The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile.

Different Chinese philosophers, writing probably in 5-4 centuries B.C., presented some major ideas and a way of life that are nowadays known under the name of Taoism, the way of correspondence between man and the tendency or the course of natural world.

Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.

It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.

There is no way of making a hedge grow like pruning it. There is no way of making sex interesting like repressing it.

For me, being literate and articulate is a form of judo, of overcoming the [system] by its own method.

It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odduncanny and highly improbable. G.K.Chesterton once said that it is one thing to be amazed at gorgon or a griffin, creatures which do not exist; but it is quite another and much higher thing to be amazed at a rhinoceros or a giraffe, creatures which do exist and look as if they don't. This feeling of universal oddity includes a basic and intense wondering about the sense of things.