To me, the extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way, and martial arts is nothing at all special; the closer to the true way of martial arts, the less wastage of expression there is.

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

Chaos is inherent in all compounded things. Strive on with diligence.

In a way, the whole tangible universe itself is a vast residue, a skeleton of countless lives that have germinated in it and have left it, leaving behind them only a trifling, infinitesimal part of their riches.

Existence precedes and rules essence.

Preaching is the expression of the moral sentiment in application to the duties of life.

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

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.

Winners embrace hard work. They love the discipline of it, the trade-off they’re making to win. Losers, on the other hand, see it as punishment. And that’s the difference.

From wonder into wonder existence opens.

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

Love, we say, is life; but love without hope and faith is agonizing death.

To me, if life boils down to one thing, it’s movement. To live is to keep moving.

I don’t know, I feel desperate when I sing. And I look desperate – it feels like I’m singing for my life, which makes me twitch, if that makes sense.

The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.

There is no wealth but life.

Nothing cannot exist forever.

My philosophy is: It’s none of my business what people say of me and think of me.

I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.

The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation.

Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

Men are so simple and yield so readily to the desires of the moment that he who will trick will always find another who will suffer to be tricked.

I felt like my favorite writers have almost musical hooks in their work, whether it’s poetry or a hook at the end of a chapter that makes you want to read the next one. And I think that my favorite writers definitely have something musical about what they do, in saying something so relatable and universal and so simple.

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

We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers.

You are a child of the sun, you come from the sun, and that is something true with the Earth also… your relationship with the Earth is so deep, and the Earth is in you and this is something not very difficult, much less difficult then philosophy.

I don’t believe in death, neither in flesh nor in spirit.

I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.

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

If you do things, whether it’s acting or music or painting, do it without fear – that’s my philosophy. Because nobody can arrest you and put you in jail if you paint badly, so there’s nothing to lose.

The unnatural, that too is natural.

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

The way up and the way down are one and the same.

Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

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

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.

The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.

Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.

Why was I born with such contemporaries?

Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

A well governed appetite is the greater part of liberty.

It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

We are all born for love. It is the principle of existence, and its only end.

It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.

The desire to annoy no one, to harm no one, can equally well be the sign of a just as of an anxious disposition.

Fear is the mother of morality.

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

Words are loaded pistols.

It’s funny because I’ve made a living off of words, but words get in the way of what you really want to say.

I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.

Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.

Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.