There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.

Suppose you could gain everything in the whole world, and lost your soul. Was it worth it?

The future influences the present just as much as the past.

Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

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.

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.

So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.

He who is not just is severe, he who is not wise is sad.

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride.

Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.

No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.

It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.

Effective action is always unjust.

A well governed appetite is the greater part of liberty.

For a war to be just three conditions are necessary – public authority, just cause, right motive.

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

The false is nothing but an imitation of the true.

Life is about conduct and how we conduct ourselves. But two wrongs never make a right.

Death to me means nothing as long as I can die fast.

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

Power does not change you, it unmasks you.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

Doubt is the incentive to truth and inquiry leads the way.

Man is made by his belief. As he believes, so he is.

Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.

Clever tyrants are never punished.

We’re all sinners. Everybody you meet all over the world is a sinner.

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.

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.

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.

Many religious confessions share common values. They teach that we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us.

All the gold which is under or upon the earth is not enough to give in exchange for virtue.

I’m a strict, strict agnostic. It’s very different from a casual, ‚I don’t know.‘ It’s that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can’t present it as fact.

Charity creates a multitude of sins.

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

The biggest risk is not taking any risk… In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.

The art of living well and the art of dying well are one.

I believe that every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises.

When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

We must accept what science tells us, that man was born from the earth. But, more logical than the scientists who lecture us, we must carry this lesson to its conclusion: that is to say, accept that man was born entirely from the world – not only his flesh and bones but his incredible power of thought.

I love to watch times change!

There will be no prison which can hold our movement down.

An individual’s refusal to carry out the criminal acts of his government sets the stage, in the most effective way possible, for the attempt to demonstrate the criminal nature of these acts.

What then do you call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot of yourselves, without revelation, admit the existence within you of anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and thinking.

There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.

What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.

I think my message to the politicians who have within their power the ability to make change is, ‚Do you really, really not care about the future of your great-grandchildren? Because if we let the world continue to be destroyed the way we are now, what’s the world going to be like for your great-grandchildren?‘

The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.

You may be able to read Bernard Shaw’s plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?

Your philosophy determines whether you will go for the disciplines or continue the errors.

It’s possible – you can never know – that the universe exists only for me. If so, it’s sure going well for me, I must admit.

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.

Where knowledge ends, religion begins.

As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into Heaven, into Hell.

Every sin is the result of a collaboration.