What is imponderable in the world is greater than what we can handle.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

I don’t pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.

Death most resembles a prophet who is without honor in his own land or a poet who is a stranger among his people.

We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal’s ‚Pensees‘ and read, ‚I am the great silent spaces between worlds.‘

I am a part of everything that I have read.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

The art is long, life is short.

If we must not act save on a certainty, we ought not to act on religion, for it is not certain. But how many things we do on an uncertainty, sea voyages, battles!

Man is not born to atheism. He is born to believe.

History should be written as philosophy.

There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it.

What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?

Who, being loved, is poor?

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God – but to create him.

The man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for.

If anyone offers conjectures about the truth of things from the mere possibility of hypotheses, I do not see by what stipulation anything certain can be determined in any science, since one or another set of hypotheses may always be devised which will appear to supply new difficulties.

The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.

The wise man does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life – knowing that under certain conditions it is not worthwhile to live.

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

The way up and the way down are one and the same.

A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything.

A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.

It’s hard to speculate what tomorrow may bring.

Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.

Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.

Surely our job while we’re here on Earth is to learn about the world, not to create parallel universes.

One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end.

Life is warfare.

Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.

I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong.

All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me.

The word ‚happy‘ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

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.

Where a man can live, he can also live well.

Love and doubt have never been on speaking terms.

The state comes into existence for the sake of life and continues to exist for the sake of good life.

Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.

The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

America is not nearly done. We’re only in the beginning. Who knows who we will be? Who knows… what color we will be? It is all something that, maybe, our descendants – if they survive that long – will see.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

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

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.

What difference is there between us, save a restless dream that follows my soul but fears to come near you?

There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.

Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

Not only do I not know what’s going on, I wouldn’t know what to do about it if I did.

The false is nothing but an imitation of the true.

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

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.

There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.

There is a time for departure even when there’s no certain place to go.