“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.”

“O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name; Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love... 'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;What's in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.”

“What is light, if Sylvia be not seen? What is joy if Sylvia be not by?”

“The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deemFor that sweet odour which doth in it live.”

“Two lovely berries moulded on one stem;So, with two seeming bodies, but one heart.”

“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”

“For thou hast given me in this beauteous face A world of earthly blessings to my soul, If sympathy of love unite our thoughts.”

“The nature of bad news affects the teller.”

“Be to yourself as you would to your friend.”

“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”

“Everything is made of one hidden stuff.”

“The Same, the Same: friend and foe are of one stuff; the ploughman, the plough, and the furrow, are of one stuff; and the stuff is such, and so much, that the variations of form are unimportant.”

“Love is the bridge between you and everything.”

“You never know how you look through other people's eyes.”

“When people tell me they've learned from experience, I tell them the trick is to learn from other people's experience.”

“My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's.”

“The house praises the carpenter.”

“If a man knows the law, find out, though he live in a pine shanty, and resort to him. And if a man can pipe or sing, so as to wrap the imprisoned soul in an elysium; or can paint a landscape, and convey into souls and ochres all the enchantments of Spring or Autumn; or can liberate and intoxicate all people who hear him with delicious songs and verses; it is certain that the secret cannot be kept; the first witness tells it to a second, and men go by fives and tens and fifties to his doors.”

“Every heroic act measures itself by its contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success at last, and then the prudent also extol.”

“Why are our bodies soft, and weak, and smooth But that our soft conditions and our hearts Should well agree with our external parts?”

“If we are true to ourselves, we can not be false to anyone.”

“There is a mortifying experience in particular, which does not fail to wreak itself also in the general history; I mean "the foolish face of praise," the forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease, in answer to conversation which does not interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved but moved, by a low usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face, with the most disagreeable sensation.”