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

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

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

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.

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

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

For everything you do, there will be a last time that you do it.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

The opposite of spiritual is not material but egotistical.

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

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.

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.

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.

If we are ever in doubt what to do, it is a good rule to ask ourselves what we shall wish on the morrow that we had done.

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.”

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

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

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

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.

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

The only difference in people that really matters is the difference between people who believe they have control over their own lives and the people that believe they don’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.

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

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

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.

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

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

Crazy is you or me, amplified.

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

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.

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

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

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

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

Don’t waste your suffering. When we’re suffering, there’s something to learn.

Write drunk, edit sober.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Which will you have: wise madness or foolish sanity?

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

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

I am not a thing in the world; I am the space in which the world is happening.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

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

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

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

What’s another word for Thesaurus?

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

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

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.

They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.

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

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

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

Between the idea and the act a whole kingdom lies.

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

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

I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.

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

Be as you wish to seem.

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

Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.

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

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

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.

Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

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

It’s later than you think.

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

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

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

Every society honours its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.

Your problem is that you think you have time.

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

What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

Rich people can’t see a sillier version of Truth or Consequences, or a scarier version of The Exorcist. You can get just as revolted as they can—you can have the same nightmares. All of this is really American.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Taste repeated becomes style.

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.

An old Russian fable tells of two poor peasants – Boris, who had a goat, and Ivan, who didn’t. One day, Ivan came upon a strange-looking lamp; when he rubbed it, a genie appeared. She told him that she could grant him just one wish, but it could be anything he wanted. Ivan said, “I want Boris’ goat to die.”

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Anyone driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone driving faster than you is a maniac.

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

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

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

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

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

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

History is philosophy teaching by example.

The trick is to learn how to want the things you already have.

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

Sorrow is nothing but worn out joy.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.

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

It’s always catch-as-catch-can, but you may catch their fancy, or imagination, or even their eye, if they catch you in the right light. They may even be a catch. But there is always a catch.

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

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

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.

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

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

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.

This is absurd.

Paradox is a pointer telling you to look beyond it.

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.

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.

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

Think with the whole body.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

You’re born naked. The rest is drag.

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

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

Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.

Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist.

“Judge not, lest ye be judged” is an abdication of moral responsibility: it is a moral blank check one gives to others in exchange for a moral blank check one expects for oneself.

Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.

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

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

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

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

The surest sign of wisdom is continual cheerfulness.

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

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

Tedious and brief.

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.

Character is destiny.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

When inspiration arrives I want it to find me working.

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.

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

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.

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

The dose makes the poison.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tastes classifies, and it classifies the classifier.

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.

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