If you pursue good with labor, the labor passes away but the good remains; if you pursue evil with pleasure, the pleasure passes away and the evil remains.

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

Life is a journey. When we stop, things don’t go right.

I’ve done everything I wanted to do, even if I have had to pay a very high price – which has been the case most of the time.

The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

Baseball is like a poker game. Nobody wants to quit when he’s losing; nobody wants you to quit when you’re ahead.

I do the very best I know how – the very best I can; and I mean to keep on doing so until the end.

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.

Your attitude towards failure determines your altitude after failure.

Rules are not necessarily sacred, principles are.

Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity.

Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments.

In all my work, I try to say – ‚You may be given a load of sour lemons, why not try to make a dozen lemon meringue pies?‘

No one lives long enough to learn everything they need to learn starting from scratch. To be successful, we absolutely, positively have to find people who have already paid the price to learn the things that we need to learn to achieve our goals.

There is no darkness but ignorance.

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

Necessity never made a good bargain.

Endurance is patience concentrated.

We are not the sum of our possessions.

He that speaks much, is much mistaken.

I have to practice to be good at guitar. I have to write 100 songs before you write the first good one.

A man is not finished when he is defeated. He is finished when he quits.

Small amounts of philosophy lead to atheism, but larger amounts bring us back to God.

In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.

If God treats you well by teaching you a disastrous lesson, you never forget it.

It sounds simple telling people to work hard and never quit, but to really execute and demonstrate those principles takes discipline and faith. Those are the two factors that I believe separate the good from the great, the successes from the failures.

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

Wishful thinking is not idealism. It is self-indulgence at best and self-exaltation at worst. In either case, it is usually at the expense of others. In other words, it is the opposite of idealism.

The brain is wider than the sky.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Fools admire, but men of sense approve.

I will do this job as long as I feel that I can do it full steam.

Whatever you want to do, do with full passion and work really hard towards it. Don’t look anywhere else. There will be a few distractions, but if you can be true to yourself, you will be successful for sure.

When something an affliction happens to you, you either let it defeat you, or you defeat it.

Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.

It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.

One thing Britons have always been celebrated for, and that is being able to stick it out in a tight place.

The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it: so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it.

It is not well to make great changes in old age.

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven’t and don’t.

Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.

I wanted to write when I was young, but people said it was impossible. Then my parents locked me in a mental institution – they said I was crazy and would never make a living from writing.

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

It doesn’t matter if the water is cold or warm if you’re going to have to wade through it anyway.

I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.

If you understand the universe, you control it, in a way.

I was inspired to spend an entire year – my 65th year – reading, researching, and meditating on Lao-tzu’s messages, practicing them and ultimately writing down these insights as I felt Lao-tzu wanted us to know them.

Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men.

If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.

I firmly believe that unless one has tasted the bitter pill of failure, one cannot aspire enough for success.

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.

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

Life is warfare.

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.

My mother used to tell me man gives the award, God gives the reward. I don’t need another plaque.

Fear is the mother of morality.

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

Cunning… is but the low mimic of wisdom.