“Important thing to realize is the world is not here to make me happy. When you don't demand that the situation, or place, or person should make you happy, then actually the situation, place, or person is quite satisfying.”

“Do you really need to mentally label every sense perception and experience? Do you really need to have a reactive like/dislike relationship with life where you are in almost continuous conflict with situations and people? Or is that just a deep-seated mental habit that can be broken? Not by doing anything, but by allowing this moment to be as it is.”

“Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to "die before you die" --- and find that there is no death.”

“Once bliss becomes normal it's no longer bliss, it's just peace.”

“The past cannot survive in your presence. It can only survive in your absence.”

“The way to learn German, is, to read the same dozen pages over and over a hundred times, till you know every word and particle in them, and can pronounce and repeat them by heart.”

“That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased.”

“Use makes a better soldier than the most urgent considerations of duty,--familiarity with danger enabling him to estimate the danger. He sees how much is the risk, and is not afflicted with imagination; knows practically Marshal Saxe's rule, that every soldier killed costs the enemy his weight in lead.”

“This liberty is all that I request.”

“My free drift Halts not particularly, but moves itself In a wide sea of wax; no levelled malice Infects one comma in the course I hold, But flies an eagle flight, bold and forth on, Leaving no tract behind.”

“Every subject's duty is the Kings, but every subject's soul is his own.”

“I do not wish to remove from my present prison to a prison a little larger. I wish to break all prisons.”

“So every bondman in his own hand bearsThe power to cancel his captivity.”

“Passion and desire bind your Heart. Remove the locks. Become a key, become a key . . .”

“Rise up nimbly and go on your strange journey to the ocean of meanings.... Leave and don't look away from the sun as you go, in whose light you're sometimes crescent, sometimes full.”

“There is only one search: wandering... no dogma and no heresy.”

“Late, by myself, in the boat of myself, no light and no land anywhere, cloudcover thick. I try to stay just above the surface, yet I'm already under and living within the ocean.”

“The wound of peace is surety, Surety secure; but modest doubt is called The beacon of the wise, the tent that searches To th' bottom of the worst.”

“Love all, trust a few, Do wrong to none: be able for thine enemy Rather in power than use; and keep thy friend Under thy own life's key: be check'd for silence, But never tax'd for speech.”

“Tongues I'll hang on every treeThat shall civil sayings show. . . .”