Out of love for mankind, and out of despair at my embarrassing situation, seeing that I had accomplished nothing and was unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, and moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere.
Everything is hard in some way. It’s hard to be in the wrong relationship. It’s hard to be in the right one. It’s hard to be broke and miserable, it’s hard to achieve your dreams. It’s hard to be stuck in the middle, not really feeling anything at all. Everything is hard, but you choose your hard. You choose what’s worth it. You don’t choose whether or not you’ll suffer, but you do choose what you want to suffer for.
How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do.
What is existence for but to be laughed at if men in their twenties have already attained the utmost?
In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.
Know you not that a good man does nothing for appearance sake, but for the sake of having done right?
Yet the ivory gods, And the ebony gods, And the gods of diamond-jade, Are only silly puppet gods That people themselves Have made.-
Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason, it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it.
When people injure you, ask yourself what good or harm they thought would come of it. If you understand that, you’ll feel sympathy rather than outrage or anger. Your sense of good and evil may be the same as theirs, or near it, in which case you have to excuse them. Or your sense of good and evil may differ from theirs. In which case they’re misguided and deserve your compassion. Is that so hard?
My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you’ll be happy; if not, you’ll become a philosopher.
When you come to the edge of all that you know, you must believe one of two things: either there will be ground to stand on, or you will be given wings to fly.
Water is to India as blood is to the body, with the many rivers functioning as arteries – the Ganges being the aorta – and the monsoon timelessly arriving as a much-needed annual blood transfusion.
Creating individuality, which creates and protects others’ individualities is good.
The problem with religion, because it’s been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation.
Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily.
Whole life is a search for beauty. But, when the beauty is found inside, the search ends and a beautiful journey begins.
Empty is the argument of the philosopher which does not relieve any human suffering.
There is not much to be got anywhere in the world. It is filled with misery and pain; if a man escapes these, boredeom lies in wait for him at every corner. Nay more; it is evil which generally has the upper hand, and folly that makes the most noise. Fate is cruel and mankind pitiable.
A child who does not think about what happens around him and is content with living without wondering whether he lives honestly is like a man who lives from a scoundrel’s work and is on the road to being a scoundrel.
Philosophizing is simply one way of being afraid, a cowardly pretense that doesn’t get you anywhere.
Who is to decide which is the grimmer sight: withered hearts, or empty skulls?
Love is our most unifying and empowering common spiritual denominator. The more we ignore its potential to bring greater balance and deeper meaning to human existence, the more likely we are to continue to define history as one long inglorious record of man’s inhumanity to man.
Truth is neither ojectivity nor the balanced view; truth is a selfless subjectivity.
Too many people get credit for being good, when they are only being passive. They are too often praised for being broadminded when they are so broadminded they can never make up their minds about anything.
Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.
You don’t have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate.
What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.
I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in you.
Nothing is as it seems, but something is everything it is made out to be.
Think of your many years of procrastination; how the gods have repeatedly granted you further periods of grace, of which you have taken no advantage. It is time now to realise the nature of the universe to which you belong, and of that controlling Power whose offspring you are; and to understand that your time has a limit set to it. Use it, then, to advance your enlightenment; or it will be gone, and never in your power again.
It doesn’t seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil – which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.
…when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.
People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.
I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.
We are a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent — people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save.
Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.
If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.
What you think, you become.What you feel, you attract.What you imagine, you create.
Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Maker of the world, but degenerates once it gets into the hands of man
When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies.
Thoughts become things. If you see it in your mind, you will hold it in your hand.
Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.
To be evenminded is the greatest virtue.Wisdom is to speakthe truth and actin keeping with its nature.
Between love and the automatic garbage chute, young people everywhere have made their choice and prefer the garbage chute. [Entre l’amour et le vide-ordure automatique la jeunesse de tous les pays a fait son choix et préfère le vide-ordure.]
The heart is like a woman, and the head is like a man, and although man is the head of woman, woman is the heart of man, and she turns man’s head because she turns his heart.
If you live today, you breath in nihilism … it’s the gas you breathe. If I hadn’t had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.
Thinking only begins at the point where we have come to know that Reason, glorified for centuries, is the most obstinate adversary of thinking.
Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.
How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?
We’re built of contradictions, all of us. It’s those opposing forces that give us strength, like an arch, each block pressing the next. Give me a man whose parts are all aligned in agreement and I’ll show you madness. We walk a narrow path, insanity to each side. A man without contradictions to balance him will soon veer off.
We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork.
Things are not always what they seem; the first appearance deceives many; the intelligence of a few perceives what has been carefully hidden.