Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.

It was morning; through the high window I saw the pure, bright blue of the sky as it hovered cheerfully over the long roofs of the neighboring houses. It too seemed full of joy, as if it had special plans, and had put on its finest clothes for the occasion.

Real beauty knocks you a little bit off kilter.

The Hindu religions gave me the impression of a vast well into which one plunges in order to grasp the reflection of the sun.

Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

Ordinary morality is innate in my view.

‚Tis better to bear the ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.

Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms – in themselves such judgments are stupidities.

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

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.

There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.

If it is surely the means to the highest end we know, can any work be humble or disgusting? Will it not rather be elevating as a ladder, the means by which we are translated?

The good is the beautiful.

Men always want and love when women wear tight and fitted clothing, right? And you’re like, ‚Wow, she looks so beautiful.‘ And then you have men who dress like slobs, and you’re like, ‚What’s the deal with these big and baggy suits.‘ It’s pretty ridiculous.

Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.

Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

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

My philosophy in life is, Decide what you want to do. You have to have something to hope for.

I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.

To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.

Nothing cannot exist forever.

I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.

I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.

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

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

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.

I’m getting a wrinkle above my eyebrow because I just can’t stop lifting it, and I love that you know.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge.

Virtue is relative to the actions and ages of each of us in all that we do.

The natural desire of good men is knowledge.

Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

You’re beautiful, like a May fly.

Sin cannot be conceived in a natural state, but only in a civil state, where it is decreed by common consent what is good or bad.

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

Thought is the parent of the deed.

I’m just glad I was able to return to some of that innocence and beauty I had as a child when I started my own family, and my children brought me back some of that spirit.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.

One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.

Is man one of God’s blunders? Or is God one of man’s blunders?

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

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.

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?

If life is a checker game, someone else is moving the pieces. It isn’t us. Don’t be surprised by amazing coincidences. There are no accidents. Consider, as I learned to do, the incredible interconnectedness of all of life.

‚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.

Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them.