No obligation to do the impossible is binding.

Who, being loved, is poor?

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will’s freedom after it.

Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth.

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

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

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

There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government.

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

The misfortune of the wise is better than the prosperity of the fool.

Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?

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

I don’t suffer of anything that I’ve lost.

The great question of our time is, ‚Will we be motivated by materialistic philosophy or by spiritual power?‘

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be named is not the eternal name. The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth; the Named is the mother of all things.

Without feelings of respect, what is there to distinguish men from beasts?

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

Laws control the lesser man… Right conduct controls the greater one.

I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.

Trouble brews when we steal from the poor and give to the rich.

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

I’m skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece.

Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.

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

Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.

Our philosophy is that we care about people first.

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

Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago.

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

I have finally decided to write my book on the spiritual life. I mean to put down as simply as possible the sort of ascetical or mystical teaching that I have been living and preaching so long. I call it ‚Le Milieu Divin,‘ but I am being careful to include nothing esoteric and the minimum of explicit philosophy.

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

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

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people – including me – would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

I don’t use Twitter for bad.

Do FBI Agents and FBI directors have political beliefs? Sure they do. But they’re not supposed to act on them.

I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

Even if it turns out that time travel is impossible, it is important that we understand why it is impossible.

The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.

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

States should have the right to enact laws… particularly to end the inhumane practice of ending a life that otherwise could live.

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

The human voice can never reach the distance that is covered by the still small voice of conscience.

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

Reverence for life is the highest court of appeal.

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

Judges should avoid commenting on a candidate for public office.

I’ve never been a manipulator, even in my bachelor days. I never wanted to do things to people that could catch up with me later on.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

What is permissible is not always honorable.

Culture of the mind must be subservient to the heart.