If a man loses his reverence for any part of life, he will lose his reverence for all of life.

I think everyone should approach relationships from the perspective of playing it straight and giving someone the benefit of the doubt. Until he establishes that this is a game. And if it’s a game, you need to win. The best thing to do is just walk away from the table.

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

If I’m a star, then the people made me a star.

We forge the chains we wear in life.

I joyfully hasten to meet death. If it come before I have had opportunity to develop all my artistic faculties, it will come, my hard fate notwithstanding, too soon, and I should probably wish it later – yet even then I shall be happy, for will it not deliver me from a state of endless suffering?

One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people’s minds.

We do not learn; and what we call learning is only a process of recollection.

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

Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.

Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

I’m never a reliable narrator, unbiased or objective.

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

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

People don’t realize that we, we meaning people in show business, have the same problems as everyone else. Money doesn’t change that. Fame doesn’t change that. Sometimes that brings on more problems. You know, it’s just a different kind of problems.

Man takes his law from the Earth; the Earth takes its law from Heaven; Heaven takes its law from the Tao. The law of the Tao is its being what it is.

Reverence for life is the highest court of appeal.

The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

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.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.

What if nothing exists and we’re all in somebody’s dream?

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.

Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.

Life begins on the other side of despair.

So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.

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

Modesty forbids what the law does not.

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.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

Had I pursued my education long enough to learn all the conventional dos and don’ts of starting a business, I often wonder how different my life and career might have been.

To some extent I liken slavery to death.

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.

Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence.

Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

There is a ‚sanctity‘ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.

Fear is the mother of morality.

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

Temperance is a mean with regard to pleasures.

Let parents bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence.

Man is made to adore and to obey: but if you will not command him, if you give him nothing to worship, he will fashion his own divinities, and find a chieftain in his own passions.

Bread without flesh is a good diet, as on many botanical excursions I have proved. Tea also may easily be ignored. Just bread and water and delightful toil is all I need – not unreasonably much, yet one ought to be trained and tempered to enjoy life in these brave wilds in full independence of any particular kind of nourishment.

Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls.

To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else’s type of thinking.

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for that one.

Our words will either bring life and victory or death and destruction. If we want to be happy, we have to be serious about speaking words of life that line up with God’s Word.

We all get weary sometimes, and we tend to think that life is what makes us weary.

Is everything funny? For me, yes. There’s a positive to every negative. Even my divorce? For me, yes. If you go back and look at it, why it happened or how it happened, there’s something in there that’ll make you laugh.

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.

I do not like the man who squanders life for fame; give me the man who living makes a name.

In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.

The bottom line is that everyone thinks differently.

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

I strongly believe that missionaries make better products. They care more. For a missionary, it’s not just about the business. There has to be a business, and the business has to make sense, but that’s not why you do it. You do it because you have something meaningful that motivates you.

Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable longing to see the truth.