What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

Let us work without theorizing, tis the only way to make life endurable.

To see and listen to the wicked is already the beginning of wickedness.

Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.

Nature does nothing in vain.

Little things console us because little things afflict us.

The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.

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

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

A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.

Facts are stubborn things.

There is nothing permanent except change.

A gaffe in Washington is someone telling the truth, and telling the truth has never hurt me.

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

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

Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.

Reality is a sliding door.

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

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.

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

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottage princes‘ palaces.

No one can outrun death. It will catch up to all of us eventually.

I want to do a certain thing in the world, and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.

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.

Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.

Intense feeling too often obscures the truth.

When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.

Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.

A man who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary.

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

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

I am a humble but very earnest seeker after truth.

Nor shall derision prove powerful against those who listen to humanity or those who follow in the footsteps of divinity, for they shall live forever. Forever.

It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.

I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion.

Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

I never gave anybody hell! I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

We usually lose today, because there has been a yesterday, and tomorrow is coming.

Means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.

We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are… than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

Nothing cannot exist forever.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?

There may not be one Truth – there may be several truths – but saying that is not to say that reality doesn’t exist.

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

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.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.

It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.

It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.

What then is freedom? The power to live as one wishes.

It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

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