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

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

All things in the world come from being. And being comes from non-being.

Happiness is a ball after which we run wherever it rolls, and we push it with our feet when it stops.

There’s an ecstatic side to writing. It’s like jazz. It just has a life.

I was inspired to spend an entire year – my 65th year – reading, researching, and meditating on Lao-tzu’s messages, practicing them and ultimately writing down these insights as I felt Lao-tzu wanted us to know them.

Forever is composed of nows.

Get up tomorrow early in the morning, and earlier than you did today, and do the best that you can. Always stay near me, for tomorrow I will have much to do and more than I ever had, and tomorrow blood will leave my body above the breast.

For my own part, I would rather excel in knowledge of the highest secrets of philosophy than in arms.

I’ve actually not read any books on time management.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed was the ninth beatitude.

Writing is fun – at least mostly. I write for four hours every day. After that I go running. As a rule, 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). That’s easy to manage.

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.

Only the ideas that we really live have any value.

You’re born. You suffer. You die. Fortunately, there’s a loophole.

How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.

Life is not a spectator sport. If you’re going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, in my opinion you’re wasting your life.

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

Without discipline, there’s no life at all.

Philosophy is common sense with big words.

They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice… that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.

One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

Moderation is the key so I work certain amount of time and then I take a certain amount of time off.

Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing losses on.

For me life is continuously being hungry. The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer.

I’d have to be superman to do some of the things I’m supposed to have done, I’ve been at six different places at six different times.

Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.

Get action. Seize the moment. Man was never intended to become an oyster.

There is no waste of time in life like that of making explanations.

The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?

I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think.

I feel a distaste for hunting, first because of a kind of Buddhist respect for the unity and sacredness of all life, and also because the pursuit of a hare or chamois strikes me as a kind of ‚escape of energy,‘ that is, the expenditure of our effort in an illusory end, one devoid of profit.

I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?

The best workers, like the happiest livers, look upon their work as a kind of game: the harder they play the more enjoyable it becomes.

Employ thy time well, if thou meanest to gain leisure.

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.

He not busy being born is busy dying.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.

As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into Heaven, into Hell.

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.

A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.

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

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.

Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.

I never look at my watch when I’m sketching!

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.

When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt.

Nothing can come of nothing.