There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.

Feeling like you’re respected among the people who do the same thing you do is incredible and necessary.

Non-violence and truth are inseparable and presuppose one another.

To be idle is a short road to death and to be diligent is a way of life; foolish people are idle, wise people are diligent.

The wisest hustler can suddenly fall for the worst tramp and lose all of his money on her. The hustler is aware of his own weaknesses and openings to con. This awareness is his edge.

Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.

True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.

The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.

Knowledge and human power are synonymous.

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.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.

Happiness is within the reach of everyone, rich or poor. Yet comparatively few people are happy. I believe the reason for this is that the majority don’t recognize happiness even when it is within their grasp.

Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms – in themselves such judgments are stupidities.

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.

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

He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts.

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.

The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?

It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.

No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.

What a heavy burden is a name that has become too famous.

Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing losses on.

A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.

If particulars are to have meaning, there must be universals.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.

Good men by nature, wish to know. I know that many will call this useless work… men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of that of wisdom, which is the food and only true riches of the mind.

Half a truth is better than no politics.

Build a man a fire, and he’ll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.

The lie is a condition of life.

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man’s resources?

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

If anyone remembers me, it’s about my hard work.

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

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.

There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.

What is imponderable in the world is greater than what we can handle.

The longer I live, the more I feel that true repose consists in ‚renouncing‘ one’s own self, by which I mean making up one’s mind to admit that there is no importance whatever in being ‚happy‘ or ‚unhappy‘ in the usual meaning of the words.

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.

The more you know the less you need to say.

To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. ‚Tis much better to do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after you.

My philosophy in life is, Decide what you want to do. You have to have something to hope for.

Experience is one thing you can’t get for nothing.

No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.

I have gained this from philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.

Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.

We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.

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

There may not be one Truth – there may be several truths – but saying that is not to say that reality doesn’t exist.

If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people – including me – would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

His priority did not seem to be to teach them what he knew, but rather to impress upon them that nothing, not even… knowledge, was foolproof.

We become wiser by adversity; prosperity destroys our appreciation of the right.

I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.

A word to the wise is infuriating.

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.

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

The union of the Word and the Mind produces that mystery which is called Life… Learn deeply of the Mind and its mystery, for therein lies the secret of immortality.

The earth is supported by the power of truth; it is the power of truth that makes the sun shine and the winds blow; indeed all things rest upon truth.