What do you want a meaning for? Life is a desire, not a meaning.

Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

The first thing which I can record concerning myself is, that I was born. These are wonderful words. This life, to which neither time nor eternity can bring diminution – this everlasting living soul, began. My mind loses itself in these depths.

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.

An empowered organisation is one in which individuals have the knowledge, skill, desire, and opportunity to personally succeed in a way that leads to collective organisational success.

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

It is the eye of other people that ruin us. If I were blind I would want, neither fine clothes, fine houses or fine furniture.

Who shall decide when doctors disagree, And soundest casuists doubt, like you and me?

Man is a universe within himself.

Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.

He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

That’s the shock: All cliches are true. The years really do speed by. Life really is as short as they tell you it is. And there really is a God – so do I buy that one? If all the other cliches are true… Hell, don’t pose me that one.

In seeking comfort, we generally find a quiet corner in life where there is a minimum of conflict, and then we are afraid to step out of that seclusion.

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

If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.

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

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

The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn’t really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn’t going to compose Beethoven’s Fifth.

Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.

There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.

The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future in life.

If my survival caused another to perish, then death would be sweeter and more beloved.

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.

Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.

Nature abhors annihilation.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

I have spent my life going from mania to mania. Somehow it has all paid off.

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

We cannot conceive of matter being formed of nothing, since things require a seed to start from… Therefore there is not anything which returns to nothing, but all things return dissolved into their elements.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

It is more fitting for a man to laugh at life than to lament over it.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.

It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.

I think it is the height of ignorance to believe that the sexual act is an independent function necessary like sleeping or eating. Seeing, therefore, that I did not desire more children, I began to strive after self-control. There was endless difficulty in the task.

Death obsesses me, yes it does. I can’t really understand why it doesn’t obsess everyone – I think it does really, I’m just a little more out about it.

A man’s character is his guardian divinity.

Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

There are three constants in life… change, choice and principles.

Jesus lived a life that was full of joy and contradictions and fights, you know? If they were to paint a picture of Jesus without contradictions, the gospels would be fake, but the contradictions are a sign of authenticity.

Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.

Mysteries are not necessarily miracles.

As long as your body is healthy and under control and death is distant, try to save your soul; when death is immanent what can you do?

God’s desire is that we excel.

The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.

‚Happiness‘ is a pointless goal.

Civilisations have been destroyed many times, and this civilisation is no different. It can be destroyed. We can think of time in terms of millions of years and life will resume little by little. The cosmos operates for us very urgently, but geological time is different.

I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.

Because of your smile, you make life more beautiful.

Religion is more than life. Remember that his own religion is the truest to every man even if it stands low in the scales of philosophical comparison.

I’m here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn’t make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply.

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

We should not be so taken up in the search for truth, as to neglect the needful duties of active life; for it is only action that gives a true value and commendation to virtue.

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.