Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

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

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.

Paradise was made for tender hearts; hell, for loveless hearts.

If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me.

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

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

Everybody looks like clones and the only people you notice are my age. I don’t notice anybody unless they look great, and every now and again they do, and they are usually 70.

I’ve learned not to look at reviews. Early on, I did. I was always curious.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that’s what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.

It’s really easy to have a nice philosophy about openness, but moving the world in that direction is a different thing. It requires both understanding where you want to go and being pragmatic about getting there.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to recieve all the great truths which atheism would deny.

Wisdom is nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.

It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.

I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.

A man’s felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessing of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.

If there is no God, everything is permitted.

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

God does not play dice.

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.

Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.

The highest proof of the spirit is love. Love the eternal thing which can already on earth possess as it really is.

It is the eye of other people that ruin us. If I were blind I would want, neither fine clothes, fine houses or fine furniture.

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.

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

Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

Everybody has their thing they like or don’t like to see. It’s all in your head. That’s why people take their own pictures, because it’s difficult for someone else to capture what you seek.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

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

All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.

An enemy generally says and believes what he wishes.

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.

Philosophy: Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

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.

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever – this is a somewhat new kind of religion.

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

If one plays good music, people don’t listen and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

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 truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.

There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.

I guess it’s flattering that everyone believed I was those characters, but it also is dehumanizing.

We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes; we have no wish to find them alike.

The less you know, the more you believe.

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