There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

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

The proclamation of the saving love of God comes before moral and religious imperatives. Today sometimes it seems that the opposite order is prevailing.

My philosophy is, it’s always very rewarding when you can make an audience laugh. I don’t mind making fun of myself. I like self-deprecating comedy. But I’d like you to laugh with me occasionally, too.

That government is best which governs least.

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.

Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.

Nothing can be beautiful which is not true.

Where sense is wanting, everything is wanting.

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

It is best to rise from life as from a banquet, neither thirsty nor drunken.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

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

A statement is persuasive and credible either because it is directly self-evident or because it appears to be proved from other statements that are so.

Means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.

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

And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last.

The only objects of practical reason are therefore those of good and evil. For by the former is meant an object necessarily desired according to a principle of reason; by the latter one necessarily shunned, also according to a principle of reason.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.

I’m grateful to intelligent people. That doesn’t mean educated. That doesn’t mean intellectual. I mean really intelligent. What black old people used to call ‚mother wit‘ means intelligence that you had in your mother’s womb. That’s what you rely on. You know what’s right to do.

We were all on this ship in the sixties, our generation, a ship going to discover the New World. And the Beatles were in the crow’s nest of that ship.

Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life.

What we need is a system of thought – you might even call it a religion – that can bind humans together. A system that would fit the Republic of Chad as well as the United States: a system that would supply our idealistic young people with something to believe in.

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin.

Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.

Small amounts of philosophy lead to atheism, but larger amounts bring us back to God.

One of the first duties of a Scout is obedience to authority. He must obey his orders in the first place and put his own amusement or desires in the second.

How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?

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

There is no birth of consciousness without pain.

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.

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

Dr. Karel Culik is an outstanding applied mathematician, a specialist in algebra, logic, computer sciences and mathematical linguistics. In 1965, he visited the linguistics research program at MIT, and we have worked together on several projects since.

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

We are second-hand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences, and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves: nothing original, pristine, clear.

I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.

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

Upon the subjects of which I have treated, I have spoken as I have thought. I may be wrong in regard to any or all of them; but, holding it a sound maxim that it is better only sometimes to be right than at all times to be wrong, so soon as I discover my opinions to be erroneous, I shall be ready to renounce them.

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.

It is possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard.

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

We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt.

History should be written as philosophy.

It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

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

Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.