“You confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for an artist.”

The unhappy are egotistical, base, unjust, cruel, and even less capable of understanding one another than are idiots. Unhappiness does not unite people, but separates them.

I can only regard with bewilderment an educated man who is also religious.

Everything on earth is beautiful, everything — except what we ourselves think and do when we forget the higher purposes of life and our own human dignity.

Better a debauched canary than a pious wolf.

When all is said and done, no literature can outdo the cynicism of real life; you won’t intoxicate with one glass someone who has already drunk up a whole barrel.

The more refined one is, the more unhappy.

When a person expends the least amount of motion on one action, that is grace.

The problem is that we attempt to solve the simplest questions cleverly, thereby rendering them unusually complex. One should seekthe simple solution.

What seems to us serious, significant and important will, in future times, be forgotten or won’t seem important at all.

Man will become better when you show him what he is like.

Just as I shall lie alone in the grave, so, in essence, do I live alone.

Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice.

When asked, “Why do you always wear black?”, he said, “I am mourning for my life.

Exquisite nature, daydreams, and music say one thing, real life another.

Not one of our mortal gauges is suitable for evaluating non-existence, for making judgments about that which is not a person.

You will not become a saint through other people’s sins.

We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. We are monkeys with money and guns.

At any moment, we are either giving humanity the gift of our clarity or our confusion. And that clarity or confusion is affecting the humanity around us, the world around us. It is manifesting. It is taking form.

If you resist confusion,you are always confused. We think that we resist certain states because they are there, but actually they are there because we resist them.

We don’t come to nirvana by avoiding samsara. We don’t come to clarity by avoiding confusion.

The willingness to not bypass illusion is very important. We come to nirvana by way of samsara. We come to see the true nature of things by seeing through the illusory nature of things.

We are, none of us, ‘either’ mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.

Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.

Times of great calamity and confusion have been productive for the greatest minds. The purest ore is produced from the hottest furnace. The brightest thunder-bolt is elicited from the darkest storm.