To free a person from error is to give, and not to take away.

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever – this is a somewhat new kind of religion.

The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.

What really raises one’s indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.

Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries.

Do not ask for what you will wish you had not got.

Peace if possible, truth at all costs.

When the prison doors are opened, the real dragon will fly out.

Knowledge without justice ought to be called cunning rather than wisdom.

All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values.

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

Justice is a temporary thing that must at last come to an end; but the conscience is eternal and will never die.

What we live by we die by.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.

I believe things cannot make themselves impossible.

I learned a great many years ago that in a fight between husband and wife, a third party should never get between the woman’s skillet and the man’s ax-helve.

The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

Entire ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the greatest of all; too much cleverness and too much learning, accompanied with ill bringing-up, are far more fatal.

He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.

It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved.

Wise leaders generally have wise counselors because it takes a wise person themselves to distinguish them.

We are not the sum of our possessions.

If you have the insight of non-self, if you have the insight of impermanence, you should make that insight into a concentration that you keep alive throughout the day. Then what you say, what you think, and what you do will then be in the light of that wisdom and you will avoid making mistakes and creating suffering.

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.

Study the past, if you would divine the future.

In South Korea, they believe that when you turn 60, you’ve become a baby again and the rest of your life should be totally about joy and happiness, and people should leave you alone, and I just think that that’s the height of intelligence.

The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

On the way back from Mumbai to go meet with President Xi in China, I stopped in Singapore to meet with a guy named Lee Kuan Yew, who most foreign policy experts around the world say is the wisest man in the Orient.

Twice and thrice over, as they say, good is it to repeat and review what is good.

Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but vengeful; and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm.

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores the better.

The Negro needs the white man to free him from his fears. The white man needs the Negro to free him from his guilt.

Honor thy error as a hidden intention.

I am not the first Buddha who came upon Earth, nor shall I be the last. In due time, another Buddha will arise in the world – a Holy One, a supremely enlightened One, endowed with wisdom in conduct, auspicious, knowing the universe, an incomparable leader of men, a master of angels and mortals.

Science is nothing but perception.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Heaven is dumb, echoing only the dumb.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

I say there is no darkness but ignorance.

Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.

There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.

Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.

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.

To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one’s being added to that being.

Who, being loved, is poor?

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven’t and don’t.

Impart as much as you can of your spiritual being to those who are on the road with you, and accept as something precious what comes back to you from them.

You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause.

He that won’t be counseled can’t be helped.

Nothing can be beautiful which is not true.

Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know.

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

When you give, it comes back to you.

I used to read five psalms every day – that teaches me how to get along with God. Then I read a chapter of Proverbs every day and that teaches me how to get along with my fellow man.