The petty thief is imprisoned but the big thief becomes a feudal lord.

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

Only he who has no use for the empire is fit to be entrusted with it.

The Perfect Man uses his mind like a mirror - going after nothing, welcoming nothing, responding but not storing.

The sage is still not because he takes stillness to be good and therefore is still. The ten thousand things are insufficient to distract his mind - that is the reason he is still.

The Spirit Tower has its guardian, but unless it understands who its guardian is, it cannot be guarded.

When men do not forget what can be forgotten but forget what cannot be forgotten - that may be called true forgetting.

The man who has forgotten self may be said to have entered Heaven.

Men all pay homage to what understanding understands, but no one understands enough to rely upon what understanding does not understand and thereby come to understand.

You can't discuss the ocean with a well frog - he's limited by the space he lives in. You can't discuss ice with a summer insect - he's bound to a single season.

He who has mastered the true nature of life does not labor over what life cannot do. He who has mastered the true nature of fate does not labor over what knowledge cannot change.

Life is nasty, brutish, and short. Death is easy.

If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.

Good music resembles something. It resembles the composer.

I think it's a very bad idea for someone to start writing for a readership.

I love going to the G4 sci-fi-type parties.

Who can wonder at the attractiveness... of the bar, for our ambitious young men, when the highest bribes of society are at the feet of the successful orator?

What the Soviet Union was to the ideology of Marxism, the Low-Fat Campaign is to the ideology of nutritionism—its supreme test and, as now is coming clear, its most abject failure.

You can curse the darkness or light a candle. The choice is yours.

Strikes and boycotting are akin to war, and can be justified only on grounds analogous to those which justify war, viz., intolerable injustice and oppression.

You dont need a machine to make pasta: a rolling pin and a fast hand can create a smooth, if thick, sheet.