He who can be, and therefore is, another’s, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

The false is nothing but an imitation of the true.

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.

Change alone is unchanging.

It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment.

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.

It’s not morbid to talk about death. Most people don’t worry about death, they worry about a bad death.

All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green.

There are things around, and I know where they can be got quite easily, but I quite like waking up to the sunshine.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased.

Non-violence is not a garment to be put on and off at will. Its seat is in the heart, and it must be an inseparable part of our being.

Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.

For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions, even on important subjects, which I once thought right but found to be otherwise.

All genuinely intellectual work is humorous.

No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of spring.

In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

To do a great right do a little wrong.

If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.

Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.

I’m an idealist without illusions.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature – trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence… We need silence to be able to touch souls.

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.

Worthless people live only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.

The higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him.

Words are loaded pistols.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man’s resources?

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.

I don’t like to commit myself about heaven and hell – you see, I have friends in both places.

Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination.

Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

Do not be very upright in your dealings for you would see by going to the forest that straight trees are cut down while crooked ones are left standing.

There was something undifferentiated and yet complete, which existed before Heaven and Earth. Soundless and formless, it depends on nothing and does not change. It operates everywhere and is free from danger. It may be considered the mother of the universe. I do not know its name; I call it Tao.

For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver.

Nature gives you the face you have at twenty; it is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.

What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

No traveler, whether a tree lover or not, will ever forget his first walk in a sugar-pine forest. The majestic crowns approaching one another make a glorious canopy, through the feathery arches of which the sunbeams pour, silvering the needles and gilding the stately columns and the ground into a scene of enchantment.

We do not learn; and what we call learning is only a process of recollection.

Base souls have no faith in great individuals.

Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.

Morality is the basis of things and truth is the substance of all morality.

The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.

It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the ‚Not Me,‘ that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, ‚Nature.‘

The formula ‚Two and two make five‘ is not without its attractions.

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

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.

A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.

They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice… that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.

If co-operation is a duty, I hold that non-co-operation also under certain conditions is equally a duty.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.

The law is reason, free from passion.

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.