More gold has been mined from the thoughts of men than has been taken from the earth.

Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.

The way of the Creative works through change and transformation, so that each thing receives its true nature and destiny and comes into permanent accord with the Great Harmony: this is what furthers and what perseveres.

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn’t wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.

Intuition and concepts constitute… the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.

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

Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past – whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.

It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

Advice in old age is foolish; for what can be more absurd than to increase our provisions for the road the nearer we approach to our journey’s end.

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

Law is mind without reason.

He who is not just is severe, he who is not wise is sad.

There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.

It is the superfluous things for which men sweat, – superfluous things that wear our togas theadbare, that force us to grow old in camp, that dash us upon foreign shores.

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

I’m grateful to intelligent people. That doesn’t mean educated. That doesn’t mean intellectual. I mean really intelligent. What black old people used to call ‚mother wit‘ means intelligence that you had in your mother’s womb. That’s what you rely on. You know what’s right to do.

The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.

And, after all, what is a lie? ‚Tis but the truth in a masquerade.

It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.

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.

People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Without feelings of respect, what is there to distinguish men from beasts?

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.

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

Where would I be without baseball? Who am I without baseball?

Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.

Philosophy begins in wonder.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.

Those whom the gods love grow young.

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.

Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.

To do nothing is also a good remedy.

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.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

My heroes don’t have anything special. They have something to tell other people but they don’t know how, so they talk to themselves.

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

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

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

Let me smile with the wise, and feed with the rich.

A sense is what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter, in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold.

Sometimes, I feel like one who is on the sidelines, who has missed life itself.

Whether if soul did not exist time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted, so that evidently there cannot be number; for number is either what has been, or what can be, counted.

I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

There is nothing insignificant in the world. It all depends on the point of view.

No law or ordinance is mightier than understanding.

However far back I go into my childhood, nothing seems to me more characteristic of, or more familiar in, my interior economy than the appetite or irresistible demand for some ‚Unique all-sufficing and necessary reality.‘

The man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for.

It is the eye of other people that ruin us. If I were blind I would want, neither fine clothes, fine houses or fine furniture.

I think the brain is essentially a computer and consciousness is like a computer program. It will cease to run when the computer is turned off. Theoretically, it could be re-created on a neural network, but that would be very difficult, as it would require all one’s memories.