There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.

Wisdom does not show itself so much in precept as in life – in firmness of mind and a mastery of appetite. It teaches us to do as well as to talk; and to make our words and actions all of a color.

Two things control men’s nature, instinct and experience.

Somewhere it is written that parents who are critical of other people’s children and publicly admit they can do better are asking for it.

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

The big question about how people behave is whether they’ve got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard.

Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you’ve conquered human nature.

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

A man’s true character comes out when he’s drunk.

No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.

Behold the child, by Nature’s kindly law pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.

That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.

Expectations are a form of first-class truth: If people believe it, it’s true.

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

Lying is not only saying what isn’t true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.

An honest man is always a child.

It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other.

Part of the reason there’s an injunction to the truth, for example, is that if you’re in a circumstance of extreme uncertainty, your best weapon, let’s say, or your best tool or your best defense is the truth, because it keeps things simpler.

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat.

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.

There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier and simpler.

Why does your mind conform? Have you ever asked? Are you aware that you are conforming to a pattern? It doesn’t matter what that pattern is, whether you have established a pattern for yourself or it has been established for you.

Man’s nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been known to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

Please think of me like an endangered species and just observe me quietly from far away. If you try to talk to me or touch me casually, I may get intimidated and bite you. So please be careful.

I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that’s always existed.

Shame may restrain what law does not prohibit.

Men are so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate needs that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions.

Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

Constant exposure to dangers will breed contempt for them.

If you are a parent, you have probably already realized that your children are always watching what you do. And just as children watch their parents and emulate their behavior, so do employees who are watching their bosses.

One has children in the expectation of dying before them. In fact, you want to make damn sure you die before them, just as you plant a tree or build a house knowing, hoping that it will outlive you. That’s how the human species has done as well as it has.

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

Humans have a knack for choosing precisely the things that are worst for them.

There are some people who need to wear a label round their necks to show that they are Christians at all, or else we might mistake them for sinners, their actions are so like those of the ungodly.

Character is expressed through our behavior patterns, or natural responses to things.

The flesh, or human nature, is generally lazy and self-centered.

Fear is a spirit that produces a feeling.

I think that most of us would prefer to be popular than unpopular.

I act on impulse and I go with my instincts.

I don’t have people following me around, like bodyguards. I don’t know how people live like that. Maybe the young movie stars have to live like that, I don’t know. But it seems a little crazy to me. I don’t think you need all that stuff.

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.

It is natural for the mind to believe and for the will to love; so that, for want of true objects, they must attach themselves to false.

The wise have always said the same things, and fools, who are the majority have always done just the opposite.

It is a big temptation to me, when I create a character for a novel, to say that he is what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of microscopic amounts of chemicals which he ate or failed to eat on that particular day.

No honest writer today can possibly avoid being influenced by Freud through his pioneering work into the Unconscious and by the influence of those discoveries on the scientific, philosophic, and artistic work of his contemporaries: but not, by any means, necessarily through Freud’s own writing.

There is no such thing as a pure introvert or extrovert. Such a person would be in the lunatic asylum.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

People expect your behavior to conform to known patterns and conventions. Your task as a strategist is to upset their expectations.

Men are moved by two levers only: fear and self interest.

Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That’s always been the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

Hatred is inveterate anger.

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.