Virtue is relative to the actions and ages of each of us in all that we do.

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

Suppose you could gain everything in the whole world, and lost your soul. Was it worth it?

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

To do all that one is able to do, is to be a man; to do all that one would like to do, is to be a god.

No notice is taken of a little evil, but when it increases it strikes the eye.

Desire of having is the sin of covetousness.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice; but only accident here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death.

A leader who doesn’t hesitate before he sends his nation into battle is not fit to be a leader.

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.

Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.

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.

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

It is dangerous for mortal beauty, or terrestrial virtue, to be examined by too strong a light. The torch of Truth shows much that we cannot, and all that we would not, see.

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

As we know, while our species remains alive, everybody has the sacred duty to be optimistic. Ethically, any other behaviour wouldn’t be admissible.

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

Our life is made by the death of others.

What we live by we die by.

In the last analysis, even the best man is evil: in the last analysis, even the best woman is bad.

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

It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one.

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.

It is a common saying, and in everybody’s mouth, that life is but a sojourn.

Reverence for life is the highest court of appeal.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

We moralize among ruins.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

The humanists‘ replacement for religion: work really hard and somehow you’ll either save yourself or you’ll be immortal. Of course, that’s a total joke, and our progress is nothing. There may be progress in technology but there’s no ethical progress whatsoever.

I believe that every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

The fool wonders, the wise man asks.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

The brain is wider than the sky.

Great ambition is the passion of a great character. Those endowed with it may perform very good or very bad acts. All depends on the principles which direct them.

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.

Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.

The lie is a condition of life.

Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

You are the universe, you aren’t in the universe.

Every man is his own hell.

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

Let me give you a definition of ethics: It is good to maintain and further life it is bad to damage and destroy life.

In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.

All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

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

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will’s freedom after it.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.

Ought we not to ask the media to agree among themselves a voluntary code of conduct, under which they would not say or show anything which could assist the terrorists‘ morale or their cause while the hijack lasted.