“Prejudices are the props of civilization.”

To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one’s freedom.

The capacity to get free is nothing; the capacity to be free is the task.

Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation.

Society knows perfectly well how to kill a man and has methods more subtle than death.

Complete possession is proved only by giving. All you are unable to give possesses you.

So long as we live among men, let us cherish humanity.

Trust those who seek the truth but doubt those who say they have found it.

Complete possession is proved only by giving. All you are unable to give possesses you.

Profound optimism is always on the side of the tortured.

Nothing is more fatal to happiness than the remembrance of happiness.

We should enjoy this summer, flower by flower, as if it were to be the last one we’ll see.

Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.

Nothing is so silly as the expression of a man who is being complimented.

I can’t expect others to share my virtues. It’s good enough for me if they share my vices.

But can one still make resolutions when one is over forty? I live according to twenty-year-old habits.

God depends on us. It is through us that God is achieved.

My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilisation, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can’t prove it, but you can’t disprove it either.

No form of theocracy, whether it’s manifested in a violent or non-violent form, is ever good for civilisation, and we have to challenge it in civil society as well as we would challenge Christian-based theocracy, or any other form of bigotry.

One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced.

CIVILISATION is not to be judged by the rapidity of communication, but by the value of what is communicated.

Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

CO2 is the exhaling breath of our civilization, literally… Changing that pattern requires a scope, a scale, a speed of change that is beyond what we have done in the past.

Civilization is always in danger when those who have never learned to obey are given the right to command.

Style is about the choices you make to create the aspects of civilization that you wish to uphold.