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

A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

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.

A jug fills drop by drop.

It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

Let freedom reign. The sun never set on so glorious a human achievement.

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.

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.

Even if the politics needed doesn’t exist today, we still need to use our voices to make sure that the people in power are focused on the right things. Because this is a democracy, and in a democracy, people are the ones who run the country.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

I believe that God has planted in every heart the desire to live in freedom.

I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.

I believe every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine.

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.

Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.

The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.

Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.

Liberty must be limited in order to be possessed.

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

If you’re a surfer, you just want to surf. You don’t know if anyone’s going to see you, and you don’t really care if they see you. You just live for that feeling.

When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known.

Nature is not human hearted.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

I feel much freer now that I am certain the pope is the Antichrist.

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.

Heaven is dumb, echoing only the dumb.

Power is like being a lady… if you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.

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

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

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

Every family should have the right to spend their money, after tax, as they wish, and not as the government dictates. Let us extend choice, extend the will to choose and the chance to choose.

I’m a strict, strict agnostic. It’s very different from a casual, ‚I don’t know.‘ It’s that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can’t present it as fact.

Temperance is a mean with regard to pleasures.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

To live is to find out for yourself what is true, and you can do this only when there is freedom, when there is continuous revolution inwardly, within yourself.

War – An act of violence whose object is to constrain the enemy, to accomplish our will.

No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.

We are not to give credit to the many, who say that none ought to be educated but the free; but rather to the philosophers, who say that the well-educated alone are free.

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

My children came out as individuals in their own right. They were not my products. They had their own characters and were very strong-minded. I gave them a lot of freedom when they were still very young. The one thing they got from me is morals. They would never betray anyone. They are really good people.

If you think in terms of a year, plant a seed; if in terms of ten years, plant trees; if in terms of 100 years, teach the people.

I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.

The good is the beautiful.

Freedom is the open window through which pours the sunlight of the human spirit and human dignity.

Existence precedes and rules essence.

We will not waver; we will not tire; we will not falter, and we will not fail. Peace and Freedom will prevail.

There is not a more unhappy being than a superannuated idol.

The act of dying is one of the acts of life.

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.

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.

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?

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

The wise use of your freedom to make your own decisions is crucial to your spiritual growth, now and for eternity.