To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.

Science is but an image of the truth.

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty – his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

To do all that one is able to do, is to be a man; to do all that one would like to do, is to be a god.

Truth cannot be brought down; rather, the individual must make the effort to ascend to it. You cannot bring the mountaintop to the valley. If you would attain to the mountaintop, you must pass through the valley, climb the steeps, unafraid of the dangerous precipices.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.

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?

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.

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

My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.

We should not be so taken up in the search for truth, as to neglect the needful duties of active life; for it is only action that gives a true value and commendation to virtue.

There is not a more unhappy being than a superannuated idol.

True virtue is life under the direction of reason.

Half a truth is often a great lie.

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.

Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.

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

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

Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

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

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.

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

Ideas have a short shelf life. You must act on them before the expiration date.

Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.

For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all.

No one can be happy who has been thrust outside the pale of truth. And there are two ways that one can be removed from this realm: by lying, or by being lied to.

The passive aggressive arguer comes armed with tricky tactics. They cannot take the risk that they might be wrong: their self-esteem is too intertwined with their opinions. It is more important to affirm their rightness, and sense of superiority, than to arrive at the truth.

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

I believe Karl Marx could have subscribed to the Sermon on the Mount.

Good ideas are free – or at least they should be.

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

In matters of truth and justice, there is no difference between large and small problems, for issues concerning the treatment of people are all the same.

To live outside the law, you must be honest.

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

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

What I’ve discovered is that in art, as in music, there’s a lot of truth-and then there’s a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It’s the moment that the audience falls in love.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

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.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Man consists of two parts, his mind and his body, only the body has more fun.

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

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

Tell the children the truth.

Sin cannot be conceived in a natural state, but only in a civil state, where it is decreed by common consent what is good or bad.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.

Therefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics.

Nothing can be beautiful which is not true.

God is a concept by which we measure our pain.

All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.

The art of being a slave is to rule one’s master.

Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

If God dropped acid, would he see people?

All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?

The wise man does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life – knowing that under certain conditions it is not worthwhile to live.

Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.