No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man's power is hooped in by a necessity, which, by many experiments, he touches on every side, until he learns its arc.
How does it happen, Maecenas, that no one is content with that lot in life which he has chosen, or which chance has thrown in his way, but praises those who follow a different course?
[Lat., Qui fit, Maecenas, ut nemo quam sibi sortem,
Seu ratio dederit, seu fors objecerit, illa
Contentus vivat? laudet diversa sequentes.]
Life in the savage appears different from the life that dwells in you, different in its expression, but it is all one Life. Anyone who has not fulfilled that life must step down the Truth, and when he does that, he is unconsciously betraying the Truth.
He was justifying his existence, than which life can do no greater; for life achieves its summit when it does to the uttermost that which it was equipped to do.
Every ant knows the formula of its ant-hill, every bee knows the formula of its beehive. They know it in their own way, not in our way. Only humankind does not know its own formula.
If a writer publishes any thing that attracts notice, and is in itself just, but does not accord with our plan, we must endeavour to win him over, or decry him.
I've tried to be totally present, so that when I'm finished with a piece of work, I'm finished. ... The work, once completed, does not need me. The work I'm working on needs my total concentration. The one that's finished doesn't belong to me anymore. It belongs to itself.
Science is about finding ever better approximations rather than pretending you have already found ultimate truth.
A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience.
The Geneva Convention . . . says that there will be no outrages upon human dignity. It’s very vague. What does that mean, ‘outrages upon human dignity’?
If a traveller does not meet with one who is his better, or his equal, let him firmly keep to his solitary journey; there is no companionship with a fool.
Mental violence has no potency and injures only the person whose thoughts are violent. It is otherwise with mental non-violence. It has potency which the world does not yet know.