To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

There is no birth of consciousness without pain.

Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.

Man’s true nature being lost, everything becomes his nature; as, his true good being lost, everything becomes his good.

I’d like to be the last person alive in the world! Yes, I’d like to know what happens.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

All men are equal before fish.

In the brute physical world, and the one encompassed by medicine, there are all too many things that could kill you, don’t kill you, and then leave you considerably weaker.

A useless life is an early death.

It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.

More gold has been mined from the thoughts of men than has been taken from the earth.

The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

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

The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.

We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.

I hope not to define myself by suffering.

Happiness is just another of the tricks that our genetic system plays on us to carry out its only role, which is the survival of the species.

Forever is composed of nows.

It’s not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren’t doing.

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

All nature is but art unknown to thee.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

There is in general good reason to suppose that in several respects the gods could all benefit from instruction by us human beings. We humans are – more humane.

When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.

If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?

No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.

Thought is the parent of the deed.

Why was I born with such contemporaries?

He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

Peace is liberty in tranquillity.

The universe is not indifferent to our existence – it depends on it.

How could man rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of men?

As I approve of a youth that has something of the old man in him, so I am no less pleased with an old man that has something of the youth. He that follows this rule may be old in body, but can never be so in mind.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.

You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

We are never further from what we wish than when we believe that we have what we wished for.

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

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

It is impossible to reason without arriving at a Supreme Being.

I don’t believe in an outside agent that creates the world, then walks away. But I feel very strongly there is an intelligence at work in every flower, in every blade of grass, in every cell of my body. And it is that intelligence that, I wouldn’t say created the universe. It is creating the universe. It’s an ongoing process.

Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?

States are not moral agents.

All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory; they have no power over the substance of original justice.

Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.

Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.

After a hard day of basic training, you could eat a rattlesnake.

We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal’s ‚Pensees‘ and read, ‚I am the great silent spaces between worlds.‘

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

This is the truth: as from a fire aflame thousands of sparks come forth, even so from the Creator an infinity of beings have life and to him return again.

The fool wonders, the wise man asks.

I want to know all Gods thoughts; all the rest are just details.

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.