Truths and roses have thorns about them.

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

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.

Common looking people are the best in the world: that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.

For me, there are two types of people: the young and the experienced.

There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.

Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.

When you go to the mountains, you see them and you admire them. In a sense, they give you a challenge, and you try to express that challenge by climbing them.

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

What we live by we die by.

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?

Some men see things as they are, and say why. I dream of things that never were, and say why not.

Any man is liable to err, only a fool persists in error.

I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.

You will always have partial points of view, and you’ll always have the story behind the story that hasn’t come out yet. And any form of journalism you’re involved with is going to be up against a biased viewpoint and partial knowledge.

I really believe in the philosophy that you create your own universe. I’m just trying to create a good one for myself.

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?

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

I don’t think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking theres some kind of change.

If you think only of evil, then you become pessimistic and hopeless like Freud. But if you think there is no evil, then you’re just one more deluded Pollyanna.

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

The end of life is to be like God, and the soul following God will be like Him.

There is nothing permanent except change.

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.

Some people never go crazy, What truly horrible lives they must live.

Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.

Love, we say, is life; but love without hope and faith is agonizing death.

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

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

What one fool can understand, another can.

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live as if there isn’t and to die to find out that there is.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

A friend who is far away is sometimes much nearer than one who is at hand. Is not the mountain far more awe-inspiring and more clearly visible to one passing through the valley than to those who inhabit the mountain?

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.

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

God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight.

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

Beauty without expression is boring.

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?

All knowledge or form conception is evoked through the medium of the eye, either in response to disturbances directly received on the retina or to their fainter secondary effects and reverberations. Other sense organs can only call forth feelings which have no reality of existence and of which no conception can be formed.

In all my wild mountaineering, I have enjoyed only one avalanche ride; and the start was so sudden, and the end came so soon, I thought but little of the danger that goes with this sort of travel, though one thinks fast at such times.

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God’s handwriting.

Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.

I was a peripheral visionary. I could see the future, but only way off to the side.

I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do.

In my entire life, any time I’ve ever lost something, I’ve gotten something even better going around the next corner. It’s like one door closes and another door opens. As long as I can walk through the produce section in every grocery store in this country and eat the grapes that they’re going to throw away, I know I can be fine.

My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.

There is no such things as ‚best‘ in the world of individuals.

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.

My justification is that most people my age spend a lot of time thinking about what they’re going to do for the next five or ten years. The time they spend thinking about their life, I just spend drinking.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

I will buy any creme, cosmetic, or elixir from a woman with a European accent.

If time is not real, then the dividing line between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.

Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.