He who has made a fair compact with poverty is rich.

Justice is a temporary thing that must at last come to an end; but the conscience is eternal and will never die.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

There is nothing permanent except change.

I don’t believe in death, neither in flesh nor in spirit.

I do not know whether there are gods, but there ought to be.

If some years were added to my life, I would give fifty to the study of the Yi, and then I might come to be without great faults.

God is a concept by which we measure our pain.

‚Tis better to bear the ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.

My philosophy is simple: It’s a down-home, common, horse-sense approach to things.

The earth is supported by the power of truth; it is the power of truth that makes the sun shine and the winds blow; indeed all things rest upon truth.

Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

The poorest people are the sweetest people.

What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?

The desire to annoy no one, to harm no one, can equally well be the sign of a just as of an anxious disposition.

You could not step twice into the same rivers; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.

It’s very difficult for the American people to believe that our government, one of the richest on Earth, is also one of the stingiest on Earth.

Ordinary morality is innate in my view.

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

I put Catholic guilt to work pretty good for a rich rock star.

People look to time in expectation that it will eventually make them happy, but you cannot find true happiness by looking toward the future.

It’s really easy to have a nice philosophy about openness, but moving the world in that direction is a different thing. It requires both understanding where you want to go and being pragmatic about getting there.

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.

We will not be intimidated or pushed off the world stage by people who do not like what we stand for, and that is, freedom, democracy and the fight against disease, poverty and terrorism.

God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature (which is the proper object of philosophy) is the way to elevate one’s gaze.

Everything is the product of one universal creative effort. There is nothing dead in Nature. Everything is organic and living, and therefore the whole world appears to be a living organism.

Man falls from the pursuit of the ideal of plan living and high thinking the moment he wants to multiply his daily wants. Man’s happiness really lies in contentment.

Ignorant people see life as either existence or non-existence, but wise men see it beyond both existence and non-existence to something that transcends them both; this is an observation of the Middle Way.

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever – this is a somewhat new kind of religion.

To know yet to think that one does not know is best; Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the Infinite.

When I was very young I was sort of floored by the fact that my mother and my father and everyone I knew was going to die one day, and myself too. I had a sort of a philosophical crisis. I couldn’t believe that we were mortal.

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.

You just have to have a simple faith.

Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?

No one is so miserable as the poor person who maintains the appearance of wealth.

I can understand wanting to have millions of dollars; there’s a certain freedom, meaningful freedom, that comes with that.

This is the moment when we must build on the wealth that open markets have created, and share its benefits more equitably. Trade has been a cornerstone of our growth and global development. But we will not be able to sustain this growth if it favors the few, and not the many.

Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.

The Hindu religions gave me the impression of a vast well into which one plunges in order to grasp the reflection of the sun.

A man’s felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessing of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.

No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.

The state comes into existence for the sake of life and continues to exist for the sake of good life.

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!

Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.

I have gained this from philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.

I can do no other than be reverent before everything that is called life. I can do no other than to have compassion for all that is called life. That is the beginning and the foundation of all ethics.

In a way, the whole tangible universe itself is a vast residue, a skeleton of countless lives that have germinated in it and have left it, leaving behind them only a trifling, infinitesimal part of their riches.

We are never further from what we wish than when we believe that we have what we wished for.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

Investing for the poor requires participation from the entire community.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

An overflow of good converts to bad.

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.