Philosophy quotes

Little things console us because little things afflict us.

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

When it’s your time, it is your time.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

Character is destiny.

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

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

He who has made a fair compact with poverty is rich.

Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

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

I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?

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

The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.

If we do discover a complete theory, it should be in time understandable in broad principle by everyone. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people be able to take part in the discussion of why we and the universe exist.

Our life is made by the death of others.

The way up and the way down are one and the same.

Ignorant people see life as either existence or non-existence, but wise men see it beyond both existence and non-existence to something that transcends them both; this is an observation of the Middle Way.

The first book I ever really read was Plato’s ‚Republic,‘ and then I had to go over that five times or something.

There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

The good is the beautiful.

I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and Non-violence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to try experiments in both on as vast a scale as I could.

Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.

Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.

Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God – but to create him.

Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.

How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?

From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.

Thinking fragments reality – it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces.

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

Fear is the mother of morality.

Everything is the product of one universal creative effort. There is nothing dead in Nature. Everything is organic and living, and therefore the whole world appears to be a living organism.

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

The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

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

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.

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

We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt.

One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people’s minds.

Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.

There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.

What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

What was God doing before the divine creation?

I had rather believe all the Fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a Mind.

The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.

I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

There is nothing permanent except change.

Philosophy is the highest music.

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

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.