If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me.

When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.

We are rarely proud when we are alone.

The empty vessel makes the loudest sound.

Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.

Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.

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.

I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.

No group and no government can properly prescribe precisely what should constitute the body of knowledge with which true education is concerned.

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

The longer I live, the more I feel that true repose consists in ‚renouncing‘ one’s own self, by which I mean making up one’s mind to admit that there is no importance whatever in being ‚happy‘ or ‚unhappy‘ in the usual meaning of the words.

Truth is a good dog; but always beware of barking too close to the heels of an error, lest you get your brains kicked out.

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

What is the Tao Te Ching? Five hundred years before the birth of Jesus, a God-realized being named Lao-tzu in ancient China dictated 81 verses which are regarded by many as the ultimate commentary on the nature of existence.

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

A man’s as miserable as he thinks he is.

Each life makes its own immitation of immortality.

Small is the number of people who see with their eyes and think with their minds.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

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

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

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

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

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty – his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.

Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.

Let it be your constant method to look into the design of people’s actions, and see what they would be at, as often as it is practicable; and to make this custom the more significant, practice it first upon yourself.

The only objects of practical reason are therefore those of good and evil. For by the former is meant an object necessarily desired according to a principle of reason; by the latter one necessarily shunned, also according to a principle of reason.

The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.

It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death.

No obligation to do the impossible is binding.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.

Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons.

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

It’s the philosophies of being an athlete that carry me today.

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause.

Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms – in themselves such judgments are stupidities.

No one is laughable who laughs at himself.

Information is not knowledge.

The uncertainty of parenting can bring up feelings in us that range from frustration to terror.

To see and listen to the wicked is already the beginning of wickedness.

Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness.

The false is nothing but an imitation of the true.

I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

Ironically, parenting is a shame and judgment minefield precisely because most of us are wading through uncertainty and self-doubt when it comes to raising our children.

A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.

The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.

For me, time is the greatest mystery of all. The fact is that we’re dreaming all the time. That’s what really gets me. We have a fathomless lake of unconsciousness just beneath our skulls.

‚Evil men have no songs.‘ How is it that the Russians have songs?

It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‚try to be a little kinder.‘