There is nothing so stable as change.

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.

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.

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.

Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again.

What is imponderable in the world is greater than what we can handle.

No nation should stoke instability in its neighbor’s country.

Nature does nothing in vain.

Who is the wisest man? He who neither knows or wishes for anything else than what happens.

All great change in America begins at the dinner table.

I have gained this from philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.

I can remember when I first went into the Himalayan area way back in 1951. Money, for instance, was not important at all to the local people. But now, finance has become just as important to them as it is to us, and this is a change maybe not for the better.

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

Money doesn’t talk, it swears.

Nothing recedes like progress.

Assuming if there’s such a thing as reality, if you have a false relationship with it, how can you do anything but fail?

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.

By the sole fact of his entering into ‚Thought,‘ man represents something entirely singular and absolutely unique in the field of our experience. On a single planet, there could not be more than one centre of emergence for reflexion.

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions, even on important subjects, which I once thought right but found to be otherwise.

As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.

To appreciate the noble is a gain which can never be torn from us.

What kills a skunk is the publicity it gives itself.

Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety.

When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn’t got any.

A lie cannot live.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.

I don’t like to commit myself about heaven and hell – you see, I have friends in both places.

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

Nothing endures but change.

Good intentions never change anything. They only become a deeper and deeper rut.

If it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

Since the beginning, it was just the same. The only difference, the crowds are bigger now.

Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.

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

God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight.

You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of.

There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.

Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.

‚Evil men have no songs.‘ How is it that the Russians have songs?

Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination.

Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.

Times and conditions change so rapidly that we must keep our aim constantly focused on the future.

Marriage has no guarantees. If that’s what you’re looking for, go live with a car battery.

There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge – that is everywhere.

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt.

I want to do a certain thing in the world, and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.

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.

I said I was ‚The Greatest,‘ I never said I was the smartest!

Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.

He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.

It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greek and Roman leave to us.

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

A policy is a temporary creed liable to be changed, but while it holds good it has got to be pursued with apostolic zeal.

A sense is what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter, in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold.