Error is always more busy than truth.

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

Thus so wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness… and so frivolous is he that, though full of a thousand reasons for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billiards or hitting a ball, is sufficient enough to amuse him.

I have lived long enough both in years and in accomplishments.

Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.

The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.

Man has throughout the ages been seeking something beyond himself, beyond material welfare – something we call truth or God or reality, a timeless state – something that cannot be disturbed by circumstances, by thought or by human corruption.

If you have the insight of non-self, if you have the insight of impermanence, you should make that insight into a concentration that you keep alive throughout the day. Then what you say, what you think, and what you do will then be in the light of that wisdom and you will avoid making mistakes and creating suffering.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

I argue thee that love is life. And life hath immortality.

I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom.

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

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

The Tao teaches us not to intervene and interfere. The things we love we have to learn to leave alone. And the people we love we have to learn to let them be.

When you give, it comes back to you.

I have just got a new theory of eternity.

I don’t pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.

He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

Therefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics.

Men’s ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.

We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.

Better than a thousand hollow words, is one word that brings peace.

Never give a sword to a man who can’t dance.

Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

To know what you know and what you do not know, that is true knowledge.

The truth is lived, not taught.

Reality is a sliding door.

I am not young enough to know everything.

There are lies, damned lies and statistics.

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.

And I love that even in the toughest moments, when we’re all sweating it – when we’re worried that the bill won’t pass, and it seems like all is lost – Barack never lets himself get distracted by the chatter and the noise. Just like his grandmother, he just keeps getting up and moving forward… with patience and wisdom, and courage and grace.

Half a truth is often a great lie.

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

Half a truth is better than no politics.

We’re all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

How could man rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of men?

The object of the superior man is truth.

Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.

Platitudes? Yes, there are platitudes. Platitudes are there because they are true.

We cannot conceive of matter being formed of nothing, since things require a seed to start from… Therefore there is not anything which returns to nothing, but all things return dissolved into their elements.

Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

We moralize among ruins.

If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.

Ordinary morality is innate in my view.

I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.

Any man is liable to err, only a fool persists in error.

There can be no greater error than to expect, or calculate, upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard.

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

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

I went into the business for the money, and the art grew out of it. If people are disillusioned by that remark, I can’t help it. It’s the truth.

Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.

What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.

Build a man a fire, and he’ll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.

The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.