I want every young man who sees me to know that I'm not that different from them. I wasn't born into wealth. I wasn't born into fame. I made a lot of mistakes - but I kept at it.
He who trusts has never yet lost in the world. A suspicious man is lost to himself and the eworld.... Suspicion is of the brood of violence. Non-violence cannot but trust.
Man only remains hypnotised with the false idea of an ego. When this ghost is off from us, all dreams vanish, and then it is found that the one Self only exists from the highest Being to a blade of grass.
If a man will stand up and assert, and repeat and re-assert, that two and two do not make four, I know nothing in the power of argument that can stop him.
The truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth. Little men are dissolved in it. If there is any gold, truth makes it shine more brightly. . . .Truth, even in the mouth of an informer, a spy, a briber, can become bigger than anybody who tries to destroy it. Truth survives.
I would like [the working man] to give me back books and newspapers and theories. And I would like to give him back, in return, his old insouciance, and rich, original spontaneity and fullness of life.
And do you know, do you know that mankind can live without the Englishman, it can live without Germany, it can live only too well without the Russian man, it can live without science, without bread, and it only cannot live without beauty, for then there would be nothing at all to do in the world! The whole secret is here, the whole of history is here. Science itself would not stand for a minute without beauty
There is no way of influencing men so powerfully as by means of the women. These should therefore be our chief study; we should insinuate ourselves into their good opinion, give them hints of emancipation from the tyranny of public opinion, and of standing up for themselves; it will be an immense relief to their enslaved minds to be freed from any one bond of restraint, and it will fire them the more, and cause them to work for us with zeal, without knowing that they do so; for they will only be indulging their own desire of personal admiration.
A matter that becomes clear ceases to concern us.--What was that god thinking who counseled, "Know thyself!" Did he perhaps mean,"Cease to concern yourself! Become objective!"--And Socrates?--And "scientific men"?