As soon as you have made a thought, laugh at it.
Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt.
People are difficult to govern because they have too much knowledge.
Abandon wisdom, discard knowledge, and people will benefit a hundredfold.
He who hoards much loses much.
Can you dissolve your ego? Can you abandon the idea of self and other? Can you relinquish the notions of male and female, short and long, life and death? Can you let go of all these dualities and embrace the Tao without skepticism or panic? If so, you can reach the heart of the Integral Oneness.
Give evil nothing to oppose and it will disappear by itself.
All things such as grass and trees are soft and supple in life. At their death they are withered and dry.
Let people take death seriously, and not travel far.
Seeing the small is called clarity.
Use the light to return to clarity.
Knowing the future is the flower of the Way, and the beginning of folly.
The truly great ones rely on substance, and not on surface, hold on to the fruit, and not to the flower.
The separate parts make no carriage.
What is well planted will not be uprooted.
Those who advice the ruler on the Way, do not want the world subdued with weapons.
Thorn bushes grow where armies have camped.
Battles are followed by years of famine.
Weapons are ominous tools. They are abhorred by all creatures. Anyone who follows the Way shuns them.
Weapons are ominous tools. They are not the noble ruler’s tools. He only uses them when he can’t avoid it.