“Rewards and punishments are the lowest form of education.”

Only fools imagine they are already awake. How clearly they understand everything! How easily they distinguish this deception from that reality!

Let your mind wander in simplicity, blend your spirit with the vastness, follow along with things the way they are, and make no room for personal views-then the world will be governed.

Men honor what lies within the sphere of their knowledge, but do not realize how dependent they are on what lies beyond it.

The enlightened attention rejects nothing nor welcomes anything-like a mirror it responds equally to all.

Horses have hoofs to carry them over frost and snow; hair, to protect them from wind and cold. They eat grass and drink water, and fling up their heels. Such is the real nature of horses.

If you have grasped the purpose of life there is no point in trying to make life into something it is not or cannot be.

Where can I find a man who has forgotten words, so I can have a few words with him?

A frog in a well cannot conceive of the ocean.

Tao is the source of both fullness and emptiness. But it is itself neither fullness nor emptiness.

Flow with whatever may happen and let your mind be free. Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.

Men do not mirror themselves in running water – they mirror themselves in still water. Only what is still can still the stillness of other things.

The men of old breathed clear down to their heels.

When deeds and words are in accord, the whole world is transformed.

All men know the use of the useful, but nobody knows the use of the useless. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so that I can have a word with him?

The greatest tragedy that can befall a person is the atrophy of his mind.

Understanding that rests in what it does not understand is the finest.

The ultimate purpose of religious life is to make this evolution move in a direction far more important to the destiny of the ego than the moral health of the social fabric which forms his present environment.

Certain of Poe’s tales possess an almost absolute perfection of artistic form which makes them veritable beacon-lights in the province of the short story.

The study of expression ought to form a part of the study of psychology, but it also comes within the province of anthropology because the habitual, life-long expressions of the face determine the wrinkles of old age, which are distinctly an anthropological characteristic.

Like a shipwreck or a jetty, almost anything that forms a structure in the ocean, whether it is natural or artificial over time, collects life.

To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.

Historically, the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever more organized forms of matter.

Sonnet is about movement in a form.

If one gains an interest in the history of the earth, he is quite sure to gain an interest in the history of the life on the earth. If the former illustrates the theory of development, so must the latter.