There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

Good men by nature, wish to know. I know that many will call this useless work… men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of that of wisdom, which is the food and only true riches of the mind.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

Real living is living for others.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

Wonder is the feeling of the philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.

Yeah, it’s pretty hard not to be completely cynical these days.

There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?

Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.

Knowledge is true opinion.

There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.

There may sometimes be ungenerous attempts to keep a young man down; and they will succeed, too, if he allows his mind to be diverted from its true channel to brood over the attempted injury.

My dear friend, clear your mind of cant.

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we’re children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they’re scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it’s pretty much in the eye of the beholder.

I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It’s the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs.

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

Any experience that touches you, in any particular way, is good. It can be a horrible experience.

Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.

It is only at the first encounter that a face makes its full impression on us.

My father was a negative person. He actually taught me to be negative, if that makes any sense. I remember him saying: ‚You know there’s no point in expecting anything good to happen because it won’t.‘ I grew up in such a negative atmosphere.

Love is a trap. When it appears, we see only its light, not its shadows.

You cannot step into the same river twice.

God does not play dice.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

If your only goal is to become rich, you will never achieve it.

Say not, ‚I have found the truth,‘ but rather, ‚I have found a truth.‘

On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down .

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores the better.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

Now, you lose something in your life, or you come into a conflict, and there’s gonna come a time that you’re gonna know: There was a reason for that. And at the end of your life, all the things you thought were periods, they turn out to be commas. There was never a full stop in any of it.

He who is contented is rich.

Every man is his own hell.

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

It is only when the rich are sick that they fully feel the impotence of wealth.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

I think the word rich is all relative.

There are no big problems, there are just a lot of little problems.

To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else’s type of thinking.

You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him.

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.

Sin cannot be conceived in a natural state, but only in a civil state, where it is decreed by common consent what is good or bad.

There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome; to be got over.

Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

As far as I’m concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue.

Love is too young to know what conscience is.

I have always held firmly to the thought that each one of us can do a little to bring some portion of misery to an end.

To know yet to think that one does not know is best; Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty.

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

There is nothing wrong with men possessing riches. The wrong comes when riches possess men.

It’s not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren’t doing.

To me, constructive criticism is when people take ownership of their ideas. That’s why I don’t listen to anything that’s anonymous. But it’s hard; when there’s something hurtful out there, I still want to read it over and over and memorize it and explain my point of view to the person.

Know then this truth, enough for man to know virtue alone is happiness below.

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down.