Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair.

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

When things are going bad, don’t get all bummed out. Don’t get startled; don’t get frustrated. If you can say the word ‚good,‘ guess what? It means you’re still alive. It means you’re still breathing.

The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be first to inquire diligently into the properties of things, and establishing those properties by experiments, and then to proceed more slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them.

Old age: the crown of life, our play’s last act.

That government is best which governs least.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.

Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.

A man must now swallow more belief than he can digest.

It is impossible to reason without arriving at a Supreme Being.

An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight… the truly wise person is colorblind.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself.

I thought one should have the attitude of ‚What do you care what other people think!‘

Of course, to have money is just great because you can do what you think is important to you. I always was a rich person because money’s not related to happiness.

If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.

If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes.

Admiration is the daughter of ignorance.

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.

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty, and all forms of human life.

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

But men must know, that in this theatre of man’s life it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on.

Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.

Egoism is the very essence of a noble soul.

How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?

If a man had more than one life, I think a little hanging would not hurt this one; but after he is once dead, we cannot bring him back, no matter how sorry we may be; so the boy shall be pardoned.

Life is not living in the suburbs with a white picket fence. That’s not life. Somehow our American culture has made it out that that’s what life needs to be – and that if it’s not that, it’s all screwed up. It’s not.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.

Nature abhors annihilation.

The darkness is really out there. It’s not something that’s in my head, just. It’s in my work because it’s in the world.

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.

Why do I not seek some real good; one which I could feel, not one which I could display?

No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.

The chief condition on which, life, health and vigor depend on, is action. It is by action that an organism develops its faculties, increases its energy, and attains the fulfillment of its destiny.

Know thyself? If I knew myself I would run away.

The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape.

Over the years I’ve seen people lose a spouse and then withdraw and lose interest in life, and I believe we need to resist that.

A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

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.

Not what we have But what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.

The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

We’re all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

The life of an uneducated man is as useless as the tail of a dog which neither covers its rear end, nor protects it from the bites of insects.

The universe is transformation: life is opinion.

Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.

Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.

Singleness of purpose is one of the chief essentials for success in life, no matter what may be one’s aim.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

I’m inconsistent, even to myself.

The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.

Truth is a pathless land.