As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.

The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.

One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.

Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.

Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.

If there were only turnips and potatoes in the world, someone would complain that plants grow the wrong way.

Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.

To read means to borrow; to create out of one s readings is paying off one's debts.

Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.

He who understands the wise is wise already.

The [true] intellectual is he who does not let harm done to others and nor let any harm done to even one's own self.

Sometimes it seems that men--yes, and even women too!--if they believe in a thing strongly enough, they get a strength or endurance that they wouldn't have believe possible.

The Brain is a chewed gum.

The safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death.

The man who is deeply discontented with himself is probably growing fast into the full likeness of Christ.

The most important things in life happen over conversations while eating.

All things happen for a purpose.

Intolerance of your present creates your future.

If you actually just treat people as if they're already in the movement, they're already alongside this movement, and just let them enter the conversation midstream, it's actually more effective.

Do not speak unless you can improve on silence, said a Buddhist sage.