What’s the good of drawing in the next breath if all you do is let it out and draw in another?

Knowledge which is divorced from justice, may be called cunning rather than wisdom.

I am in my own head most of the time.

Is fear preventing you from taking action? Acknowledge the fear, watch it, take your attention into it, be fully present with it. Doing so cuts the link between the fear and your thinking. Don’t let the fear rise up into your mind. Use the power of the Now. Fear cannot prevail against it.

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

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

We identify in our experience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.

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

The simple act of paying attention can take you a long way.

We’re all insecure, aren’t we? I’m not walking around like I’m macho man or anything.

Who is the wisest man? He who neither knows or wishes for anything else than what happens.

Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.

For me, time is the greatest mystery of all. The fact is that we’re dreaming all the time. That’s what really gets me. We have a fathomless lake of unconsciousness just beneath our skulls.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.

Man takes his law from the Earth; the Earth takes its law from Heaven; Heaven takes its law from the Tao. The law of the Tao is its being what it is.

The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within.

The true identity theft is not financial. It’s not in cyberspace. It’s spiritual. It’s been taken.

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.

Sometimes I’m a bit under-aggressive and sometimes a bit over. But I think it’s good to have both.

The people who truly know me know what I’m like. There have been people who try to say things that aren’t fair, and I check them. And then they don’t like me because I checked them.

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.

You might not have the things you want, but if you check carefully, you got all you need.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

I am tough, but deep inside my toughness, I like to let people know I’m an old-fashioned mama’s boy.

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.

There is no principle worth the name if it is not wholly good.

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings – words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.

There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.

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

‚Happiness‘ is a pointless goal.

As long as your body is healthy and under control and death is distant, try to save your soul; when death is immanent what can you do?

Without stirring abroad, One can know the whole world; Without looking out of the window One can see the way of heaven. The further one goes The less one knows.

Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.

I periodically realize every few years that the only person whose taste I really trust is me.

We are in a far better position to observe instincts in animals or in primitives than in ourselves. This is due to the fact that we have grown accustomed to scrutinizing our own actions and to seeking rational explanations for them.

You can be obsessed with the bad things people say and the good things; either way, you’re obsessed with yourself, and I’m not – you can become unhinged so easily.

Genius is a potential that lives within you and every other human being. You have many moments of genius in your lifetime. These are the times when you have a uniquely brilliant idea and implement it even if only you are aware of how fantastic it is.

Become slower in your journey through life. Practice yoga and meditation if you suffer from ‚hurry sickness.‘ Become more introspective by visiting quiet places such as churches, museums, mountains and lakes. Give yourself permission to read at least one novel a month for pleasure.

I sometimes ask people, ‚Can you be aware of your own presence? Not the thoughts that you’re having, not the emotions that you’re having, but the very presence of your very being?‘ You become aware of your own presence by sensing the entire energy field in your body that is alive. And that is the totality of your presence.

A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.

Unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax.

It’s very hard to live with yourself if you don’t stick with your moral code.

There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through others. This first kind is excellent, the second good, and the third kind useless.

People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased.

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Philosophy is common sense with big words.

If I went back to my 20-year-old self, what I would tell my 20-year-old self is, ‚You don’t know anything.‘ Because everyone, when they’re young, they think they know what’s going on in the world, and you don’t.

Everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.

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

‚Tis better to bear the ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.

My crown is called content, a crown that seldom kings enjoy.

There’s no substitute for the practice of meditation.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.