The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent. To the large mind of the astronomer it is neither cruel nor kind, but only stupendous — and that is almost worse than cruelty.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

The true paradox of human freedom is that we are most ourselves when we are most constrained by the necessity of our circumstances.

We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

The true paradox of human existence is that we are condemned to be free; we are forced to choose, and yet there is no certain ground on which to base our choices.

The true paradox of human existence is that we are condemned to be free; we are responsible for what we make of ourselves, yet we perpetually seek to escape this responsibility through bad faith and self-deception.

We are dying from civilisation and its discontents; we have invented the machine, and the machine now invents us. We do not live, we are lived.

The mind of man is capable of anything because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.

We are dying from civilisation and its discontents; we have invented the machines, but we do not know how to live with them.

We are dying from civilisation and its discontents, and only the most radical knowledge of the authenticity of being can save us.

We are dying from civilisation and its discontents, and only the most radical knowledge and the most intimate courage can possibly enable us to endure.

The true paradox is that we become most fully alive at the moment when we cease to live for ourselves alone. It is in the surrender of self that self is found.

We are dying from overthinking. We are slowly killing ourselves by drowning in our own thoughts.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that very existence of such a world is a form of rebellion.