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

All generalizations are false, including this one.

He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.

Whatever you cannot understand, you cannot possess.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

The life so short, the craft so long to learn.

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.

When we’re looking for compassion, we need someone who is deeply rooted, is able to bend and, most of all, embraces us for our strengths and struggles.

I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

It’s absolutely normal that different human beings want to go different ways.

At the heart of the Irish economy has always been the philosophy of tax competitiveness. On the cranky left, that is very annoying; I can see that.

You accept that this civilisation could be abolished and life will begin later on after a few thousand years because that is something that has happened in the history of this planet. When you have peace in yourself and accept, then you are calm enough to do something, but if you are carried by despair there is no hope.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.

Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom.

Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

I’m for women choosing whatever they want to do but they have to really know what they are doing.

If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

The learned is happy, nature to explore; The fool is happy, that he knows no more.

Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.

Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses.

Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

Let me embrace thee, sour adversity, for wise men say it is the wisest course.

To try to become happy is to try to build a machine with no other specifications than it shall run noiselessly.

It is as necessary for man to live in beauty rather than ugliness as it is necessary for him to have food for an aching belly or rest for a weary body.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.

If you have the insight of non-self, if you have the insight of impermanence, you should make that insight into a concentration that you keep alive throughout the day. Then what you say, what you think, and what you do will then be in the light of that wisdom and you will avoid making mistakes and creating suffering.

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.

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

The proper study of mankind is books.

To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don’t be.

True virtue is life under the direction of reason.

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.

I joyfully hasten to meet death. If it come before I have had opportunity to develop all my artistic faculties, it will come, my hard fate notwithstanding, too soon, and I should probably wish it later – yet even then I shall be happy, for will it not deliver me from a state of endless suffering?

Why, if someone is good in one field can they not be accepted or given the slightest opportunity to express and be creative in other fields?

Things won’t get better dwelling on the past. Accept what has happened. Then move forward.

Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.

The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all.

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.

True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.

Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.

Libraries raised me.

When one has finished building one’s house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way – before one began.

Freedom without limits is just a word.

Old age is just a record of one’s whole life.

You have to accept whatever comes and the only important thing is that you meet it with courage and with the best that you have to give.

Experience teaches us that it is much easier to prevent an enemy from posting themselves than it is to dislodge them after they have got possession.

You can always tell when a man’s well informed. His views are pretty much like your own.

The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.

The superior man is distressed by the limitations of his ability; he is not distressed by the fact that men do not recognize the ability that he has.

I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and Non-violence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to try experiments in both on as vast a scale as I could.

I read Plato’s ‚Republic.‘ I read it through about five times until I could actually understand it.

The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.