The philosopher cannot seriously put to himself questions that his civilization has not lived.

The bond that attaches us to the life outside ourselves is the same bond that holds us to our own life.

Since the Greeks, Western man has believed that Being, all Being, is intelligible, that there is a reason for everythingand that the cosmos is, finally, intelligible. The Oriental, on the other hand, has accepted his existence within a universe that would appear to be meaningless, to the rational Western mind, and has lived with this meaninglessness. Hence the artistic form that seems natural to the Oriental is one that is just as formless or formal, as irrational, as life itself.

Hunger is not the worst feature of unemployment; idleness is.

Much like tobacco companies want to keep smokers dependent on their deadly product, the oil industry wants to keep California dependent on oil – an expensive, dirty and limited resource that damages health.

From what deep springs of character our personal philosophies issue, we cannot be sure. In philosophers themselves we seem always able to notice some deep internal correspondence between the man and his philosophy. Are our philosophies, then, merely the inevitable outcome of the body of fate and personal circumstance that is thrust upon each of us? Or are these beliefs the means by which we freely create ourselves as the persons we become? Here, at the very outset, the question of freedom already hovers in the background.

It is the familiar that usually eludes us in life. What is before our nose is what we see last.