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.

To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn’t wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.

It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

Man is not born to atheism. He is born to believe.

The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.

A lie cannot live.

It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.

The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and, however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true to fact. The people are turbulent and changing, they seldom judge or determine right.

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

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

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.

As you get older, time speeds up but life slows down.

Risk is a part of God’s game, alike for men and nations.

The trouble ain’t that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain’t distributed right.

There should be a point to movies. Sure, you’re giving people a diversion from the cold world for a bit, but at the same time, you pass on some facts and rules and maybe a little bit of wisdom.

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger.

No legacy is so rich as honesty.

Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?

Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.

Surely our job while we’re here on Earth is to learn about the world, not to create parallel universes.

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

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.

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.

Piety requires us to honor truth above our friends.

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it’s about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

A jug fills drop by drop.

Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.

We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows.

Can the mind see the truth of its own incapacity to know the unknown? Surely if I see very clearly that my mind cannot know the unknown, there is absolute quietness.

Kisses are a better fate than wisdom.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

The wise use of your freedom to make your own decisions is crucial to your spiritual growth, now and for eternity.

Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can’t expect an angel to look out.

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

If life is a checker game, someone else is moving the pieces. It isn’t us. Don’t be surprised by amazing coincidences. There are no accidents. Consider, as I learned to do, the incredible interconnectedness of all of life.

To go to the world below, having a soul which is like a vessel full of injustice, is the last and worst of all the evils.

Never give a sword to a man who can’t dance.

Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that’s how we’ve got to live.

Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.

Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.