Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.

I don’t know if I particularly want to be remembered for anything. I personally do not think I’m a great gift to the world. I’ve been very fortunate.

If you have enough people sitting around telling you you’re wonderful, then you start believing you’re fabulous, then someone tells you you stink and you believe that too!

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.

I try to look on all the great things God’s done, and not focus on the negative. It’s a perspective.

Information is not knowledge.

The way you see people is the way you treat them, and the way you treat them is what they become.

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.

How we experience memory sometimes, it’s not linear. We’re not telling the stories to ourselves. We know the story; we’re just seeing it in flashes overlaid.

Some men see things as they are, and say why. I dream of things that never were, and say why not.

The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply.

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

Life is wasted on the living.

It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.

All men are equal before fish.

The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.

The proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.

I was never ignorant, as far as being experienced in classrooms and learning about different subjects and actually soaking it up, so I checked into college for a little bit. I took classes at a community college in West L.A. I took psychology, English, and philosophy.

It’s different from being 21 and you think there’s endless amount of opportunities. At 33, the ending is much, much closer.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

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

No one can be happy who has been thrust outside the pale of truth. And there are two ways that one can be removed from this realm: by lying, or by being lied to.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

You cannot step into the same river twice.

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

Everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.

Loving people live in a loving world. Hostile people live in a hostile world. Same world.

Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.

I like being able to be on the inside of music, rather than on the outside listening to it.

Man only likes to count his troubles, but he does not count his joys.

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.

We are not the sum of our possessions.

In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth – often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.

I don’t pretend to understand the Universe – it’s a great deal bigger than I am.

I want to do a certain thing in the world, and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.

I’ve always felt like there was a lot of hype around me even when there wasn’t. I felt like everyone was talking about me even when no one was talking about me.

It is not he who reviles or strikes you who insults you, but your opinion that these things are insulting.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

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

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

The good opinion of mankind, like the lever of Archimedes, with the given fulcrum, moves the world.

All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

There is a fundamental question we all have to face. How are we to live our lives; by what principles and moral values will we be guided and inspired?

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so.

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all.

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

I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.

All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.

I will never be an old man. To me, old age is always 15 years older than I am.

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

Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.

The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.