Truth is a good dog; but always beware of barking too close to the heels of an error, lest you get your brains kicked out.

Getting old is a fascination thing. The older you get, the older you want to get.

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.

It’s not morbid to talk about death. Most people don’t worry about death, they worry about a bad death.

We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

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

Being is the great explainer.

Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

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

A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.

Governing a great nation is like cooking a small fish – too much handling will spoil it.

Reality has a way of intruding. Reality eventually intrudes on everything.

A wet spot on the floor kind of put a scare in myself, so you never know inside those lines what might happen.

You’ve got to reach a hand of friendship across the aisle and across philosophies in this country.

The person who doesn’t scatter the morning dew will not comb gray hairs.

But Satan now is wiser than of yore, and tempts by making rich, not making poor.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

So near is falsehood to truth that a wise man would do well not to trust himself on the narrow edge.

I don’t think that faith, whatever you’re being faithful about, really can be scientifically explained. And I don’t want to explain this whole life business through truth, science. There’s so much mystery. There’s so much awe.

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.

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.

Children are a wonderful gift. They have an extraordinary capacity to see into the heart of things and to expose sham and humbug for what they are.

We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.

If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.

Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind.

Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‚But how can it be like that?‘ because you will get ‚down the drain,‘ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

Don’t get older just to get wiser. If you get older, you will be wiser, I believe that – if you dare. But get older because it’s fun!

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

Youth is wasted on the young.

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.

You’re born. You suffer. You die. Fortunately, there’s a loophole.

No one knows who is listening, say nothing you would not wish put in the newspapers.

Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms.

Some old men, continually praise the time of their youth. In fact, you would almost think that there were no fools in their days, but unluckily they themselves are left as an example.

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.

I think the brain is essentially a computer and consciousness is like a computer program. It will cease to run when the computer is turned off. Theoretically, it could be re-created on a neural network, but that would be very difficult, as it would require all one’s memories.

There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge – that is everywhere.

Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.

All men by nature desire knowledge.

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

I don’t think there is any philosophy that suggests having polio is a good thing.

Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it.

In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it.

Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

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.

Wise men make more opportunities than they find.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

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

The state comes into existence for the sake of life and continues to exist for the sake of good life.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

People react to fear, not love; they don’t teach that in Sunday School, but it’s true.

Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.

He that won’t be counseled can’t be helped.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.