Thinking fragments reality – it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces.

The universe is not indifferent to our existence – it depends on it.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.

Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

We misjudge risk if we feel we have some control over it, even if it’s an illusory sense of control.

My aim is to make the poor look rich and the rich look poor.

Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I’m a realist.

This is the truth: as from a fire aflame thousands of sparks come forth, even so from the Creator an infinity of beings have life and to him return again.

Men’s ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

It is folly for an eminent man to think of escaping censure, and a weakness to be affected with it. All the illustrious persons of antiquity, and indeed of every age in the world, have passed through this fiery persecution.

The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.

No other planet in the solar system is a suitable home for human beings; it’s this world or nothing. That’s a very powerful perception.

Nothing can be divided into more parts than it can possibly be constituted of. But matter (i.e. finite) cannot be constituted of infinite parts.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

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.

There’s no reality except the one contained within us. That’s why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself.

If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?

Lies are sufficient to breed opinion, and opinion brings on substance.

Trying to be fascinating is an asinine position to be in.

Science is nothing but perception.

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.

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.

Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.

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

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

I do think there must be some kind of interaction between your living life and the life that goes on from here.

All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.

There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

I can express all my views on the slavery question by quotations from Henry Clay.

Some men do think I’m a psycho bunny-boiler.

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.

Culture of the mind must be subservient to the heart.

What really matters is how God sees me. He isn’t concerned with labels; he is concerned about the state of man’s soul.

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

Justice… is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed.

Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.

If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.

I guess every single word I’ve ever said is going to be dissected now.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you.

The Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books.

If one plays good music, people don’t listen and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.

I have always held firmly to the thought that each one of us can do a little to bring some portion of misery to an end.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.

Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.

Ever since Newton, we’ve done science by taking things apart to see how they work. What the computer enables us to do is to put things together to see how they work: we’re now synthesized rather than analysed. I find one of the most enthralling aspects of computers is limitless communication.

For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.

It amazes me sometimes that even intelligent people will analyze a situation or make a judgement after only recognizing the standard or traditional structure of a piece.

We have lost contact with reality, the simplicity of life.

To go beyond is as wrong as to fall short.

Science is but an image of the truth.

Life is hard. After all, it kills you.

Fame is but the breath of people, and that often unwholesome.

Man takes his law from the Earth; the Earth takes its law from Heaven; Heaven takes its law from the Tao. The law of the Tao is its being what it is.