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?

You can never really live anyone else’s life, not even your child’s. The influence you exert is through your own life, and what you’ve become yourself.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom… in a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

Because of lack of moral principle, human life becomes worthless. Moral principle, truthfulness, is a key factor. If we lose that, then there is no future.

It is only a man’s own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else’s meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.

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

In every parting there is an image of death.

I know that war is very cruel and that life is harder when you aren’t able to live in the place you called home.

Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.

He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion.

All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

If you gain, you gain all. If you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then, without hesitation, that He exists.

Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

It’s better to be good than evil, but one achieves goodness at a terrific cost.

The greatest mistake you can make in life is continually fearing that you’ll make one.

It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?

When you look at a corporation, just like when you look at a slave owner, you want to distinguish between the institution and the individual. So slavery, for example, or other forms of tyranny, are inherently monstrous. The individuals participating in them may be the nicest guys you can imagine.

The first book I ever really read was Plato’s ‚Republic,‘ and then I had to go over that five times or something.

The pursuit of truth does not permit violence on one’s opponent.

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.

Say not, ‚I have found the truth,‘ but rather, ‚I have found a truth.‘

Life is thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

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.

Paradise was made for tender hearts; hell, for loveless hearts.

A few years ago, the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls… saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality?

Civilisations have been destroyed many times, and this civilisation is no different. It can be destroyed. We can think of time in terms of millions of years and life will resume little by little. The cosmos operates for us very urgently, but geological time is different.

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.

Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding.

I love to go to the zoo. But not on Sunday. I don’t like to see the people making fun of the animals, when it should be the other way around.

There is no such thing as part freedom.

Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks.

Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.

I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

Life is very difficult. One of the most ancient of religious ideas that emerges everywhere, I would say, is that life is essentially suffering.

I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.

Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give.

Wonder is the feeling of the philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.

Health is the soul that animates all the enjoyments of life, which fade and are tasteless without it.

I am a little too absorbed by science to be able to philosophise much; but the more I look into myself, the more I find myself possessed by the conviction that it is only the science of Christ running through all things, that is to say true mystical science, that really matters. I let myself get caught up in the game when I geologise.

What goes up must come down.

A sense is what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter, in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold.

It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.

Live one day at a time emphasizing ethics rather than rules.

There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

A financial institution has the task of taking risks, and if it’s a well run institution – say, Goldman Sachs – it tries to cover the potential losses to itself, but only to itself.

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.

I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring.

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.

When the water starts boiling it is foolish to turn off the heat.

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

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