You could not step twice into the same rivers; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.

Everything in excess is opposed to nature.

Older and wiser voices can help you find the right path, if you are only willing to listen.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.

The words of truth are always paradoxical.

It is the superfluous things for which men sweat, – superfluous things that wear our togas theadbare, that force us to grow old in camp, that dash us upon foreign shores.

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.

I was inspired to spend an entire year – my 65th year – reading, researching, and meditating on Lao-tzu’s messages, practicing them and ultimately writing down these insights as I felt Lao-tzu wanted us to know them.

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

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Normally, when someone we love is turning away from a struggle, we self-protect by also turning away. That’s definitely my first response. I think change is more likely to happen if both partners have common language and a shared lens to see problems.

Just as treasures are uncovered from the earth, so virtue appears from good deeds, and wisdom appears from a pure and peaceful mind. To walk safely through the maze of human life, one needs the light of wisdom and the guidance of virtue.

In a progressive country change is constant; change is inevitable.

It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.

Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle.

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.

Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.

I’m fascinated by the fact that we can’t grasp anything about time.

I look upon death to be as necessary to our constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning.

Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.

Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.

The only source of knowledge is experience.

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

A revolution is an idea which has found its bayonets.

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

Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.

Truth is what works.

Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.

Life is hard. After all, it kills you.

I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.

To keep your secret is wisdom; but to expect others to keep it is folly.

To know anything well involves a profound sensation of ignorance.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

You are the universe, you aren’t in the universe.

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

I do hope that some of my dissents will one day be the law.

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

He that does good to another does good also to himself.

It is a common saying, and in everybody’s mouth, that life is but a sojourn.

Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

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

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

If you want to gather honey, don’t kick over the beehive.

A loving heart is the truest wisdom.

It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.

Great and good are seldom the same man.

From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.

Study the past, if you would divine the future.

But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.

What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.

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

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

The only real valuable thing is intuition.

I think we all change each other’s paths. I don’t know which law idea that is in physics, but I don’t think any of us can live without affecting one another.