Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you may be fierce and original in your work.

Every society honours its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.

Let come what comes, let go what goes. See what remains.

Between what is said and not meant, and what is meant and not said, most of love is lost.

You see one object which makes you think of another. The two together is an idea.

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

There are two types of people: those that talk the talk and those that walk the walk. People who walk the walk sometimes talk the talk but most times they don’t talk at all, ’cause they walkin’.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.

The way to love anything is to realise that it may be lost.

Tedious and brief.

Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

Happiness is like a butterfly, the more you chase it, the more it will evade you, but if you notice the other things around you, it will gently come and sit on your shoulder.

Problems are inevitable. Problems are solvable. Solutions create new problems which must be solved in their turn.

You’ll worry less about what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do.

Almost every idea that you have is downstream from what you consume. When you choose who to follow on Twitter, what book to read, what podcast to listen to, you’re choosing your future thoughts.

The world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.

The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right.

People who claim they don’t let little things bother them have never slept in a room with a single mosquito.

Be as you wish to seem.

To want to meet an author because you like his books is as ridiculous as wanting to meet the goose because you like pâté.

Talent hits a target no one else can hit, while genius hits a target that no one else can see.

Humour is what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to.

Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is the best.

The world is full of fools; and he who would not wish to see one must not only shut himself up alone, but must also break his looking-glass.

If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.

To be stupid and selfish and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness; though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.

If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.

Life is like a blank piece of paper. But just remember, you’re writing with a sharpie.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

Before you take mushrooms or LSD, people will say, “It’s going to allow you to have thoughts you’ve never had before.” When you hear that it makes no sense because you think, “I can think whatever I want now.” And then you take hallucinogens and you realise there are thoughts your mind stops you from having. I’m very interested in living a life where I’m always in that realm, where I’m having thoughts that my unconscious is trying to prevent.

I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that.

We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under the flesh.

The big problem is that people don’t believe a revolution is possible, and it is not possible precisely because they do not believe it is possible.

We are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it.

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

I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don’t even invite me.

Throughout the whole of life one must continue to learn to live. And what will amaze you even more, throughout life one must learn to die.

The way you do anything is the way you do everything.

If you don’t know what you want to do it’s harder to do it.

See everything; overlook a great deal; correct a little.

What works good is better than what looks good, because what works good lasts.

In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.

There’s a concept of being entertained by other people, or by things, or by TV programmes, or whatever, that is a mistake. We may interpret what is happening as the other thing entertaining us but really the only thing that entertains us is our own creative engagement with it.

Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.

This is absurd.

Before you act, listen. Before you react, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you criticize, wait. Before you pray, forgive. Before you quit, try.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

The only difference between a rut and a grave is their dimensions.

What they call you is one thing. What you answer to is something else.

History is philosophy teaching by example.

The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous.

How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.

Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian.

You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?

Think with the whole body.

For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.

If I had five minutes to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first three sharpening the axe.

The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.

I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.

I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s.

There’s a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.

Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.

What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is stoned to death.

Seek freedom and become captive of your desires, seek discipline and find your liberty.

Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.

No worthy problem is ever solved within the plane of its original conception.

For there is always a sanctuary more, a door that can never be forced, whatever the force, a last inviolable stronghold that can never be taken, whatever the attack; your vote can be taken, your name, your innards, even your life, but that last stronghold can only be surrendered.

That which we do not bring to consciousness appears in our lives as fate.

On what principle is it that with nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

Believe those who seek the truth. Doubt those who find it.

Taste repeated becomes style.

Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.

A bore is someone who persists in holding his own views after we have enlightened him with ours.

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.

This is the main question, with what activity one’s leisure is filled.

It’s good to be open-minded, but not so open that your brain falls out.

Why be unhappy about something if it can be remedied? And what is the use of being unhappy if it cannot be remedied?

Confidence is not about believing you’ll win. It’s about being comfortable with the fact that you might lose.

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.

I wanted to be alone in quite an unusual, new way. The very opposite of what you are thinking: namely, without myself.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.

Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don’t need.

Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.

Your problem is that you think you have time.

Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.

Which will you have: wise madness or foolish sanity?

In the beginning there was crying. In the middle there was confusion. In the end there was silence.

Common sense is what tells you that the world is flat.

I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.

When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution isn’t beautiful, I know it is wrong.

A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim.

Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.

Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.

Provided that it is not accompanied by humiliation, discomfort can be endured for long periods without complaint. For proof of this, we have only to look to the example of the many soldiers and explorers who have, over the centuries, willingly tolerated privations far exceeding those suffered by the poorest members of their societies, so long as they were sustained throughout their hardships by an awareness of the esteem in which they were held by others.

Let not the defeatists tell us that it is too late. It will never be earlier. Tomorrow will be later than today.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

Look closely at the present you are constructing. It should look like the future you are dreaming.

When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail.

Vincent Van Gogh. Everyone said to him, “You can’t be a great painter, you only have one ear.” And you know what he said? “I can’t hear you.”

It would be better if there were nothing. Since there is more pain than pleasure on earth, every satisfaction is only transitory, creating new desires and new distresses, and the agony of the devoured animal is always far greater than the pleasure of the devourer.

Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what is going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much he had learnt in seven years.

Life is a long failure of understanding. A long mistaken shutting of the heart.

The surest sign of wisdom is continual cheerfulness.

If you don’t have a plan, you become part of somebody else’s plan.

The dose makes the poison.

Everything has been said. But nobody listens. Therefore it has to be said all over again only better. In order to say it better, we have to know how it was said before.

What’s another word for Thesaurus?

Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.

Here it is—right now. Start thinking about it and you miss it.

Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one.

Someone with a healthy sense of self isn’t afraid that they’ll vanish if they ever break eye contact with the mirror.

I want to be at least as alive as the vulgar.

If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist it’s another nonconformist who doesn’t conform to the prevailing standards of nonconformity.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

Just wait until now becomes then. You’ll see how happy we were.

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.

Happiness is related to the level of expectation. To be the mayor of Wellington, or the second richest farmer in Southland, is a gnawing futility if you can only be satisfied by being Prime Minister.

I Started Out With Nothing and I Still Have Most of It Left

Imagine a room, awash in gasoline. And there are two implacable enemies in that room. One of them has 9000 matches. The other has 7000 matches. Each of them is concerned about who’s ahead, who’s stronger.

Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television.

Why not go out on a limb? That’s where the fruit is.

Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist.

Know what’s weird? Day by day, nothing seems to change. But pretty soon, everything’s different.

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

A movie is good or bad not because of what it is about, but because of how it is about it.

Wealth consists not in having many possessions, but in having few wants.

Design is a solution to a problem. Art is a question to a problem.

According to the second law of thermodynamics, things fall apart. Structures disintegrate. Buckminster Fuller hinted at a reason we are here: by creating things, by thinking up new combinations, we counteract this flow of entropy. We make new structures, new wholeness, so the universe comes out even. A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, “There’s a hunter, a plow, a fish,” is making mental connections that have as much real force in the universe as the very fires in those stars themselves.

If you don’t understand how someone could possibly believe something as stupid as they do, this is more likely a failure of understanding on your part than a failure of reason on theirs.

When inspiration arrives I want it to find me working.

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

You’re born naked. The rest is drag.

An unproblematic state is a state without creative thought. It’s other name is death.

Politics in a democracy is based on getting people to agree with you, not making them afraid to disagree.

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.

Although an entire book could be written about each one, let me simply list, roughly in order of their occurrence, some of the major conditions, desires and attitudes that must be given up in the course of a wholly successful evolving lifetime:

• The state of infancy, in which no external demands need be responded to
• The fantasy of omnipotence
• The desire for total possession of one’s parents
• The dependency of childhood
• Distorted images of one’s parents
• The omnipotentiality of adolescence
• The “freedom” of uncommitment
• The agility of youth
• The sexual attractiveness and/or potency of youth
• The fantasy of immortality
• Authority over one’s children
• Various forms of temporal power
• The independence of physical health
• And, ultimately, the self and life itself.

Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.

People felt that enlightenment was going entirely with the flow, but that’s like being the ball in a football game. I’d rather be the quarterback.

If you are lonely when you’re alone, you are in bad company.

The best thing is to do the right thing; the next best is to do the wrong thing; the worst thing of all things is to stand perfectly still.

The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.

In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action.

It’s later than you think.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.

Too many people spend money they haven’t earned to buy things they don’t want to impress people they don’t like.

Write drunk, edit sober.

What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

The lives of the psyche and of the world are not separate; the inner and the outer realities are like a pair of funfair mirrors set against one another, and life is the flow of images reflected in them.

Why should any phenomenon be assumed impossible? The universe begins to look more and more like a great thought, than a great machine.

At any given moment you’re failing to see the way things actually are. The manifestation is that you’re failing to be kind.

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

It is the function of the artist to evoke the experience of surprised recognition: to show the viewer what he knows but does not know that he knows.

Intelligence is knowing how to win the game. Wisdom is knowing which game to play in the first place.

True success is figuring out your life and career so you never have to be around jerks.

I think that having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own.

A gentleman is a man who can play the accordion but doesn’t.

If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so. The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.

Don’t be yourself. Be someone a little nicer.

When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them. Where they speak out for the privileges of a puny group, I shall shout for the rights of all mankind.

The opposite of spiritual is not material but egotistical.

I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.

The purpose of art is not to solve problems but to formulate them correctly.

The Stone Age came to an end not because we had a lack of stones, and the oil age will come to an end not because we have a lack of oil.

Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, “Why, why, why?”
Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.

Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.

The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.

When the boy asked him if this knowledge were a special knowledge only to the blind the blind man said that it was not. He said that most men were in their lives like the carpenter whose work went so slowly for the dullness of his tools that he had not time to sharpen them.

It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth.

It’s a small world, but not if you have to clean it.

Man is disturbed not by things, but by the views he takes of them.

The television screen has become the retina of the mind’s eye.

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

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

I, on the other hand, am a fully-rounded human being, with a degree from the University of Life, a diploma from the School of Hard Knocks, and three gold stars from the Kindergarten of Getting the Shit Kicked Out of Me.

Pessimism and optimism emerge as being a dispute about how far one is prepared to look, about focal distances.

Character is destiny.

The past does not repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes.

People are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

The cost of a thing is the amount of life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

Paradox is a pointer telling you to look beyond it.

A culture is the residue of all the things that people have thought worthwhile to preserve.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Yes, I have free will. I have no choice but to have it.

Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realise that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.

The first rule of tinkering is to save all the parts.

A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.

Confidence is the feeling you have before you understand the situation.

For 50 million years our biggest problems were too few calories, too little information. For about 50 years our biggest problems have been too many calories, too much information.

To oppose something is to maintain it. They say here “all roads lead to Mishnory.” To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.

If you want something you’ve never had, you must be willing to do something you’ve never done.

The “I” and “mine” are extra. We are adding them to the experience.

Zen pretty much comes down to three things—everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.

Assume that every human being currently alive, all eight billion souls on Earth, is a marble placed in a massive jar. If given the opportunity, would you put your marble in with the others, shake the jar, take another marble at random, and live that life instead? If the answer is no, then you know you live a blessed life.

Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

Life is full of misery, pain and tremendous suffering, and it’s all over much too quickly.

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.

The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.

Between the idea and the act a whole kingdom lies.

Any technology invented before you were 20 is just standard, anything invented while you were between 20 and 30 is new and exciting, while any technology invented after you were 30 is dangerous, unnatural and likely to upset the social order.

Sorrow is nothing but worn out joy.

Here’s a joke. Don’t feel offended. A Turk goes to see a doctor. He tells him: “When I touch my body with my finger, it hurts. When I touch my head, it hurts, my legs, it hurts, my belly, my hand, it hurts.” The doctor examines him and then tells him: “Your body’s fine but your finger’s broken.”

My dear man, your mind is ill but there’s nothing wrong with you. You have to change your outlook and change the world.