Chaos is inherent in all compounded things. Strive on with diligence.

But if nothing but soul, or in soul mind, is qualified to count, it is impossible for there to be time unless there is soul, but only that of which time is an attribute, i.e. if change can exist without soul.

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

One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes… and the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores the better.

Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God – but to create him.

God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

We often want one thing and pray for another, not telling the truth even to the gods.

Have you ever thought how humiliating and distressing it was to be placed upon a sphere? For friendship it is a boon never to be able to be further apart than the antipodes. But suppose that you are leaving together to go on and on; it is impossible. To go beyond a certain point is to return to where you began.

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

I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do.

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.

States are not moral agents.

The Tibetan people will need to determine who the next reincarnation of the Dalai Lama is.

Science is but an image of the truth.

Man’s true nature being lost, everything becomes his nature; as, his true good being lost, everything becomes his good.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!

Of those beings who live in ignorance, shut up and confined, as it were, in an egg, I have first broken the eggshell of ignorance and alone in the universe obtained the most exalted, universal Buddhahood.

Error is always more busy than truth.

No notice is taken of a little evil, but when it increases it strikes the eye.

There is nothing permanent except change.

I’m not a New Age person, but I do believe in meditation, and for that reason I’ve always liked the Buddhist religion. When I’ve been to Japan, I’ve been to Buddhist temples and meditated, and I found that rewarding.

Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the Infinite.

Man is unable to see himself entirely unrelated to mankind, neither is he able to see mankind unrelated to life, nor life unrelated to the universe.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.

It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself.

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.

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.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.

Non-violence, which is the quality of the heart, cannot come by an appeal to the brain.

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.

If every day you practice walking and sitting meditation and generate the energy of mindfulness and concentration and peace, you are a cell in the body of the new Buddha. This is not a dream but is possible today and tomorrow.

Only the ideas that we really live have any value.

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

To be is to do.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: ‚War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.‘

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

Life is wasted on the living.

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

It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.

You are the universe, you aren’t in the universe.

The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It’s a battle you can’t hope to win – it’s a battle that’s going to go on forever. It’s part of the human condition.

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

Man’s greatness lies in his power of thought.