🤔 Philosophical

What you seek is seeking you.

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.

The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.

All cruelty springs from weakness.

We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.

Only the educated are free.

Circumstances don't make the man, they only reveal him to himself.

Small-minded people blame others. Average people blame themselves. The wise see all blame as foolishness.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Courage is knowing what not to fear.

Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.

Ignorance, the root and stem of every evil.

Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

We are our choices.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them.

Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.

Remember that you are an actor in a drama, of such a kind as the author pleases to make it. If short, of a short one; if long, of a long one.

Let death and exile, and all other things which appear terrible, be daily before your eyes, but chiefly death; and you will never entertain any abject thought.

Is your child dead? It has been given back. Is your wife dead? She has been given back. Is your estate taken away? Well, and is not that likewise given back?

If a man has reported to you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make any defense, but say: 'He did not know the rest of my faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone.'

For what else is tragedy, but the sufferings of men, bewildered by their admiration of external things, represented in proper verse?

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

Freedom is not procured by a full enjoyment of what is desired, but by controlling the desire.

Truth conquers by itself; opinion by foreign aids.

What need have they of light to see what you are doing?

For these alone are each man's own property, which make his actions either shameful or noble.

It was in this way that Socrates became what he was, by paying attention to nothing other than reason in everything that he encountered.

Act without expectation.

What would he have done under such circumstances? Obviously he would have rolled himself up in a blanket and slept.

Do you wish to be praised by a man who curses himself three times every hour?

The body is to everyone the measure of the possessions proper for it, just as the foot is of the shoe.

For to that which once exceeds a due measure, there is no bound.

The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

When people see some things as beautiful, other things become ugly. When people see some things as good, other things become bad.

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move.

We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.

We work with being, but non-being is what we use.

What does it mean that success is as dangerous as failure? Whether you go up the ladder or down it, your position is shaky.

Tolerant, you are impartial. Impartial, you are kingsize. Kingsize, you are noble. Noble, you are homelike.

The next best is a leader who is loved and praised. Next, one who is feared. The worst is one who is despised.

When the great Tao is forgotten, goodness and piety appear. When intellectual cleverness arises, great hypocrisy begins.

If you want to become whole, let yourself be partial. If you want to become straight, let yourself be crooked.

He who shines his own light doesn't shine. He who praises his own work doesn't achieve.

Before the universe was created, there was something formless and perfect. It was pure, deep, solitary, and unchanging.

The heavy is the root of the light. The unmoved is the source of all movement.

A good knot needs no rope and cannot be untied. A good traveler leaves no tracks.

If you stay in the center and embrace death with your whole heart, you will endure forever.

Because it has no desires, it can be called small. Because all things return to it, it can be called great.

If you want to shrink something, you must first allow it to expand. If you want to get rid of something, you must first allow it to flourish.

The Tao never acts, yet nothing is left undone.

A truly good man is not aware of his goodness, and therefore is good. A foolish man tries to be good, and therefore is not.

Newborn children are soft and tender. When dead, they are stiff and hard. Ten thousand plants are soft and flexible. When dead, they are dry and brittle.

True words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not true. Good men do not argue; those who argue are not good.

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Overman—a rope over an abyss.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under.

The belly is the reason why man does not so readily take himself for a God.

Where the state ceases—there begins the human being who is not superfluous: there begins the song of necessity, the unique and irreplaceable melody.

Are you a slave? Then you cannot be a friend. Are you a tyrant? Then you cannot have friends.

And life itself told me this secret: 'Behold,' it said, 'I am that which must always overcome itself.'

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.

One loves ultimately one's desires, not the thing desired.

A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions—as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers, above all.

The thought of suicide is a powerful solace: by means of it one gets through many a bad night.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

To do great things is difficult; but to command great things is more difficult.

Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every profound spirit a mask is continually growing.

The garden of the world has no limits, except in your mind.

Where are your greatest dangers? In compassion.

Great debts do not make for gratitude, but for revenge; and if a little benefit is not forgotten, it becomes a gnawing worm.

The spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it is a great triumph over Christianity.

The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.

Hope in reality is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs the torments of man.

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.

Art is the proper task of life.

Ten truths a day must thou find; else thou seekest truth in the night, and thy soul remaineth hungry.

Fear is the mother of morality.

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.

He who cannot lie does not know what truth is.

As the ocean 'waves', the universe 'peoples'. Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature.

We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline.

We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing.

The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.

Since it is in the present and only in the present that you live, there is no other reality than present reality.

The primary illusion is that I am a separate, lonely center of consciousness and action, placed in a world that is not me.

How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, should consider itself a lonely outsider in this universe?

The self is not a thing; it is a process, an ongoing happening.

Security is an illusion. The desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing.

The backward law: the more you strive for happiness, the further away it retreats.

Death is the indispensable companion of life, without which life would lose all its savor.

Progress lies not in enhancing what is, but in advancing toward what will be.

Without death, life would be like a book whose pages are endless, and therefore meaningless.

The sensation of 'I' is not in fact separate from the experience of 'now'.

Words are like signposts: they point to the city, but they are not the city.

Most human beings eat the menu instead of the dinner.

The game of life is not a battle between good and evil; it is a play between light and shadow, which together make the picture.

The great problem of civilization is that we take the symbols for the reality.

In music, one does not make the end of a composition the point of the composition. If that were so, the best conductors would be those who played the quickest.

Generosity is giving more than you can, and pride is taking less than you need.

How does one achieve enlightenment? By not seeking it. For whoever seeks it assumes that he does not already have it.

To put it another way: God is the most obvious thing in the world, so obvious that we look right past Him.

Nothing is more creative than death, since it is the secret of life: it means that the past must always make way for the future.

There are no mistakes in nature. There are only events.

The root of all human anxiety is the attempt to hold your breath indefinitely.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.

The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

In each of us there is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves.

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

I have learned that beyond the surface, there is another world; and beyond our daylight lies a profound darkness of the stars.

The spirit of the depths from time immemorial and for all the future possesses a greater power than the spirit of this time.

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

The soul demands your folly; not your wisdom.

Dreams open into that primordial cosmic night that had its being long before there was any ego consciousness.

I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among all my patients in the second half of life, there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.

Individuation means becoming a single, homogeneous being, and, in so far as 'individuality' embraces our innermost, ultimate, and incomparable uniqueness, it also implies becoming one's own self.

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved, but only outgrown.

The self is not only the center, but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious.

Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth.

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one's being, but by integration of the contraries.

The soul is the living relationship with the unconscious.

The seat of the soul is where the inner and the outer worlds meet.

He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.

The meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one's own shadow.

The serious problems in life are never fully solved. If ever they should seem to be so, it is a sure sign that something has been lost.

Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness.

He is wisest among you who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing.

Real wisdom is the property of the divine, and human wisdom has little or no value.

The highest form of knowledge is not to imagine that one knows what one does not know.

I attend as a midwife to the soul; the god compels me to foster the birth of truth in others, while withholding from me the power to produce it myself.

Let us follow the argument wherever, like a wind, it may lead us.

To be afraid of death is only another form of thinking that one is wise when one is not; for it is to think that one knows what one does not know.

He who knows what is right will do what is right, for no one voluntarily chooses that which he knows will harm his own nature.

Wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence brings about wealth and all other goods for men, both in public and in private.

It is the greatest good for an individual every day to converse about virtue, and to test oneself and others.

Virtue does not come from money, but from virtue comes money and every other good of man, both public and private.

There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.