One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.
The funny thing about insane people is that it is kind of the opposite of being a celebrity. Nobody envies you.
Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships.
If someone’s ungrateful and you tell him he’s ungrateful, okay, you’ve called him a name. You haven’t solved anything.
Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?
In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty...
Familiarity can blind too.
I really don’t mind dying because I figure I haven’t wasted this life. Up until my first book was published I had all this potential, people would say, and I screwed up. After it, I could say: No, I didn’t screw up.
Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. This is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it, we are defining something less than Quality itself.
I think now the trace of egotism may have been the beginning of all his troubles.
It’s nice to start journeys pleasantly, even when you know they won’t end that way.
An evolutionary morality argues that The North was right in pursuing that war because a nation is a higher form of evolution than a human body and the principle of human equality is an even higher form than a nation.
The best students always are flunking. Every good teacher knows that.
Good is a noun rather than an adjective.
What’s wrong with technology is that it’s not connected in any real way with matters of the spirit and of the heart. And so it does blind, ugly things quite by accident and gets hated for that.
There is an evil tendency underlying all our technology – the tendency to do what is reasonable even when it isn’t any good.
The logic of science was infallible, and if the scientists were sometimes mistaken, this was assumed to be only from their mistaking its rules.
Only social patterns can control biological patterns, and the instrument of conversation between society and biology is not words. The instrument of conversation between society and biology has always been a policeman or a soldier and his gun.
The number of hypotheses available to explain any given phenomenon is infinite.
The Buddha takes no position on gods, he suggests they may exist or they may not, but either way you can live a moral life.