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

From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.

We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.

A woman will doubt everything you say except it be compliments to herself.

Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.

If you don’t get out of the box you’ve been raised in, you won’t understand how much bigger the world is.

We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.

Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, – till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.

Misfortune seldom intrudes upon the wise man; his greatest and highest interests are directed by reason throughout the course of life.

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.

Never give an order that can’t be obeyed.

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

Blessedness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself.

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

We cannot always oblige; but we can always speak obligingly.

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores the better.

If you’re a politician, you might want to learn the Buddhist way of negotiation. Restoring communication and bringing back reconciliation is clear and concrete in Buddhism.

All nature is but art unknown to thee.

Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.

The way people look at me these days – that’s the same way I looked at President Obama before I met him. We tend to forget that people who’ve attained a certain position are human.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

Surely our job while we’re here on Earth is to learn about the world, not to create parallel universes.

We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.

People may hear your words, but they feel your attitude.

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.

There is no such thing as justice in the abstract; it is merely a compact between men.

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?

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

A quarrel is quickly settled when deserted by one party; there is no battle unless there be two.

Use, do not abuse… neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.

I remember the first time I heard a teenager say ‚LOL.‘ Just what? But it means ‚laugh.‘ Why don’t you just laugh? What are you doing?

Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil.

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

Silence speaks so much louder than screaming tantrums. Never give anyone an excuse to say that you’re crazy.

If you make listening and observation your occupation you will gain much more than you can by talk.

It’s never happened in history that every region in the world could affect every other region simultaneously. The Roman empire and the Chinese empire didn’t know much about each other and had no means of interacting. Now we have every continent able to reach every other.

We have two ears and one tongue so that we would listen more and talk less.

I’m a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how people can learn from each other, and how they can achieve the kind of freedoms that they’re interested in.

Sorry, I’m still a dialectical materialist.

The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.

Do everything as in the eye of another.

The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.

If you can’t hear me, it’s because I’m in parentheses.

I think it’s brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television – but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.

The capability of negotiating… is something that means you not only have to understand fully what you believe and what your national interests are but in order to be a really good negotiator, you have to try to figure out what the other person on the other side of the table has in mind.

The first book I ever really read was Plato’s ‚Republic,‘ and then I had to go over that five times or something.

God never gives someone a gift they are not capable of receiving. If he gives us the gift of Christmas, it is because we all have the ability to understand and receive it.

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.

I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.

It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly. And it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living a pleasant life.