What is the Tao Te Ching? Five hundred years before the birth of Jesus, a God-realized being named Lao-tzu in ancient China dictated 81 verses which are regarded by many as the ultimate commentary on the nature of existence.

I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.

I do not know whether there are gods, but there ought to be.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

Everything deep is also simple and can be reproduced simply as long as its reference to the whole truth is maintained. But what matters is not what is witty but what is true.

What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.

A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.

It’s not morbid to talk about death. Most people don’t worry about death, they worry about a bad death.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

I want to do a certain thing in the world, and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.

As we regularly spend time reading God’s Word and talking to Him in prayer, we put ourselves in position for Him to do things in our lives we could never do on our own.

We are not the sum of our possessions.

The ultimate connection is when you are connected to the creator of the universe.

All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

Wisdom is found only in truth.

To realize that you are not your thoughts is when you begin to awaken spiritually.

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.

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

Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.

Whether if soul did not exist time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted, so that evidently there cannot be number; for number is either what has been, or what can be, counted.

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

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.

God is a concept by which we measure our pain.

When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.

I just really believe people have to get hungry. I think maybe what we need to do, instead of trying to stuff our beliefs down people’s throats, is just pray for them to really be hungry and to see their neediness.

The world is so unpredictable. Things happen suddenly, unexpectedly. We want to feel we are in control of our own existence. In some ways we are, in some ways we’re not. We are ruled by the forces of chance and coincidence.

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

In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.

The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.

God’s Spirit moves through us and the world at a pace that can never be constricted by any one religious paradigm.

Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.

Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.

Faith is easy; I think people complicate it.

God’s first creature, which was light.

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, and I’ll forgive Thy great big joke on me.

If God can’t get you to obey Him concerning your money, he won’t get to anything else you got.

People don’t come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

Ignorant people see life as either existence or non-existence, but wise men see it beyond both existence and non-existence to something that transcends them both; this is an observation of the Middle Way.

The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort.

Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the Infinite.

No one can live without relationship. You may withdraw into the mountains, become a monk, a sannyasi, wander off into the desert by yourself, but you are related. You cannot escape from that absolute fact. You cannot exist in isolation.

Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.

There is an afterlife. I am convinced of this.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now – always.

To do a great right do a little wrong.

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

If there really is a god, then he really looks after me.

All religions have been made by men.

Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.

I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.

When you are spiritually connected, you are not looking for occasions to be offended, and you are not judging and labeling others. You are in a state of grace in which you know you are connected to God and thus free from the effects of anyone or anything external to yourself.

It is better to die than to preserve this life by incurring disgrace. The loss of life causes but a moment’s grief, but disgrace brings grief every day of one’s life.

One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.

God is the name people give to the reason we are here. But I think that reason is the laws of physics rather than someone with whom one can have a personal relationship. An impersonal God.

The spirit becomes free only when it ceases to be a support.

Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.