Perfect happiness is the absence of striving for happiness.

I was given life because it was my time, and now I take leave of it according to the same law. Content with the natural sequence of these events, I am touched neither by joy nor by grief. I am simply hanging in the air ... incapable of freeing myself, tied by the threads of things.

Rewards and punishments are the lowest form of education.

To be truly ignorant, be content with your own knowledge.

Are you and I perchance caught up in a dream from which we have not yet awakened?

Can a man cling to the positive without any negative in contrast to which it is seen to be positive? If he claims to do so he is a rouge or a madman.

He who dreams ... does not know he is dreaming... . Only when he awakens does he know he has dreamt. But there is also the great awakening (ta-chiao), and then we see that [everything] here is nothing but a great dream. Of course, the fools believe that they are already awake-what foolishness! Confucius and you, both of you, are dreams; and I, who tell you this, am also a dream.