Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

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.

There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.

Different men seek after happiness in different ways and by different means, and so make for themselves different modes of life and forms of government.

The love of economy is the root of all virtue.

‚Pure experience‘ is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.

How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?

It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other.

To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

A man’s felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessing of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt.

This is the truth: as from a fire aflame thousands of sparks come forth, even so from the Creator an infinity of beings have life and to him return again.

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

Atheism shows strength of mind, but only to a certain degree.

The empty vessel makes the loudest sound.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms.

Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.

I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

Heaven is long-enduring, and earth continues long. The reason why heaven and earth are able to endure and continue thus long is because they do not live of, or for, themselves.

The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.

To free a person from error is to give, and not to take away.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Religions get lost as people do.

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

If we do discover a complete theory, it should be in time understandable in broad principle by everyone. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people be able to take part in the discussion of why we and the universe exist.

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.

Sincere words are not fine; fine words are not sincere.

To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don’t be.

Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.

If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.

It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.

As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you’re going to say, ‚Where did we come from, what happens next?‘ The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

One who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

The act of dying is one of the acts of life.

To me, the extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way, and martial arts is nothing at all special; the closer to the true way of martial arts, the less wastage of expression there is.

If anyone offers conjectures about the truth of things from the mere possibility of hypotheses, I do not see by what stipulation anything certain can be determined in any science, since one or another set of hypotheses may always be devised which will appear to supply new difficulties.

I want to do a certain thing in the world, and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.

A beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not.

Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.

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.

Death to me means nothing as long as I can die fast.

Colleges are like old-age homes, except for the fact that more people die in colleges.

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.

Who would ever think that so much went on in the soul of a young girl?

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.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.

The good is the beautiful.