We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering.

You know that being an American is more than a matter of where your parents came from. It is a belief that all men are created free and equal and that everyone deserves an even break.

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.

Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.

A man should be upright, not be kept upright.

Philosophy begins in wonder.

Man is a universe within himself.

God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.

The ‚I think‘ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‚I breathe‘ which actually does accompany them.

A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges is not Christian. This is not in the Gospel.

After it is all over, the religion of man is his most important possession.

Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.

May be is very well, but Must is the master. It is my duty to show justice without recompense.

Know then this truth, enough for man to know virtue alone is happiness below.

Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that’s how we’ve got to live.

The misfortune of the wise is better than the prosperity of the fool.

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

Strength and compassion are not mutually exclusive.

Just cause you got the monkey off your back doesn’t mean the circus has left town.

One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.

If you think only of evil, then you become pessimistic and hopeless like Freud. But if you think there is no evil, then you’re just one more deluded Pollyanna.

To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world.

For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions, even on important subjects, which I once thought right but found to be otherwise.

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

I feel like I just grabbed a big juicy worm with a right sharp hook in the middle of it.

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.

Well, the future for me is already a thing of the past.

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.

Poverty is a veil that obscures the face of greatness. An appeal is a mask covering the face of tribulation.

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

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

There is a fundamental question we all have to face. How are we to live our lives; by what principles and moral values will we be guided and inspired?

Moderation is the center wherein all philosophies, both human and divine, meet.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

Philosophy is common sense with big words.

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

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.

The empty vessel makes the loudest sound.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.

The utmost extent of man’s knowledge, is to know that he knows nothing.

Nature is not human hearted.

One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.

Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the Infinite.

Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life.

Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.

The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue.

I don’t suffer of anything that I’ve lost.

Only the ideas that we really live have any value.

To see and listen to the wicked is already the beginning of wickedness.