What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness.

One who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived.

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.

I’ve never bought into any sort of hard and fast, this-box/that-box characterization. People are individuals. Yes, they may be expected to be a particular way. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to be that way.

All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.

I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.

Courage is a mean with regard to fear and confidence.

To a guy like me, a laugh is full of information.

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.

My philosophy is that if I have any money I invest it in new ventures and not have it sitting around.

Forever is composed of nows.

I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.

There is no such thing as part freedom.

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It’s called living.

Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.

I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greek and Roman leave to us.

If you gain, you gain all. If you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then, without hesitation, that He exists.

I don’t think human beings learn anything without desperation. Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

There is no birth of consciousness without pain.

Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.

I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

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

People respond in accordance to how you relate to them. If you approach them on the basis of violence, that’s how they’ll react. But if you say, ‚We want peace, we want stability,‘ we can then do a lot of things that will contribute towards the progress of our society.

The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.

Two things control men’s nature, instinct and experience.

I love reading people. I really enjoy watching, observing, and being able to figure out a person, the reason they wore that dress, the reason they smell the way they do.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.

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.

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.

Natural ability without education has more often attained to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.

The important question is not, what will yield to man a few scattered pleasures, but what will render his life happy on the whole amount.

I have nothing to ask but that you would remove to the other side, that you may not, by intercepting the sunshine, take from me what you cannot give.

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

For peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.

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

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

I will praise any man that will praise me.

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.

Chaos is inherent in all compounded things. Strive on with diligence.

The idea that to make a man work you’ve got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We’ve done that for so long that we’ve forgotten there’s any other way.

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

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

O wretched man, wretched not just because of what you are, but also because you do not know how wretched you are!

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.

What if nothing exists and we’re all in somebody’s dream?

To do a great right do a little wrong.

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

The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be first to inquire diligently into the properties of things, and establishing those properties by experiments, and then to proceed more slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them.

Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, – till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.