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.

A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.

I’m generous. I give good tips. It’s just – the way I live my life, ironically enough, is: I don’t want anything. I’m not a consumer. I don’t crave objects.

Money is a strange business. People who haven’t got it aim it strongly. People who have are full of troubles.

When I ask people to give, I can’t be on television if they don’t; I can’t help people, if I don’t – I mean, it takes money.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be named is not the eternal name. The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth; the Named is the mother of all things.

Facts are to the mind what food is to the body.

The truest wisdom is a resolute determination.

It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.

All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical part.

In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom; we have to say, Like People like Government.

Wise kings generally have wise counselors; and he must be a wise man himself who is capable of distinguishing one.

If you think dealing with issues like worthiness and authenticity and vulnerability are not worthwhile because there are more pressing issues, like the bottom line or attendance or standardized test scores, you are sadly, sadly mistaken. It underpins everything.

Necessity is the mistress and guide of nature. Necessity is the theme and inventress of nature, her curb and her eternal law.

When we think of the major threats to our national security, the first to come to mind are nuclear proliferation, rogue states and global terrorism. But another kind of threat lurks beyond our shores, one from nature, not humans – an avian flu pandemic.

Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt.

So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their ending!

It’s not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren’t doing.

Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right.

The dispersal of juniper seeds is effected by the plum and cherry plan of hiring birds at the cost of their board, and thus obtaining the use of a pair of extra good wings.

I have somewhere met with the epitaph on a charitable man which has pleased me very much. I cannot recollect the words, but here is the sense of it: ‚What I spent I lost; what I possessed is left to others; what I gave away remains with me.‘

An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and – since there is no other metaphor – also the soul.

There are no such things as Flowers there are only gladdened Leaves.

The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.

Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.

How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.

If you modestly enjoy your fame you are not unworthy to rank with the holy.

A great fortune is a great slavery.

Be careful to leave your sons well instructed rather than rich, for the hopes of the instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant.

Real living is living for others.

Wealth is not his that has it, but his that enjoys it.

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

Take time for all things: great haste makes great waste.

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.

Old age, believe me, is a good and pleasant thing. It is true you are gently shouldered off the stage, but then you are given such a comfortable front stall as spectator.

The extreme weakness of quantum gravitational effects now poses some philosophical problems; maybe nature is trying to tell us something new here: maybe we should not try to quantize gravity.

It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.

Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.

Europe became rich because it exploited Africa; and the Africans know that.

A man can take a little bourbon without getting drunk, but if you hold his mouth open and pour in a quart, he’s going to get sick on it.

The waving of a pine tree on the top of a mountain – a magic wand in Nature’s hand – every devout mountaineer knows its power; but the marvelous beauty value of what the Scotch call a breckan in a still dell, what poet has sung this?

Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?

What is a farm but a mute gospel?

The world, we are told, was made especially for man – a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God’s universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.

If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride.

Virtue is like a rich stone, best plain set.

It is better, of course, to know useless things than to know nothing.

There must be a reason why some people can afford to live well. They must have worked for it. I only feel angry when I see waste. When I see people throwing away things that we could use.

Successful people make money. It’s not that people who make money become successful, but that successful people attract money. They bring success to what they do.

Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.

If I see a mountain, I just pick up and hike it.

We are not cisterns made for hoarding, we are channels made for sharing.

No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.

Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.

You forget that the fruits belong to all and that the land belongs to no one.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, and of every good to man.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.