Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action.

How great is the mystery of the first cells which were one day animated by the breath of our souls! How impossible to decipher the welding of successive influences in which we are forever incorporated! In each one of us, through matter, the whole history of the world is in part reflected.

Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age.

Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.

The fool wonders, the wise man asks.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Do not bite at the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath it.

The greater our knowledge increases the more our ignorance unfolds.

You know when you’re young and you see a play in high school, and the guys all have gray in their hair and they’re trying to be old men and they have no idea what that’s like? It’s just that stupid the other way around.

There is a fine balance between honoring the past and losing yourself in it. For example, you can acknowledge and learn from mistakes you made, and then move on and refocus on the now. It is called forgiving yourself.

The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

Concentrate your energies, your thoughts and your capital. The wise man puts all his eggs in one basket and watches the basket.

Why love if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore; only the life I have lived. The pain now is part of the happiness then.

After your death you will be what you were before your birth.

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.

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

I’ll die a crazy old man!

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

I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better.

People are more aware now of cities and of different ways of life. I suppose the writing I do is a bit in the past, and I’m not sure it’s the kind of writing I would do if I were starting now.

There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution.

No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.

Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.

I once did a three-hour interview with Radio Oxford only to be told the microphone hadn’t picked me up.

The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.

He that hath knowledge spareth his words.

All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.

In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.

If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.

Meditation is to get insight, to get understanding and compassion, and when you have them, you are compelled to act.

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

The marvel of the Bhagavad-Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life’s wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion.

Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.

Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.

Old age is just a record of one’s whole life.

The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.

Is man one of God’s blunders? Or is God one of man’s blunders?

Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage.

Education is the best friend. An educated person is respected everywhere. Education beats the beauty and the youth.

Personal success or personal satisfaction are not worth another thought if one does achieve them, or worth worrying about if they evade one or are slow in coming. All that is really worth while is action – faithful action, for the world, and in God.

He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.

Admiration is the daughter of ignorance.

The higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him.

Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.

Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.

Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain – and most fools do.

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

I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.

It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.

What’s done can’t be undone.

Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.

But if nothing but soul, or in soul mind, is qualified to count, it is impossible for there to be time unless there is soul, but only that of which time is an attribute, i.e. if change can exist without soul.