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He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
Some of the greatest, most revolutionary advances in science have been given their initial expression in attractively modest terms, with no fanfare.
Think like a man of action. Act like a man of thought.
Do not take life too seriously. You will not get out of it alive.
Life is not measured by the number of breaths you take but by the moments that take your breath away.
Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.
The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.
The sad truth is the truth is sad.
The earth is not my home, I'm just passing by
These considerations lead to the postulate of a new scientific discipline which we call general system theory. It's subject matter is formulation of principles that are valid for "systems" in general, whatever the nature of the component elements and the relations or "forces" between them.
If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself.
The root of happiness is altruism - the wish to be of service to others.
What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truth from its errors.
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.
No, no, you're not thinking, you're just being logical. 
I have done one thing that I think is a contribution: I helped Buddhist science and modern science combine. No other Buddhist has done that. Other lamas, I don't think they ever pay attention to modern science. Since my childhood, I have a keen interest.
The individual has to awaken his intelligence, not through any form of discipline, resistance, compulsion, coercion, but through freedom.
Great souls have wills; feeble souls have wishes.
Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it.
The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.
True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.
There is only one journey. Going inside yourself.
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him
I hope I never get so old I get religious.
But among many professional women the existence of sex differences is still a source of discomfort. As one colleague said to me, "Look, I know that males and females are not identical. I see it in my kids, I see it in myself, I know about the research. I can't explain it, but when I read claims of sex differences, steam comes out of my ears."
Life is a sexually transmitted disease.
The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity
I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.
When we think of coconuts or pigs, there are no coconuts or pigs in the brain.
This is a feminist bookstore. There is no humor section.
Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it. For it cannot give any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is.
Management problems are not respecters of the company organization, nor of the talents of the people appointed to solve them.
I believe the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness. Whether one believes in religion or not, whether one believes in that religion or this religion, we are all seeking something better in life. So, I think, the very motion of our life is towards happiness.
When we meet real tragedy in life, we can react in two ways–either by losing hope and falling into self-destructive habits, or by using the challenge to find our inner strength.
We discover our character through decisions under pressure.
We are seeking for another basic outlook - the world as organization. This would profoundly change the categories of our thinking and influence our practical attitudes. We must envision the biosphere as a whole with mutually reinforcing or mutually destructive interdependencies.
"Say whatever you choose about the object, and whatever you might say is not it." Or, in other words? "Whatever you might say the object "is", well it is not." This negative statement is final, because it is negative.
She says: "I don't ask much. Just treat me like a lady and fuck me like a whore".
The artist . . . can leave a great many of the most fundamental aspects of culture to be picked up not from his actual words, but from his emphasis. [He can] group and stress [words] so that the reader almost unconsciously receives information which is not explicit in the sentences and which the artist would find it hard - almost impossible - to express in analytic terms. This impressionistic technique is utterly foreign to the methods of science.
Compassion is not religious business, it is human business, it is not luxury, it is essential for our own peace and mental stability, it is essential for human survival.
History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
We are all prisoners of our thoughts.
All you need is love.
Before solving a problem, make sure you've got the right problem.
The mind is the effect, not the cause.
Freedom from mental distraction equals power.
Between two evils I always pick the one I never tried before.
There is no greater need in society than that of gossip. It is the principal means of passing the time, which is one of the first necessities of life.
The world hates change yet it is the only thing that has brought progress.
I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.
My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition. 
We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.
If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.
Don't find fault, find a remedy.
Desired substance, things, patterns, or sequences of experience that are in some sense "good" for the organism - items of diet, conditions of life, temperature, entertainment, sex, and so forth - are never such that more of the something is always better than less of the something. Rather, for all objects and experiences, there is a quantity that has optimum value. Above that quantity, the variable becomes toxic. To fall below that value is to be deprived.
You can change your life with a simple shift of attention. But to make that simple shift, you have to find your heart. It's the only way. Accept yourself, then transcend yourself.
I believe it will have become evident why, for me, adjectives such as happy, contented, blissful, enjoyable, do not seem quite appropriate to any general description of this process I have called the good life, even though the person in this process would experience each one of these at the appropriate times. But adjectives which seem more generally fitting are adjectives such as enriching, exciting, rewarding, challenging, meaningful. This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-fainthearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one's potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life. Yet the deeply exciting thing about human beings is that when the individual is inwardly free, he chooses as the good life this process of becoming.
An eye for beauty locks onto faces that show signs of health and fertility - just as one would predict if it had evolved to help the beholder find the fittest mate.
He who has imagination without learning has wings and no feet. 
Heaven is where the police are British, the chefs Italian, the mechanics German, the lovers French and is all organized by the Swiss.

Hell is where the police are German, the chefs British, the mechanics French, the lovers Swiss is all organized by the Italians.
Creativity is connecting things.
All experience is subjective.
The bad sort of vulnerability comes in pretending to be someone you're not.
Just as blueprints don't necessarily specify blue buildings, selfish genes don't necessarily specify selfish organisms. As we shall see, sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is build a selfless brain. Genes are a play within a play, not the interior monologue of the players.
The love of economy is the root of all virtue.
Language mavens commonly confuse their own peeves with a worsening of the language.
Where ignorance is our master, there is no possibility of real peace.
It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how music should be played.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
Do not allow your dreams of a beautiful world to lure you away from the claims of men who suffer here and now. Our fellow men have a claim to our help; no generation must be sacrificed for the sake of future generations, for the sake of an ideal of happiness that may never be realised.
First-order cybernetics is the science of observed systems; Second-order cybernetics is the science of observing systems.
I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.
Doubt grows with knowledge.
Logic is not a theory but a reflexion of the world.
CONSCIENCE: The inner voice that warns us that someone may be looking.
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose. 
The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. The result of philosophy is not a number of “philosophical propositions”, but to make propositions clear. Philosophy should make clear and delimit sharply the thoughts which otherwise are, as it were, opaque and blurred.
A ship in harbor is safe -- but that is not what ships are for.
There are those who are so scrupulously afraid of doing wrong that they seldom venture to do anything.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.
The shadows: some hide, others reveal.
It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas or feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing is further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing whatsoever on reason or mental health. Just as there is a folie à deux there is a folie à millions. The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same mental pathology does not make these people sane.
My life consists in my being content to accept many things.
It's all right letting yourself go, as long as you can get yourself back.
Happiness is a state of mind.
No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities.
The recognition of the difference between appearance and reality is a human discovery.
For every complicated problem there is a simple, easy to understand, wrong answer.
That which does not destroy us makes us stronger.
If every man could act as he chose, the whole of history would be a tissue of disconnected accidents.
Love is a state of being, and in that state, the 'me', with its identifications, anxieties, and possessions is absent. Love cannot be, as long as the activities of the self, of the 'me', whether conscious or unconscious, continue to exist.
People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don't find myself saying, "Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner." I don't try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.
If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.
The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
If an opinion can eventually go to the determination of a practical belief, it, in so far, becomes itself a practical belief; and every proposition that is not pure metaphysical jargon and chatter must have some possible bearing upon practice.
Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.
FAIRY TALE: a horror story to prepare children for the newspapers.
Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.
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