To resist change, to try to cling to life, is therefore like holding your breath: if you persist you kill yourself.

Since opposed principles, or ideologies, are irreconcilable, wars fought over principle will be wars of mutual annihilation. But wars fought for simple greed will be far less destructive, because the aggressor will be careful not to destroy what he is fighting to capture. Reasonable - that is, human - men will always be capable of compromise, but men who have dehumanized themselves by becoming the blind worshipers of an idea or an ideal are fanatics whose devotion to abstractions makes them the enemies of life.

Life and love generate effort but effort will not generate them.

When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us.

They are enlightened who join in this play knowing it as play, for people suffer only because they take as serious what the gods made for fun.

Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.

As the fish doesn't know water, people are ignorant of space. Consciousness is concerned only with changing and varying details; it ignores constants-especially constant backgrounds. Thus only very exceptional people are aware of what is basic to everything.