Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principle of morality.

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will’s freedom after it.

The highest proof of the spirit is love. Love the eternal thing which can already on earth possess as it really is.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.

The way is long if one follows precepts, but short… if one follows patterns.

Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, – till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.

Non-violence is the article of faith.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people’s minds.

Man’s greatness lies in his power of thought.

Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.

May you live your life as if the maxim of your actions were to become universal law.

I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

It is better to die than to preserve this life by incurring disgrace. The loss of life causes but a moment’s grief, but disgrace brings grief every day of one’s life.

I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong.

Then not only custom, but also nature affirms that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice, and that justice is equality.

There are few things more dishonorable than misleading the young.

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.

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

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

All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.

Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.

To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.

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

The lie is a condition of life.

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

All things in the world come from being. And being comes from non-being.

When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable thing possible: one thereby almost deserves to live.

The deed is everything, the glory is naught.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.

When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.

We’re all sinners. Everybody you meet all over the world is a sinner.

He who gives away shall have real gain. He who subdues himself shall be free; he shall cease to be a slave of passions. The righteous man casts off evil, and by rooting out lust, bitterness, and illusion do we reach Nirvana.

The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.

The Hindu religions gave me the impression of a vast well into which one plunges in order to grasp the reflection of the sun.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.

In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself – limits where minds meet, and in meeting, begin to exist.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

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?

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

You cannot make a sinner into a saint by killing him. He who does not live as a saint here will never live as a saint hereafter.

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

Heaven is long-enduring, and earth continues long. The reason why heaven and earth are able to endure and continue thus long is because they do not live of, or for, themselves.

To appreciate the noble is a gain which can never be torn from us.

Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

That government is best which governs least.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.

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.