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

If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

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

The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.

It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.

Justice and truth are too such subtle points that our tools are too blunt to touch them accurately.

Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge.

Two qualities are indispensable: first, an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth; and second, the courage to follow this faint light wherever it may lead.

Absence and death are the same – only that in death there is no suffering.

All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.

At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.

Reality has a way of intruding. Reality eventually intrudes on everything.

Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.

Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind.

Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.

Truth cannot be brought down; rather, the individual must make the effort to ascend to it. You cannot bring the mountaintop to the valley. If you would attain to the mountaintop, you must pass through the valley, climb the steeps, unafraid of the dangerous precipices.

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.

In everything one thing is impossible: rationality.

What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

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.

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.

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 now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.

If you think only of evil, then you become pessimistic and hopeless like Freud. But if you think there is no evil, then you’re just one more deluded Pollyanna.

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

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.

My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

I feel a distaste for hunting, first because of a kind of Buddhist respect for the unity and sacredness of all life, and also because the pursuit of a hare or chamois strikes me as a kind of ‚escape of energy,‘ that is, the expenditure of our effort in an illusory end, one devoid of profit.

So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.

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 am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.

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

That’s another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it’s as if things were coming together in my mind. It’s like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature, and when you feel that nature articulated, it’s it’s like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together.

Men would be angels, angels would be gods.

To know yet to think that one does not know is best; Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty.

I have gained this from philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.

Our life is made by the death of others.

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

One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

Through my films I’m eventually trying to one day tell the truth. I don’t know if I’m ever going to get there, but I’m slowly letting pieces of myself out there and then maybe by the time I’m 85, I’ll look back and say, ‚All right, that about sums it up.‘

Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear.

Our philosophy is that we care about people first.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

No obligation to do the impossible is binding.

For though we love both the truth and our friends, piety requires us to honor the truth first.

It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.

Only those are fit to live who are not afraid to die.

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

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

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?

No legacy is so rich as honesty.

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

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

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.