There is nothing good or evil save in the will.

There is no wealth but life.

How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

History should be written as philosophy.

I can do no other than be reverent before everything that is called life. I can do no other than to have compassion for all that is called life. That is the beginning and the foundation of all ethics.

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

It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.

Don’t lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell.

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.

A man’s character is his guardian divinity.

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

Exaggeration is truth that has lost its temper.

Never in any case say I have lost such a thing, but I have returned it. Is your child dead? It is a return. Is your wife dead? It is a return. Are you deprived of your estate? Is not this also a return?

States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.

You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause.

Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.

You could not step twice into the same rivers; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.

It is the superfluous things for which men sweat, – superfluous things that wear our togas theadbare, that force us to grow old in camp, that dash us upon foreign shores.

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.

It is a strange desire, to seek power, and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man’s self.

All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory; they have no power over the substance of original justice.

To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

Morality is the basis of things and truth is the substance of all morality.

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

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

I can control my destiny, but not my fate. Destiny means there are opportunities to turn right or left, but fate is a one-way street. I believe we all have the choice as to whether we fulfil our destiny, but our fate is sealed.

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

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

All virtue is summed up in dealing justly.

Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.

One must not cheat anyone, not even the world of its victory.

O wretched man, wretched not just because of what you are, but also because you do not know how wretched you are!

I don’t believe in death, neither in flesh nor in spirit.

When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable thing possible: one thereby almost deserves to live.

I’ll never tell a lie. I’ll never make a misleading statement. I’ll never betray the confidence that any of you had in me. And I’ll never avoid a controversial issue.

I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.

Everything is the product of one universal creative effort. There is nothing dead in Nature. Everything is organic and living, and therefore the whole world appears to be a living organism.

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

It is a common saying, and in everybody’s mouth, that life is but a sojourn.

Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.

The love of economy is the root of all virtue.

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.

It means, people who are in high and responsible positions, if they go against righteousness, righteousness itself will get transformed into a destroyer.

The end of life is to be like God, and the soul following God will be like Him.

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

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

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do.

The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.

Use, do not abuse… neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.

As I approve of a youth that has something of the old man in him, so I am no less pleased with an old man that has something of the youth. He that follows this rule may be old in body, but can never be so in mind.