Misfortune seldom intrudes upon the wise man; his greatest and highest interests are directed by reason throughout the course of life.

Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.

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.

Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.

Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.

I don’t pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.

We should all start to live before we get too old.

All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green.

Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.

Although the life of a person is in a land full of thorns and weeds, there is always a space in which the good seed can grow. You have to trust God.

The important question is not, what will yield to man a few scattered pleasures, but what will render his life happy on the whole amount.

Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering – and it’s all over much too soon.

To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.

If you don’t live your life, then who will?

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

O wise man! Give your wealth only to the worthy and never to others. The water of the sea received by the clouds is always sweet.

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

No one ever teaches well who wants to teach, or governs well who wants to govern.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight… the truly wise person is colorblind.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.

Ignorant people see life as either existence or non-existence, but wise men see it beyond both existence and non-existence to something that transcends them both; this is an observation of the Middle Way.

When a man bleeds inwardly, it is a dangerous thing for himself; but when he laughs inwardly, it bodes no good to other people.

Life can be boring unless you put some effort into it.

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.

The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice.

All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

I was bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led, and bearding every authority which stood in their way.

To know what you know and what you do not know, that is true knowledge.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.

Our life is what our thoughts make it.

All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.

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

Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.

Life is either a great adventure or nothing.

Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.

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

The utmost extent of man’s knowledge, is to know that he knows nothing.

Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.

He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.

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

Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.

Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.

I give the name of cosmic sense to the more or less confused affinity that binds us psychologically to the All which envelops us. The existence of this feeling is indubitable, and apparently as old as the beginning of thought… The cosmic sense must have been born as soon as man found himself facing the forest, the sea and the stars.

I’ve been afraid of people playing their life away with too many toys.

I do think there must be some kind of interaction between your living life and the life that goes on from here.

In such a porcelain life, one likes to be sure that all is well lest one stumble upon one’s hopes in a pile of broken crockery.

As a general rule, the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information.

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

The less you know, the more you believe.

My theory is 98 percent of all human endeavor is killing time.

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.