Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses.

I’m a strict, strict agnostic. It’s very different from a casual, ‚I don’t know.‘ It’s that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can’t present it as fact.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

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

You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause.

Life is warfare.

To appreciate the noble is a gain which can never be torn from us.

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.

We awaken in others the same attitude of mind we hold toward them.

Man – a being in search of meaning.

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

There is no such thing as justice in the abstract; it is merely a compact between men.

To know yet to think that one does not know is best; Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty.

The more you are talked about the less powerful you are.

My aim is to make the poor look rich and the rich look poor.

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.

Thomas Jefferson once said, ‚We should never judge a president by his age, only by his works.‘ And ever since he told me that, I stopped worrying.

I have all the emotions that everyone has; it just appears that I don’t.

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

No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.

To be is to do.

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

Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing.

The words of truth are always paradoxical.

Light troubles speak; the weighty are struck dumb.

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

They consider me to have sharp and penetrating vision because I see them through the mesh of a sieve.

All who think cannot but see there is a sanction like that of religion which binds us in partnership in the serious work of the world.

Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?

Heaven is long-enduring, and earth continues long. The reason why heaven and earth are able to endure and continue thus long is because they do not live of, or for, themselves.

No one can outrun death. It will catch up to all of us eventually.

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.

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

Wisdom alone is the science of other sciences.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

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.

I don’t have this feeling that 70 is really old.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.

Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.

Is the babe young? When I behold it, it seems more venerable than the oldest man.

We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.

Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.

If some years were added to my life, I would give fifty to the study of the Yi, and then I might come to be without great faults.

My greatest strength is common sense. I’m really a standard brand – like Campbell’s tomato soup or Baker’s chocolate.

The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

Men show their character in nothing more clearly than what they think laughable.

Nothing is so wretched or foolish as to anticipate misfortunes. What madness is it to be expecting evil before it comes.

Your philosophy determines whether you will go for the disciplines or continue the errors.

Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.

Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering.

People take the little bit of information they’re fed, and they draw a picture of who you are. Most of the time, it’s wrong.

I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.

‚Tis strange what a man may do, and a woman yet think him an angel.

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

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

Everything in excess is opposed to nature.