Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see, Thinks what ne’er was, nor is, nor e’er shall be.

There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.

We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.

Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

I have lived long enough to satisfy both nature and glory.

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

Would that I were a dry well, and that the people tossed stones into me, for that would be easier than to be a spring of flowing water that the thirsty pass by, and from which they avoid drinking.

O love, if I regret the age when one savors you, it is not for the hour of pleasure, but for the one that follows it.

I let people fill in the blanks on their own. If they want to think about their ex, that’s fine. If they want to think about maybe who one of my exes is, then that’s fine. And it might not be right, because I’m the only one who knows what these songs are really about. It’s the one shred of privacy I have in the matter.

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

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.

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

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

In the ideal world, if I was perfect, I’d be able to beat every teammate that I have, in every race.

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

What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.

If you don’t know your full-throttle history, the whole story of how you came to where you are, it’s kind of hard to put things together.

The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

The sage does not hoard. The more he helps others, the more he benefits himself, The more he gives to others, the more he gets himself. The Way of Heaven does one good but never does one harm. The Way of the sage is to act but not to compete.

Wishful thinking is not idealism. It is self-indulgence at best and self-exaltation at worst. In either case, it is usually at the expense of others. In other words, it is the opposite of idealism.

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It’s also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

Despair is the conclusion of fools.

Wisdom allows nothing to be good that will not be so forever; no man to be happy but he that needs no other happiness than what he has within himself; no man to be great or powerful that is not master of himself.

He who doesn’t pray to the Lord prays to the devil.

The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

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.

The spiritual is the parent of the practical.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

Death to me means nothing as long as I can die fast.

Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.

I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think.

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults.

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution.

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

States are not moral agents.

Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.

A man is but the product of his thoughts, what he thinks he becomes.

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

You are doomed to make choices. This is life’s greatest paradox.

Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.

Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.

There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome; to be got over.

Falsehood is a perennial spring.

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.

Justice… is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed.