“You should not overlook the guidelines of your culture. Life is short, and you don’t have time to figure everything out on your own. The wisdom of the past was hard-earned, and your dead ancestors may have something useful to tell you.”

See the truth. Tell the truth.

Thus, you should never sacrifice what you could be for what you are.

You can only find out what you actually believe (rather than what you think you believe) by watching how you act.

Women select men. That makes them nature, because nature is what selects.

People who know what to expect from one another can act together to tame the world.

When you have something to say, silence is a lie.

When the aristocracy catches a cold, as it is said, the working class dies of pneumonia.

The purpose of life, as far as I can tell, is to find a mode of being that’s so meaningful that the fact that life is suffering is no longer relevant.

True thinking is rare – just like true listening.

It is better, proverbially, to rule your own spirit than to rule a city.

To act is literally to manifest preference about one set of possibilities, contrasted with an infinite set of alternatives. If we wish to live, we must act. Acting, we value.

That’s poetic in its malevolence.

Anyone who was out to change the world by changing others was to be regarded with suspicion. The temptations of such a position were too great to be resisted.

What you aim at determines what you see.

Worthlessness is the default condition.

Consciousness is a mystery that faces the mystery of potential and transforms it into actuality. We do that with every choice we make. Our choices determine the destiny of the world. By making a choice, you alter the structure of reality.

Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good.

Never abandon life. There is a way out of everything except death.

Everyone may be called “comrade,” but some comrades have the power of life and death over other comrades.

People living deeply have no fear of death.

Death comes for us all in the end.

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.

Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.

It is our attitude toward events, not events themselves, which we can control. Nothing is by its own nature calamitous, even death is terrible only if we fear it.