Letting go is not giving up.
Use every distraction as an object of meditation and they cease to be distractions.
Plain question and plain answer make the shortest road out of most perplexities.
Some people have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat. For my part, I mind my belly very studiously, and very carefully; for I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else.
He is rich who is content with the least; for contentment is the wealth of nature.
The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes.
To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.
Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters?
Prudence operates on life in the same manner as rule of composition; it produces vigilance rather than elevation; rather prevents loss than procures advantage; and often miscarriages, but seldom reaches either power or honor.
If man is to be liberated to enjoy more leisure, he must also be prepared to enjoy this leisure fully and creatively.
I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.
One cause, which is not always observed, of the insufficiency of riches, is that they very seldom make their owner rich.
It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.
A wise neuter joins with neither, but uses both as his honest interest leads him.
We are in fact convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself. It seems, to judge from the argument, that the wisdom which we desire and upon which we profess to have set our hearts will be attainable only when we are dead and not in our lifetime.
If you can’t forgive and forget, pick one.
Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial “we.”
