Who is the wisest man? He who neither knows or wishes for anything else than what happens.

Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that’s what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be named is not the eternal name. The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth; the Named is the mother of all things.

It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.

What really raises one’s indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.

What is the Tao Te Ching? Five hundred years before the birth of Jesus, a God-realized being named Lao-tzu in ancient China dictated 81 verses which are regarded by many as the ultimate commentary on the nature of existence.

Reality has a way of intruding. Reality eventually intrudes on everything.

Ultimately, education in its real sense is the pursuit of truth. It is an endless journey through knowledge and enlightenment.

Religion is the frozen thought of man out of which they build temples.

It is the nature of the wise to resist pleasures, but the foolish to be a slave to them.

Knowledge will give you power, but character respect.

Many receive advice, only the wise profit from it.

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

He who obtains has little. He who scatters has much.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life.

Let’s not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.

And I love that even in the toughest moments, when we’re all sweating it – when we’re worried that the bill won’t pass, and it seems like all is lost – Barack never lets himself get distracted by the chatter and the noise. Just like his grandmother, he just keeps getting up and moving forward… with patience and wisdom, and courage and grace.

Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.

You’re born. You suffer. You die. Fortunately, there’s a loophole.

Then not only an old man, but also a drunkard, becomes a second time a child.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.

There is not a more unhappy being than a superannuated idol.

Be content with what you are, and wish not change; nor dread your last day, nor long for it.

We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal’s ‚Pensees‘ and read, ‚I am the great silent spaces between worlds.‘

There are three methods to gaining wisdom. The first is reflection, which is the highest. The second is limitation, which is the easiest. The third is experience, which is the bitterest.

If you desire many things, many things will seem few.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

Silence is the mother of truth.

Wisdom allows nothing to be good that will not be so forever; no man to be happy but he that needs no other happiness than what he has within himself; no man to be great or powerful that is not master of himself.

The marvel of the Bhagavad-Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life’s wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion.

Whoever does not regard what he has as most ample wealth, is unhappy, though he be master of the world.

I don’t believe in death, neither in flesh nor in spirit.

Having a simple career as a musician who liked music was good enough for me.

He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.

What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?

What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

In God’s family, there are no outsiders, no enemies.

We should purify our innate well of contentment – what a wonderful expression – and then external things will be in harmony with us.

Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.

Say not, ‚I have found the truth,‘ but rather, ‚I have found a truth.‘

Who shall decide when doctors disagree, And soundest casuists doubt, like you and me?

You are the universe, you aren’t in the universe.

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.

The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about.

It says nothing against the ripeness of a spirit that it has a few worms.

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?

When a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark, you don’t throw away the ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer.

Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principle of morality.

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.

Religions get lost as people do.

Only those are fit to live who are not afraid to die.

Knowledge is power.