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

Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed was the ninth beatitude.

Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.

We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.

All who think cannot but see there is a sanction like that of religion which binds us in partnership in the serious work of the world.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.

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

You are a child of the sun, you come from the sun, and that is something true with the Earth also… your relationship with the Earth is so deep, and the Earth is in you and this is something not very difficult, much less difficult then philosophy.

Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.

Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence.

Small is the number of people who see with their eyes and think with their minds.

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

It is better to die than to preserve this life by incurring disgrace. The loss of life causes but a moment’s grief, but disgrace brings grief every day of one’s life.

Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.

Rastafari not a culture, it’s a reality.

Use, do not abuse… neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.

The words of truth are always paradoxical.

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

I think a lot of the American people feel more than a little disappointed that the high-water mark for human exploration was 1969. The dream of human space travel has almost died for a lot of people.

It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

I like the way the stories of my relationships sound to music more than the way they look in print, in gossip columns or in me talking about them in interviews. I think it’s a better way of telling the stories.

For my own part, I would rather excel in knowledge of the highest secrets of philosophy than in arms.

They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice… that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.

As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into Heaven, into Hell.

Nature cannot be tricked or cheated. She will give up to you the object of your struggles only after you have paid her price.

I can tell you all kinds of moral tales, but fashion and reality are vaguely different.

It is possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard.

It is as necessary for man to live in beauty rather than ugliness as it is necessary for him to have food for an aching belly or rest for a weary body.

Plain women know more about men than beautiful women do.

Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

The utmost extent of man’s knowledge, is to know that he knows nothing.

Death is not the worst that can happen to men.

A man’s as miserable as he thinks he is.

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.

There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Nothing can be beautiful which is not true.

I get to hear the really good or the really bad things in the press, but I don’t read it. I can afford to say that because public opinion does not drive U2’s audience.

At the heart of the Irish economy has always been the philosophy of tax competitiveness. On the cranky left, that is very annoying; I can see that.

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

Premature certainty is the enemy of the truth.

Plato is my friend; Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.

I only see clearly what I remember.

The world is so unpredictable. Things happen suddenly, unexpectedly. We want to feel we are in control of our own existence. In some ways we are, in some ways we’re not. We are ruled by the forces of chance and coincidence.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

Error is always more busy than truth.

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.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice.

Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, and of every good to man.

The long time to come when I shall not exist has more effect on me than this short present time, which nevertheless seems endless.

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

I give the name of cosmic sense to the more or less confused affinity that binds us psychologically to the All which envelops us. The existence of this feeling is indubitable, and apparently as old as the beginning of thought… The cosmic sense must have been born as soon as man found himself facing the forest, the sea and the stars.

It’s very difficult for the American people to believe that our government, one of the richest on Earth, is also one of the stingiest on Earth.

Man has throughout the ages been seeking something beyond himself, beyond material welfare – something we call truth or God or reality, a timeless state – something that cannot be disturbed by circumstances, by thought or by human corruption.

The only objects of practical reason are therefore those of good and evil. For by the former is meant an object necessarily desired according to a principle of reason; by the latter one necessarily shunned, also according to a principle of reason.