Misfortune seldom intrudes upon the wise man; his greatest and highest interests are directed by reason throughout the course of life.

When you have nobody you can make a cup of tea for, when nobody needs you, that’s when I think life is over.

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.

There is no sin except stupidity.

If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go.

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

I would fain grow old learning many things.

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.

A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.

When you look at the sun during your walking meditation, the mindfulness of the body helps you to see that the sun is in you; without the sun there is no life at all and suddenly you get in touch with the sun in a different way.

Singleness of purpose is one of the chief essentials for success in life, no matter what may be one’s aim.

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

Death is a fearful thing.

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed was the ninth beatitude.

We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.

In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.

We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.

All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

Everything that happens happens as it should, and if you observe carefully, you will find this to be so.

No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

If you want to gather honey, don’t kick over the beehive.

Even death is not to be feared by one who has lived wisely.

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.

Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth.

I can tell you, honest friend, what to believe: believe life; it teaches better that book or orator.

Life is an ordeal, albeit an exciting one, but I wouldn’t trade it for the good old days of poverty and obscurity.

My company survives because I’ve learned to respect the ideas of people younger than me and recognize when my wisdom is obsolete.

Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Reality is a sliding door.

I love Notting Hill and Westbourne Grove – there is so much life and vitality around Portobello and Ladbroke Grove. It has come up a lot since I started Virgin more than 40 years ago, but there is so much character.

We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.

There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.

Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt.

There is no wealth but life.

I do not concern myself with gods and spirits either good or evil nor do I serve any.

Courage is knowing what not to fear.

Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.

It is through gratitude for the present moment that the spiritual dimension of life opens up.

The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries.

Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses.

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

Better a little which is well done, than a great deal imperfectly.

As a single withered tree, if set aflame, causes a whole forest to burn, so does a rascal son destroy a whole family.

Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego’s fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life.

I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active – not more happy – nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.

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

All things in the world come from being. And being comes from non-being.

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.