Quotes

When each day is the same as the next, it's because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives every day that the sun rises.

It is better to be alone with one's books. They tell their incredible stories at the time when you want to hear them. But when you're talking to people, they say some things that are so strange that you don't know how to continue the conversation.

Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.

Grammatically, the term Ahura Mazda is both masculine and feminine. Ahura (the being, the essence) is masculine, and Mazda (the source of wisdom, the super wisdom), is feminine. It is a perfect grammatical construction: a God who is both masculine and feminine, representing the strict equality of men and women which is one of the bases of the Zoroastrian system.

A free man is only master of what he can master without impediment. The only thing we are free to master without impediment is ourselves. Therefore, if you see a person wishing to control not himself but others, you know that he is not free: he has become a slave of his desire to dominate people.

Surely if men fail to see that if their two convictions (religions) contradict each other, then neither of them possesses the whole truth that constitutes faith.

Among the members of various religions I met many deeply moral men with sincere belief. I wished to be a brother to these people. And what happened? The teaching which had promised me unity of all through one faith and through love, that very teaching, speaking through its highest representatives, told me that all those people were living a lie, that the thing which gave them strength of life was a temptation of the devil, and it is we alone who are in possession of the only possible truth. I ...

I realized that I had been lost, and how I had become lost. I had strayed not so much because my ideas had been incorrect as because I had lived foolishly. I realized that I had been blinded from the truth not so much through my mistaken thoughts as through my life itself, which had been spent in satisfying desire and in exclusive conditions of epicureanism. I realized that my question as to what my life is, and the answer that it is an evil, was quite correct. The only mistake was that I had ...

Whatever answers faith gives, regardless of which faith, or to whom the answers were given, such answers always give an infinite meaning to the finite existence of man; a meaning that is not destroyed by suffering, deprivation or death. This means that only in faith can we find the meaning and possibility of life. I realized that the essential meaning of faith lies not only in the 'manifestation of things unseen', or in revelation (being only a description of one of the signs of faith) ...

According to faith it follows that in order to comprehend the meaning of life I must renounce my reason, the very thing for which meaning was necessary.

(Fortunate people often) forget that all the privileges of their position are accidental and that not everyone can have a thousand wives and palaces as Solomon did; that for every man with a thousand wives there are a thousand men without wives, and that for every palace there are a thousand men who built it by the sweat of their brow, and that the same chance that has made you Solomon today might make you Solomon's slave tomorrow.

(After witnessing executions in Paris) When I saw the heads being separated from the bodies and heard them thump, one after the next, I understood, and not just with my intellect but with my whole being, that no theories of the rationality of existence and progress could justify this crime. I realized that even if every single person since the day of creation had, according to whatever theory, found this necessary I knew that it was unnecessary and wrong, and therefore that judgments on what i ...

However cruel Attila, Genghis Khan and their followers may have been, the act of killing people personally, face to face, must have been unpleasant to them, and the consequences of the murder still more unpleasant: the wailing relatives and the presence of the corpses. And thus their cruelty was restrained. Nowadays we kill people through such a complex process, and the consequences of our cruelty are so carefully removed and concealed from us, that there is no restraint on the bestiality of t ...

So long as people do not consider all men as their brothers and do not consider human life as the most sacred thing, which rather than destroy they must consider it their first and foremost duty to support; that is so long as people do not behave towards one another in a religious manner, they will always ruin one another's lives for the sake of personal gain.

Luxury cannot be obtained other than by enslaving other people. As soon as there is slavery there is an increase in luxury, and the increase in luxury inevitably instigates an increase in slavery. It is only people who are hungry, cold and tied down by need who will spend their whole lives doing something they have no need of doing, but which is needed for the amusement of their masters.

Oppressors need not be meek and humble but, as emperors, kings, popes, bishops, and secular and spiritual authorities of any kind, they must correct others by teaching and punishing them while themselves living in splendour and luxury, the provision of which is an obligation for those they subject. Thanks to this false teaching which they whole-heartedly support, the ruling classes govern the people, forcing them to provide for the luxuries, vanities and vices of the rulers. Moreover, the scie ...

The law of human life is such that the improvement of it, whether for the individual or for society, is only possible through inner, moral perfection. All the efforts people make to improve their lives through violent external behaviour towards one another serve as the most potent form of propaganda and example of evil, and do not improve life, but, on the contrary, increase the evil which gathers size like a snowball and increasingly alienates people from the only possible way of genuinely im ...

A person cannot discover through any sort of movement the direction in which he ought to move, and yet every movement is inevitably performed in some direction. In just the same way it is impossible in philosophy or science to use mental effort in order to determine the direction in which such efforts should be made, and yet all mental effort is inevitably performed according to a given direction. It is religion that indicates the direction of such mental effort.

When among one hundred men, one rules over ninety-nine, it is unjust, it is despotism; when ten rule over ninety, it is equally unjust, it is an oligarchy; but when fifty-one rule over forty-nine (and this is only theoretical, for in reality it is always ten or eleven of these fifty-one), it is entirely just, it is freedom! Could there be anything funnier, in its manifest absurdity, than such reasoning? And yet it is this very reasoning that serves as the basis for all reformers of the politic ...

Violence performed against you can never justify violence on your part.