What’s the good of drawing in the next breath if all you do is let it out and draw in another?

Know your worth! People always act like they’re doing more for you than you’re doing for them.

It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.

I’m not intelligent. I’m not arrogant. I’m just like the people who read my books. I used to have a jazz club, and I made the cocktails and I made the sandwiches. I didn’t want to become a writer – it just happened.

Most humans are never fully present in the now, because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one. But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

If I forget to pray, I can’t get through the day without snapping at people.

I don’t think I’m such an amazing person who needs to be written about.

Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation.

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.

There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.

In a controversy the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.

We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?

Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

You may be able to read Bernard Shaw’s plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?

Fear is the mother of morality.

No man who worships education has got the best out of education… Without a gentle contempt for education no man’s education is complete.

Only the really plain people know about love – the very fascinating ones try so hard to create an impression that they soon exhaust their talents.

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

In golf, the player, coach and official are rolled into one, and they overlap completely. Golf really is the best microcosm of life – or at least the way life should be.

He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

I love to sit and eat quietly and enjoy each bite, aware of the presence of my community, aware of all the hard and loving work that has gone into my food.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings – words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.

Forward, as occasion offers. Never look round to see whether any shall note it… Be satisfied with success in even the smallest matter, and think that even such a result is no trifle.

Who had deceived thee so often as thyself?

I spent most of the early years of my walk with God focused on what was wrong with me. Most of us probably do that, hoping to change ourselves.

The best part about being in your thirties is you know what works for you.

When you take your attention into the present moment, a certain alertness arises. You become more conscious of what’s around you, but also, strangely, a sense of presence that is both within and without.

The greatest pride, or the greatest despondency, is the greatest ignorance of one’s self.

It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved.

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

I was ill, and everyone could see it but me.

If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me.

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight.

The truth is something that burns. It burns off dead wood. And people don’t like having the dead wood burnt off, often because they’re 95 percent dead wood.

What a terrible thing to have lost one’s mind. Or not to have a mind at all. How true that is.

I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.

Many a man thinks he is buying pleasure, when he is really selling himself to it.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

I never knew a more presumptuous person than myself. The fact that I say that shows that what I say is true.

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

You are a child of the sun, you come from the sun, and that is something true with the Earth also… your relationship with the Earth is so deep, and the Earth is in you and this is something not very difficult, much less difficult then philosophy.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

When it comes to social media, there are just times I turn off the world, you know. There are just some times you have to give yourself space to be quiet, which means you’ve got to set those phones down.

I have great respect for the past. If you don’t know where you’ve come from, you don’t know where you’re going. I have respect for the past, but I’m a person of the moment. I’m here, and I do my best to be completely centered at the place I’m at, then I go forward to the next place.

I try not to think about anything special while running. As a matter of fact, I usually run with my mind empty. However, when I run empty-minded, something naturally and abruptly crawls in sometime. That might become an idea that can help me with my writing.

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it’s a drag? But you see, that’s what people do.

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

The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.

Ignorant people see life as either existence or non-existence, but wise men see it beyond both existence and non-existence to something that transcends them both; this is an observation of the Middle Way.