Take care of your body, then the rest will automatically become stronger.

The effect of life in society is to complicate and confuse our existence, making us forget who we really are by causing us to become obsessed with what we are not.

A petty thief is put in jail. A great brigand becomes a ruler of a Nation.

The perfect man uses his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing. It regrets nothing. It receives but does not keep.

Do not struggle. Go with the flow of things, and you will find yourself at one with the mysterious unity of the Universe.

If you have insight, you use your inner eye, your inner ear, to pierce to the heart of things, and have no need of intellectual knowledge.

Let your mind wander in the pure and simple. Be one with the infinite. Let all things take their course.

The torch of doubt and chaos, this is what the sage steers by.

When an archer shoots for enjoyment, he has all his skill; when he shoots for a brass buckle, he gets nervous; when he shoots for a prize of gold, he begins to see two targets.

We cling to our own point of view, as though everything depended on it. Yet our opinions have no permanence; like autumn and winter, they gradually pass away.

Never admire a man by his strength; judge him in how he uses it- A way is made by walking it

If your thirst for knowledge is strong enough, you will find the waters to satisfy it.

Our search for safety and contentment is endless and inexhaustible precisely because of the intrinsic futility of relying on human abilities to provide resolution to our problems.

Well, well, my boy, if good luck knocks at your door, don't you put your head out at window and tell it to be gone about its business, that's all.

I'm reading a bunch of fiction by Afghan and Iraq War veterans for a New Yorker piece. There hasn't been that much, but it's starting to come out, and some of the fiction is really good.

Midnight,--strange mystic hour,--when the veil between the frail present and the eternal future grows thin.

I take things too seriously.

It is very often nothing but our own vanity that deceives us.

Pablo Casals has this simple and sincere attitude of knowing where it's at - of saying, "This is the way it is." If I thought I could carry some of that into my life, I would be happy.

I'm a radical reformist, because between where we are and where I want to go there's a great deal of work, and I won't see the end of this.