I did used to have nightmares about the idea that when I die, there is a spark of consciousness which basically creates the world. ‚Is the world going to disappear if this spark of consciousness disappears? And how do I know it won’t? How do I know there’s anything there except what I’m conscious of?‘

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

When you give, it comes back to you.

Appearance is something absolute, but reality is not that way – everything is interdependent, not absolute.

If you do not conquer self, you will be conquered by self.

All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well.

Many a man thinks he is patient when, in reality, he is indifferent.

I will not be concerned at other men’s not knowing me; I will be concerned at my own want of ability.

What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.

I used to have nightmares that they would put ‚He played Ted‘ on my tombstone.

I find with most of my readers are kind of like me, sort of people who were a little bit naive in life and then learned the hard way that this is what’s going on, the political games and most of my readers write to me telling me that the book helped them open their eyes to what other people are doing to them.

He who falls in love with himself will have no rivals.

Man is unable to see himself entirely unrelated to mankind, neither is he able to see mankind unrelated to life, nor life unrelated to the universe.

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.

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

Only the shallow know themselves.

You have to just make the choices you make in life. I made the choices I made because I believed they were right for me.

I am tough, but deep inside my toughness, I like to let people know I’m an old-fashioned mama’s boy.

Justice… is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed.

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.

I don’t suffer of anything that I’ve lost.

Base souls have no faith in great individuals.

Find out who you are. And do it on purpose.

A man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself.

Men would be angels, angels would be gods.

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.

The future is called ‚perhaps‘, which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.

Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong, but just to watch it and move with it. In that watching, you begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling. And out of this awareness comes silence.

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.

There’s a deceptive sin that can keep us from walking in love: pride. It’s deceptive because when you have pride, you’re usually too proud to admit it. I know this because I used to have teachings on pride and they didn’t sell well.

I can tell you all kinds of moral tales, but fashion and reality are vaguely different.

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

You’re born. You suffer. You die. Fortunately, there’s a loophole.

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

Cowardice… is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.

Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.

My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when – and he won’t necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.

Who would set a limit to the mind of man? Who would dare assert that we know all there is to be known?

I know what I believe, I know what I want to do, and I’m just comfortable saying it, and laying it out there.

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.

Non-violence is the article of faith.

Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.

That deep emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.

Death obsesses me, yes it does. I can’t really understand why it doesn’t obsess everyone – I think it does really, I’m just a little more out about it.

If you abandon the present moment, you cannot live the moments of your daily life deeply.

He who knows himself is enlightened.

I’m crazy, but I’m not too crazy.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

I’m not convinced that women have the education or the sense of their own history enough or that they understand the cruelty of which men are capable and the delight that many men will take in seeing you choose to chain yourself – then they get to say ‚See, you did it yourself.‘

There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.

We are braver and wiser because they existed, those strong women and strong men… We are who we are because they were who they were. It’s wise to know where you come from, who called your name.

There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome; to be got over.

I can be a cruel person.

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

I’m an idealist without illusions.

It is not like I have gone crazy, I just don’t want to take any chances. You never know what could happen.

If the people are happy, united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the rest. We conclude that to be good from whence good is derived.