I'm not sure I really am a Humanist. I describe myself as a rigorous agnostic, which means that you cannot declare as a matter of material truth something that is in fact a matter of spiritual belief.
The term that best describes me now is 'secular humanist.'
I study a lot of philosophy. I want to be an example of how to enjoy this success, and that's exactly what I've done. I've enjoyed every moment.
My advice to you is get married: If you find a good wife you’ll be happy; if not, you’ll become a philosopher.
Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see. It's getting hard to be someone but it all works out. It doesn't matter much to me.
I'm very much an Enlightenment kind of guy.
Enlightenment writer and philosopher Voltaire likened life to a game of cards. Players must accept the cards dealt to them. However, once they have those cards in hand, they alone choose how they will play them. They decide what risks and actions to take.
My pessimism (which, by the way, is far from absolute) originated with my despair in the lack of perfection to be found in human nature. I was attempting in my successive books to show the inevitable handicap of the human condition.
How do I comfort myself? Well, I say, 'Life is just like that.'
He who grown aged in this world of woe, In deeds, not years, piercing the depths of life, So that no wonder waits him.
I shall not, as far as I am concerned, try to pass myself off as a Christian in your presence. I share with you the same revulsion from evil. But I do not share your hope, and I continue to struggle against this universe in which children suffer and die.
The happy man . . . will be always or at least most often employed in doing and contemplating the things that are in conformity with virtue. And he will bear changes of fortunes most nobly, and with perfect propriety in every way.
I have often said, and oftener think, that this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel - a solution of why Democritus laughed and Heraclitus wept.
I'm a fatalist.
Nonviolence of the strong cannot be a mere policy. It must be a creed, or a passion, if 'creed' is objected to.
I think I'm more relaxed; I think I'm more philosophical. I don't get worried as much as I used to about things.
By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.
Although I'm not Christian, I was raised Christian. I'm an atheist, with a slight Buddhist leaning. I've got a very strong sense of morality.
Thy steady temper, Portius, Can look on guilt, rebellion, fraud, and Cæsar, In the calm lights of mild philosophy.
Philosophy's power to blunt all the blows of circumstance is beyond belief.
That's my only defense against this world: to build a sentence out of it.
If you going to live by a certain code - as Bob Dylan said, you gotta serve somebody.
You ask if there is no doctrine of sorrow in my philosophy. Of acute sorrow I suppose that I know comparatively little. My saddestand most genuine sorrows are apt to be but transient regrets. The place of sorrow is supplied, perchance, by a certain hard and proportionately barren indifference. I am of kin to the sod, and partake of its dull patience,--in winter expecting the sun of spring.
Initial response illustrates a great deal about someone's personal philosophy.
I am not a prophet in any sense of the word, and I entertain an active and intense dislike of the foregoing mixture of optimism, fatalism, and conservatism.
