Sin is geographical.

To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he might have the less.

Compassion is the basis of morality.

Getting older is no problem. You just have to live long enough.

I think that as you grow up, as you get older, we can’t get bitter, we can’t get jaded.

Is man one of God’s blunders? Or is God one of man’s blunders?

To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to recieve all the great truths which atheism would deny.

To be admitted to Nature’s hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

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

I have been influenced in my thinking by both west and east.

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about dying, but I like to think that I’ve – if it did occur – that I would die peacefully and not make too much of a fuss about it.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.

So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.

I will never be an old man. To me, old age is always 15 years older than I am.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

I found that part of it towards San Salvador extending from north to south five leagues, and the other side which we coasted along, ran from east to west more than ten leagues.

To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.

A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.

Little things affect little minds.

Abortion isn’t a lesser evil, it’s a crime. Taking one life to save another, that’s what the Mafia does. It’s a crime. It’s an absolute evil.

States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.

It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral.

Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable longing to see the truth.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

He who doesn’t pray to the Lord prays to the devil.

If small things have the power to disturb you, then who you think you are is exactly that: small.

To observations which ourselves we make, we grow more partial for th‘ observer’s sake.

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

Consider, when you are enraged at any one, what you would probably think if he should die during the dispute.

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.

The ‚I think‘ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‚I breathe‘ which actually does accompany them.

Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.

The fool wonders, the wise man asks.

I like gaps; all my stories have gaps. It seems this is the way people’s lives present themselves.

Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself.

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

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.

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

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

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottage princes‘ palaces.

When wealth is lost, nothing is lost; when health is lost, something is lost; when character is lost, all is lost.

Temperance is a mean with regard to pleasures.

I think, in politics, half the people are gonna like you, and half the people are not gonna like you, no matter what you do or what you say… It’s like there are no right answers. If there were, everyone would choose the right answers. They’re all opinions.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury.

People must have righteous principals in the first, and then they will not fail to perform virtuous actions.

Then not only custom, but also nature affirms that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice, and that justice is equality.

You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?

Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man’s nature – opposition to it is his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely, as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.

Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering.

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

Man has throughout the ages been seeking something beyond himself, beyond material welfare – something we call truth or God or reality, a timeless state – something that cannot be disturbed by circumstances, by thought or by human corruption.