Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.

You can pretend to be serious; you can't pretend to be witty.

If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything, there were only a wild ferment, a power that, twisting in dark passions, produced everything great or inconsequential, if an unfathomable, insatiable, emptiness lay hidden beneath everything, what would life be but despair?

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

It's a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.

Then it is fact, Simmias, that true philosophers make dying their profession, and to them of all men death is least alarming. Socrates

How can the past and future be when the past is no longer and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity.

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

In order to discover who you are, first learn who everybody else is; you're what's left.

Look! are not the fields covered with a delightful verdure? Is there not something in the woods and groves, in the rivers and clear springs, that soothes, that delights, that transports the soul? At the prospect of the wide and deep ocean, or some huge mountain whose top is lost in the clouds, or of an old gloomy forest, are not our minds filled with a pleasing horror? Even in rocks and deserts is there not an agreeable wildness? How sincere a pleasure is it to behold the natural beauties of the earth! . .