The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.

It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory.

We should not look down on our first ancestors.

Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

Things in themselves have no life in them. A car can’t comfort or encourage you. A house means nothing if there’s no life and love inside.

If a man loses his reverence for any part of life, he will lose his reverence for all of life.

No boxer in the history of boxing has had Parkinson’s. There’s no injury in my brain that suggests that the illness came from boxing.

We do not know what is really good or bad fortune.

There’s a tremendous gap between public opinion and public policy.

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

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.

Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.

Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet.

The wise man does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life – knowing that under certain conditions it is not worthwhile to live.

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

After your death you will be what you were before your birth.

Issues are never simple. One thing I’m proud of is that very rarely will you hear me simplify the issues.

How can one preach goodness and love to men without at the same time offering them an interpretation of the World that justifies this goodness and this love?

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.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things.

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

What we achieved was a nuclear pause, not a nuclear halt.

I don’t think that faith, whatever you’re being faithful about, really can be scientifically explained. And I don’t want to explain this whole life business through truth, science. There’s so much mystery. There’s so much awe.

A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us.

Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.

Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.

Although the big word on the left is ‚compassion,‘ the big agenda on the left is dependency.

Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

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

As soon as I arrived in the Indies, in the first island which I found, I took some of the natives by force, in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts. And so it was that they soon understood us, and we them, either by speech or by signs, and they have been very serviceable.

I still think like a Marxist in many ways.

Forever is composed of nows.

Men would be angels, angels would be gods.

Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

You may not always have a comfortable life and you will not always be able to solve all of the world’s problems at once but don’t ever underestimate the importance you can have because history has shown us that courage can be contagious and hope can take on a life of its own.

Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.

What do you want a meaning for? Life is a desire, not a meaning.

All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small.

If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.

America has fought five wars since 1945 and has gained its objectives in only one of them, the Gulf War.

All truth is simple… is that not doubly a lie?

Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.

There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge – that is everywhere.

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

America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.

We do not need to proselytise either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study.

It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving – as if it were an individual person – its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

Fear is the mother of morality.

Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.

No obligation to do the impossible is binding.

Some may remember, if you have good memories, that there used to be a concept in Anglo-American law called a presumption of innocence, innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Now that’s so deep in history that there’s no point even bringing it up, but it did once exist.

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

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.

To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low.