Socrates

Worthless people love only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.

Think not those faithful who praise all thy words and actions, but those who kindly reprove thy faults.

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.

Enjoy yourself – it’s later than you think.

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

Having the fewest wants, I am nearest to the gods.

The truth of Zen, just a little bit of it, is what turns one’s humdrum life into one of art.

To study Buddhism is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be awakened by all things.

It is the final proof of God’s omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.

There is no path to happiness: Happiness is the path.

God is a loving god.

The practice of Zen is forgetting the self in the act of uniting with something.

You’ve got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body’s sermon on how to behave.

If there is any moral in Christianity, if there is anything to be learned from it, if the whole story is not profitless from first to last, it comes to this: that a man should back his own opinion against the world s.

In a controversy the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.

I lost my faith in God when I lost my daughter to Cancer, the beast. I begged, I cried, I offered my life for hers, and day by day, I watched that beautiful little Angel slip off. So, excuse me for not taking my seat next to you on Sunday in Church, I feel too cheated to worship.

I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God’s will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed.

What you possess, you lose.

Do not learn how to react learn how to respond.

In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

Religion was invented when the first con man met the first fool.