Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.
We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.
We can only learn to love by loving.
There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.
Remember that the secret of all learning is patience and that curiosity is not the same thing as a thirst for knowledge.
For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.
Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.
Most of our love is shabby stuff, but there is always a thin line of gold, the bit of pure love on which all the rest depends — and which redeems all the rest.
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.
The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life’s major mysteries.
Education doesn’t make you happy. Nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free – if we are. Or because we’ve been educated – if we have. But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears, tells us where delights are lurking, convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever, that of the mind, and gives us the assurance – the confidence – to walk the path our mind, our educated mind, offers.
The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.
Love is the last and secret name of all the virtues.
Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
One should go easy on smashing other people’s lies. Better to concentrate on one’s own.
On connecting: Where does one person end and another person begin?
The cry of equality pulls everyone down.
Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.
Language is a machine for making falsehoods.
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.
A middling talent makes for a more serene life.
Jealousy comes from self-love rather than from true love.
