And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.

Man takes his law from the Earth; the Earth takes its law from Heaven; Heaven takes its law from the Tao. The law of the Tao is its being what it is.

Just as treasures are uncovered from the earth, so virtue appears from good deeds, and wisdom appears from a pure and peaceful mind. To walk safely through the maze of human life, one needs the light of wisdom and the guidance of virtue.

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

Love, we say, is life; but love without hope and faith is agonizing death.

As long as you know men are like children, you know everything!

As long as your body is healthy and under control and death is distant, try to save your soul; when death is immanent what can you do?

Questions are never indiscreet, answers sometimes are.

Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.

Courage is knowing what not to fear.

To go to the world below, having a soul which is like a vessel full of injustice, is the last and worst of all the evils.

Never go to excess, but let moderation be your guide.

Having nothing, nothing can he lose.

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one’s weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.

I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.

Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.

The first duty of government is to see that people have food, fuel, and clothes. The second, that they have means of moral and intellectual education.

Let him that is without stone among you cast the first thing he can lay his hands on.

Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.

Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.

Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

Our life is made by the death of others.

He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason.

I have no desire to crow over anybody or to see anybody eating crow, figuratively or otherwise. We should all get together and make a country in which everybody can eat turkey whenever he pleases.

I have gained this from philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.

Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.

Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is Enlightenment.

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

Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

The life so short, the craft so long to learn.

The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.

The way is long if one follows precepts, but short… if one follows patterns.

When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.

I am not young enough to know everything.

Wise kings generally have wise counselors; and he must be a wise man himself who is capable of distinguishing one.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

Being at ease with not knowing is crucial for answers to come to you.

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.

Nature abhors annihilation.

In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.

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

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

It is better to die than to preserve this life by incurring disgrace. The loss of life causes but a moment’s grief, but disgrace brings grief every day of one’s life.

I really believe in the philosophy that you create your own universe. I’m just trying to create a good one for myself.

Many men have been capable of doing a wise thing, more a cunning thing, but very few a generous thing.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

We usually lose today, because there has been a yesterday, and tomorrow is coming.

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

It is only to the individual that a soul is given.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

Our philosophy is that we care about people first.

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

This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.

Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again.