As Coleridge said, "We receive but what we give." The happy life is a life of continual generosity in which we go out to meet and acclaim the world.

Middle age snuffs out more talent than even wars or sudden death.

Everyone is a bore to someone. That is unimportant. The thing to avoid is being a bore to oneself.

Those who have money think that the most important thing in the world is love. The poor know it is money.

Wisdom is keeping a sense of fallibility of all our views and opinions.

We are closer to the ants than to the butterflies. Very few people can endure much leisure.

In a happy marriage it is the wife who provides the climate, the husband the landscape.

We confess our bad qualities to others out of fear of appearing naive or ridiculous by not being aware of them.

Old age takes away from us what we have inherited and gives us what we have earned.

The only test of work of literature is that it shall please other ages than its own.

Words are as recalcitrant as circus animals, and the unskilled trainer can crack his whip at them in vain.

Complete focused applied awareness of the Soul (shuddha upayog) is considered absolute Knowledge (keval gnan).

I like to approach every day like it's my first, so this morning when I woke up I covered my body with red gelatin.

love being such, or such, the normal corners of your heart will never guess how much my wonderful jealousy is dark

Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human; art is making sense and giving shape to that sense. It is like the religious search for God.

Blaming something else makes that something else cause; and as that cause takes on power, the individual in the same act loses control and becomes effect.

The haiku lets meaning float; the aphorism pins it down.

I'd much prefer my books to shoes...In the summer I sometimes take walks without shoes but never without a novel.

We are Fragile, everyone. We all long for something more. Things are said and things are done and the pieces hit the floor. See how fragile.

The cool part about New York is that you can do that. You can talk to all the people you admire.