There’s this lingering philosophy that movie stars shouldn’t do TV.

The unnatural, that too is natural.

The spiritual is the parent of the practical.

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

If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

Wisdom allows nothing to be good that will not be so forever; no man to be happy but he that needs no other happiness than what he has within himself; no man to be great or powerful that is not master of himself.

We are all born for love. It is the principle of existence, and its only end.

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

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

There is no such thing as accident; it is fate misnamed.

We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.

Religion and philosophy are to be preserved distinct. We are not to introduce divine revelations into philosophy, nor philosophical opinions into religion.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

Wisdom begins in wonder.

One of the reasons I connect to the Super Bowl is that I approach my shows like an athlete.

The Hindu religions gave me the impression of a vast well into which one plunges in order to grasp the reflection of the sun.

Nothing can be divided into more parts than it can possibly be constituted of. But matter (i.e. finite) cannot be constituted of infinite parts.

A God without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but fate and nature.

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

What really raises one’s indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.

To see and listen to the wicked is already the beginning of wickedness.

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

Admiration is the daughter of ignorance.

Who would set a limit to the mind of man? Who would dare assert that we know all there is to be known?

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

Everything deep is also simple and can be reproduced simply as long as its reference to the whole truth is maintained. But what matters is not what is witty but what is true.

Exaggeration is truth that has lost its temper.

I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.

Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, – till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.

The book, ’12 Rules For Life,‘ is a very serious book. There’s elements of humor in it, but I’m trying to struggle with things at the deepest possible level and to explain to people why it’s necessary to live a upstanding and noble and moral and truthful and responsible life, and why there’s hell to pay if you don’t do that.

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.

Between falsehood and useless truth there is little difference. As gold which he cannot spend will make no man rich, so knowledge which cannot apply will make no man wise.

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.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.

History should be written as philosophy.

Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago.

We cannot conceive of matter being formed of nothing, since things require a seed to start from… Therefore there is not anything which returns to nothing, but all things return dissolved into their elements.

Having nothing, nothing can he lose.

The dominant theory coming out of Hollywood is that peoples‘ attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and they need more stimulation.

We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.

What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness.

It is natural to die as to be born.

Reality is a sliding door.

What do you want a meaning for? Life is a desire, not a meaning.

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!

The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.

Actors are one family over the entire world.

A man is but the product of his thoughts, what he thinks he becomes.

He who gives away shall have real gain. He who subdues himself shall be free; he shall cease to be a slave of passions. The righteous man casts off evil, and by rooting out lust, bitterness, and illusion do we reach Nirvana.

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.

If you think only of evil, then you become pessimistic and hopeless like Freud. But if you think there is no evil, then you’re just one more deluded Pollyanna.

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.

Wisdom is found only in truth.