Existence precedes and rules essence.

There is nothing permanent except change.

If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it.

We must conceive of this whole universe as one commonwealth of which both gods and men are members.

The brain is wider than the sky.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

The deed is everything, the glory is naught.

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

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

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

Information is not knowledge.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the Infinite.

I want to know all Gods thoughts; all the rest are just details.

And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.

I read Plato’s ‚Republic.‘ I read it through about five times until I could actually understand it.

If some years were added to my life, I would give fifty to the study of the Yi, and then I might come to be without great faults.

When I was very young I was sort of floored by the fact that my mother and my father and everyone I knew was going to die one day, and myself too. I had a sort of a philosophical crisis. I couldn’t believe that we were mortal.

The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.

After your death you will be what you were before your birth.

The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

Science is nothing but perception.

To live outside the law, you must be honest.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

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.

Do you know the only value life has is what life puts on itself?

Our life is made by the death of others.

It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.

When you give, it comes back to you.

The utmost extent of man’s knowledge, is to know that he knows nothing.

To do all that one is able to do, is to be a man; to do all that one would like to do, is to be a god.

I suppose for a very long time I’ve been trying to understand how it is that people might make sense out of their lives and make meaning and make their lives meaningful in the face of the trouble that life brings.

Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.

I believe in believing. My coach John Kavanagh is a big atheist, and he is always trying to persuade people to his way of thinking, and I think, ‚What a waste of energy.‘ If people want to believe in this god or that god, that’s fine by me; believe away. But I think we can be our own gods. I believe in myself.

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

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

There never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am I certain it is desirable that there should be.

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

Protecting the rights of even the least individual among us is basically the only excuse the government has for even existing.

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

Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.

The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

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.

There is a fundamental question we all have to face. How are we to live our lives; by what principles and moral values will we be guided and inspired?

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.

The unnatural, that too is natural.

The ‚soul‘ is one of the words you can use to talk about your innermost being, the essence of who you are.

If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once.

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

We might as well die as to go on living like this.

Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.

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.

He that does good to another does good also to himself.