than being proud or not telling the truth. I don’t think God categorizes sins.

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you’ve conquered human nature.

I think you have a moral responsibility when you’ve been given far more than you need, to do wise things with it and give intelligently.

What the statesman is most anxious to produce is a certain moral character in his fellow citizens, namely a disposition to virtue and the performance of virtuous actions.

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

It’s the philosophies of being an athlete that carry me today.

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

Theology is unnecessary.

The deed is everything, the glory is naught.

He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.

The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.

All the commandments: You shall not commit adultery, you shall not kill, you shall not steal, you shall not covet, and so on, are summed up in this single command: You must love your neighbor as yourself.

I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.

I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

Our faith is faith in someone else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.

Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.