Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

To witness two lovers is a spectacle for the gods.

Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light.

A women who doesn’t wear perfume has no future.

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

He that is giddy thinks the world turns round.

Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved.

It is not my nature, when I see a people borne down by the weight of their shackles – the oppression of tyranny – to make their life more bitter by heaping upon them greater burdens; but rather would I do all in my power to raise the yoke than to add anything that would tend to crush them.

Perhaps one of the most difficult things for us to do is to choose a notable and joyous dress for men. There would be more joy in life if we were to accustom ourselves to use all the beautiful colours we can in fashioning our own clothes.

Blushing is the color of virtue.

Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow.

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.

Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence.

A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.

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.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.

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.

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?

All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.

Trees go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!

As I approve of a youth that has something of the old man in him, so I am no less pleased with an old man that has something of the youth. He that follows this rule may be old in body, but can never be so in mind.

Know then this truth, enough for man to know virtue alone is happiness below.

Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.

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

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?

Man lives freely only by his readiness to die, if need be, at the hands of his brother, never by killing him.

There is a fundamental question we all have to face. How are we to live our lives; by what principles and moral values will we be guided and inspired?

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.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.

Before God we are all equally wise – and equally foolish.

I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.

Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.

I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.

Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.

If you do things, whether it’s acting or music or painting, do it without fear – that’s my philosophy. Because nobody can arrest you and put you in jail if you paint badly, so there’s nothing to lose.

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence.

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

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.

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

The lie is a condition of life.

Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

The great question of our time is, ‚Will we be motivated by materialistic philosophy or by spiritual power?‘

There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.

The way of the Creative works through change and transformation, so that each thing receives its true nature and destiny and comes into permanent accord with the Great Harmony: this is what furthers and what perseveres.

He that does good to another does good also to himself.