Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.

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

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the ‚Not Me,‘ that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, ‚Nature.‘

Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.

Those whom the gods love grow young.

Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

My philosophy is that if I have any money I invest it in new ventures and not have it sitting around.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

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

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings.

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.

Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

There was something undifferentiated and yet complete, which existed before Heaven and Earth. Soundless and formless, it depends on nothing and does not change. It operates everywhere and is free from danger. It may be considered the mother of the universe. I do not know its name; I call it Tao.

There is no such thing as Something for nothing.

Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else.

Couples are wholes and not wholes, what agrees disagrees, the concordant is discordant. From all things one and from one all things.

As far as I’m concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue.

Man was made at the end of the week’s work, when God was tired.

Life is wasted on the living.

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

Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you don’t find out til too late that he’s been playing with two queens all along.

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

Wisdom begins in wonder.

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

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action.

We must accept what science tells us, that man was born from the earth. But, more logical than the scientists who lecture us, we must carry this lesson to its conclusion: that is to say, accept that man was born entirely from the world – not only his flesh and bones but his incredible power of thought.

Religion is the frozen thought of man out of which they build temples.

It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory.

Knowledge which is divorced from justice, may be called cunning rather than wisdom.

O wretched man, wretched not just because of what you are, but also because you do not know how wretched you are!

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

Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.

A God without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but fate and nature.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

The way to see by Faith is to shut the Eye of Reason.

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.

The great quest of life has always been to discover truth.

It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.

Nothing can be beautiful which is not true.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

‚Happiness‘ is a pointless goal.

Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: ‚War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.‘

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

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

It is best to rise from life as from a banquet, neither thirsty nor drunken.

Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame.

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.

Men exist for the sake of one another.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.