Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

So many people live with anger and unforgiveness, and many of them are Christians.

To me, the extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way, and martial arts is nothing at all special; the closer to the true way of martial arts, the less wastage of expression there is.

A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.

The just is close to the people’s heart, but the merciful is close to the heart of God.

More gold has been mined from the thoughts of men than has been taken from the earth.

I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live as if there isn’t and to die to find out that there is.

Hatred is gained as much by good works as by evil.

If you’ve lost your spirit, even living in the richest country in the world can’t help you become rich.

We should never let material things get ahead of God or become so important in our lives that we can’t walk away from them if He tells us to. Anything you own that has a hold on you is a problem.

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

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

You don’t look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.

God didn’t make me to make movies, flex muscles, buy gold. What you love the most becomes your God… If I never make another dollar, my life is complete.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: ‚War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.‘

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Every day I pray about all I do.

Dear friends, we may well sing to our Beloved when it is near the time of our departure. It draws near, and as it approaches, we must not dread it, but rather thank God for it.

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.

The most effective prayers are usually the simple prayers.

I always want to listen to people and receive good criticism, but I just don’t have to answer to them; I have to answer to God.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

O‘ What may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side!

I remember how my mother would bring us to chapel on Sundays… and my father used to wait outside. One of the things that I picked up from my father and my mother was the sense that religion often gets in the way of God. For me, at least, it got in the way.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other organism does. That’s human nature.

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us.

I’m trying to make God more relevant in our society. And I think talking in everyday terms and making sure people can understand it – I think that’s important.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed was the ninth beatitude.

God is so big. It’s a gigantic concept in God. The idea that God might love us and be interested in us is kind of huge and gigantic, but we turn it, because we’re small-minded, into this tiny, petty, often greedy version of God, that is religion.

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

Knowledge which is divorced from justice, may be called cunning rather than wisdom.

To do a great right do a little wrong.

In times of need, God can come to you in a myriad of disguises.

I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.

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

I love being American, and I love family. I love having a family, and I feel so blessed, and I feel like God gave me exactly what I wanted, so now I have to do the right thing in God’s eyes also. Just follow what God wants me to do.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.

Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.

To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.

It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.

The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down.

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

Then not only custom, but also nature affirms that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice, and that justice is equality.

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

I have finally decided to write my book on the spiritual life. I mean to put down as simply as possible the sort of ascetical or mystical teaching that I have been living and preaching so long. I call it ‚Le Milieu Divin,‘ but I am being careful to include nothing esoteric and the minimum of explicit philosophy.

Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.

When the water starts boiling it is foolish to turn off the heat.

No one can live without relationship. You may withdraw into the mountains, become a monk, a sannyasi, wander off into the desert by yourself, but you are related. You cannot escape from that absolute fact. You cannot exist in isolation.

If co-operation is a duty, I hold that non-co-operation also under certain conditions is equally a duty.

Sin is geographical.