Featured Quotations
From the early teenage years, I educated myself by writing down my favorite passages from the books I read. I lost my records during migrations, and this is my attempt to keep some of the sayings. I include here my favorite poems, lyrics, as well as koans, proverbs, and longer prose excerpts.
Everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough.
Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do.
The criminalization of debt, then, was the criminalization of the very basis of human society.
History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.
Humans have not evolved any ritualized aggression-inhibiting mechanisms to ensure the survival of the species. For this reason, man is considered a very dangerous animal.
Our freest will underlies strict moral laws, and one of the reasons for our longing for freedom is to prevent our obeying other laws than these.
Improbable things happen a lot.
Extract the eternal from the ephemeral.
My actions are my only true belongings.
We live in a world of abstraction, a world of bureaucracy and machinery, of absolute ideas and of messianism without subtlety.
I insist on your freedom.
Two mirrors facing each other. There is no image in between.
When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.
What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge.
Oh yes, things exist like the echo
When you yell at the foot
Of a huge mountain.
The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.
There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.
