We are not the sum of our possessions.

If some years were added to my life, I would give fifty to the study of the Yi, and then I might come to be without great faults.

Man was made at the end of the week’s work, when God was tired.

It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.

Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.

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.

Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt.

Death is not the worst that can happen to men.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.

Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

I want to negotiate what I’m worth. I want to put my analytics forward, man-to-man, and to be like, ‚This is what I’m owed now. Pay me.‘ And then we can talk.

The Tao teaches us to let go of things. Use the 80/20 rule. If you take all your clothes, you’ll find out that you only wear 20 percent of them. Take what you have and don’t use and circulate it. Give stuff to people who truly need it. After all, we come into this world with nothing; we leave this world with nothing.

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

A woman has the age she deserves.

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.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

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

I’m over being a pop star. I don’t wanna be a hot girl. I wanna be iconic. And I feel like I’ve accomplished a lot. I feel like I’m highly respected, which is more important than any award or any amount of records. And I feel like there comes a point when being a pop star is not enough.

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

You are not a problem that needs solving.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

Americans are far more remarkable than we give ourselves credit for. We’ve been so busy damning ourselves for years. We’ve done it all, and yet we don’t take credit for it.

There is nothing insignificant in the world. It all depends on the point of view.

I feel a distaste for hunting, first because of a kind of Buddhist respect for the unity and sacredness of all life, and also because the pursuit of a hare or chamois strikes me as a kind of ‚escape of energy,‘ that is, the expenditure of our effort in an illusory end, one devoid of profit.

He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion.

Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.

The way of the Creative works through change and transformation, so that each thing receives its true nature and destiny and comes into permanent accord with the Great Harmony: this is what furthers and what perseveres.

Religion and philosophy are to be preserved distinct. We are not to introduce divine revelations into philosophy, nor philosophical opinions into religion.

It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes.

Courage is a mean with regard to fear and confidence.

The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.

Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it.

I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.

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 appreciate the noble is a gain which can never be torn from us.

There is nothing your highest self wants more than peace. This peace makes you feel worthy of all of the richest blessings of the universe, and when you radiate this out into the world, it is returned to you without fail.

It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory.

It is possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard.

Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

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

Life is wasted on the living.

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

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

Man lives freely only by his readiness to die, if need be, at the hands of his brother, never by killing him.

Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence.

All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.

In my opinion, there is no aspect of reality beyond the reach of the human mind.

I think some people would love to be able to make the clothes I make – and of course, I do influence them, but they keep simplifying, and minimalism doesn’t quite work.

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

Having nothing, nothing can he lose.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods.

I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do.

Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.

The superior man does not, even for the space of a single meal, act contrary to virtue. In moments of haste, he cleaves to it. In seasons of danger, he cleaves to it.

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.