Everything that happens happens as it should, and if you observe carefully, you will find this to be so.

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

I don’t know how to function without music. When I’m not making it, I’m listening to it. It gives me courage and takes care of my mind.

I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms – in themselves such judgments are stupidities.

In Buddhism, we talk of meditation as an act of awakening, to be awake to the fact that the earth is in danger and living species are in danger.

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

Religions get lost as people do.

What then do you call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot of yourselves, without revelation, admit the existence within you of anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and thinking.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to recieve all the great truths which atheism would deny.

The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

It says nothing against the ripeness of a spirit that it has a few worms.

Pick the day. Enjoy it – to the hilt. The day as it comes. People as they come… The past, I think, has helped me appreciate the present – and I don’t want to spoil any of it by fretting about the future.

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.

States are not moral agents.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

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

Always say ‚yes‘ to the present moment… Surrender to what is. Say ‚yes‘ to life – and see how life starts suddenly to start working for you rather than against you.

O God, O God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

I never deny. I never contradict. I sometimes forget.

If you aren’t in the moment, you are either looking forward to uncertainty, or back to pain and regret.

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

Conservatism discards Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress; having rejected all respect for antiquity, it offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future.

Each day provides its own gifts.

A man watches his pear tree day after day, impatient for the ripening of the fruit. Let him attempt to force the process, and he may spoil both fruit and tree. But let him patiently wait, and the ripe pear at length falls into his lap.

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.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.

Everybody looks like clones and the only people you notice are my age. I don’t notice anybody unless they look great, and every now and again they do, and they are usually 70.

The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.

Never let yesterday use up too much of today.

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.

I thought I would try to be gay for a while, but I’m just more sexually attracted to women. But I’m really glad that I found a few gay friends, because it totally saved me from becoming a monk or something.

Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That’s the way the mind of man operates.

I think my worst problem is actually living in the moment and understanding everything that’s going on. I feel like I’m in my own bubble.

We should not fret for what is past, nor should we be anxious about the future; men of discernment deal only with the present moment.

I sometimes ask people, ‚Can you be aware of your own presence? Not the thoughts that you’re having, not the emotions that you’re having, but the very presence of your very being?‘ You become aware of your own presence by sensing the entire energy field in your body that is alive. And that is the totality of your presence.

Breathing in, I am aware of my heart. Breathing out, I smile to my heart and know that my heart still functions normally. I feel grateful for my heart.

If you understand the universe, you control it, in a way.

The most happy man is he who knows how to bring into relation the end and beginning of his life.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

Freedom is not given to us by anyone; we have to cultivate it ourselves. It is a daily practice… No one can prevent you from being aware of each step you take or each breath in and breath out.

A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.

No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?

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.

We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottage princes‘ palaces.

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.

The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be first to inquire diligently into the properties of things, and establishing those properties by experiments, and then to proceed more slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them.

Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.

The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.

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

Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.

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.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.