“The highest purpose of intellectual cultivation is to give a man a perfect knowledge and mastery of his own inner self.”

Doing philosophy is only a threefold or double kind of waking–being awake–consciousness.

Only the most perfect human being can design the most perfect philosophy.

Philosophy bears witness to the deepest love of reflection, to absolute delight in wisdom.

A character is a completely fashioned will.

Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us.

The mysterious path goes inward. It is in us, and not anywhere else, where the eternity of the worlds, the past and the future are found.

Man is lyrical, woman epic, marriage dramatic.

Christianity is the root of all democracy, the highest fact in the rights of men.

Perceptibility is a kind of attentiveness.

The history of every individual man should be a Bible.

To become properly acquainted with a truth, we must first have disbelieved it, and disputed against it.

Where children are, there is the golden age.

All power appears only in transition. Permanent power is stuff.

Life is the beginning of death. Life is for the sake of death. Death is at once the end and the beginning—at once separation and closer union of the self. Through death the reduction is complete.

I often feel, and ever more deeply I realize, that fate and character are the same conception.

Genius in general is poetic. Where genius has been active it has been poetically active. The truly moral person is a poet.

Instead of yielding to idle conversation it might profit one to cultivate silence and contemplation.

The true Mason ever strives to cultivate Masonry in his/her life to the fullest degree possible.

Great men cultivate love, only little men cherish a spirit of hatred.

Great men cultivate love and only little men cherish a spirit of hatred; assistance given to the weak makes the one who gives it strong; oppression of the unfortunate makes one weak.

Happiness is a habit—cultivate it.

The shadow is not a problem to be solved or an enemy to be conquered, but a fertile field to be cultivated. When we dig our hands into its rich soil we will discover the potent seeds of the people we most desire to be.

Compassion allows us to understand that, as citizens of the planet, we’re all in this together and that in order to ensure our survival we must hold and cultivate a new and larger vision of what’s possible for ourselves and for the human race as a whole.

I can’t cultivate a relationship with my child if it’s between takes. I tried that on a movie and realized, ‘This is not going to work.’ It will work some of the year, but not 12 months a year.