The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

The beginning of wisdom is the discovery that there exist contradictions of permanent tension with which it is not possible to live at peace but with which it is not possible to live at all without them.

We are all of us the worse for too much liberty, and the better for a master hand over us at times; yet we struggle with all our might against that master hand when it is laid upon us.

Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed.

The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is safest if it sits on the fly-swatter.

The most violent appetites in all creatures are lust and hunger; the first is a perpetual call upon them to propagate their kind, the latter to preserve themselves. It is strange that the most brutal of passions should be the most spiritual.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility.

The true paradox of consciousness is that the more we know of ourselves, the more we become strangers to ourselves; for knowledge itself is a kind of forgetting—we lose the immediate simplicity of mere being in the complications of understanding what we are.

The true paradox of human freedom is that we are most ourselves when we are most constrained by love for something outside ourselves.

A man may take to drink on account of his wife, but he ought never to take to drink on account of his wife's husband.

The sign of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

The true paradox of consciousness is that we become most fully conscious precisely when we cease to think about consciousness at all, and surrender ourselves to the world.

The true paradox is that we become most fully alive at the moment when we cease to live for ourselves alone. It is in the surrender of self that self is found.

The true paradox of consciousness is that it cannot be fully grasped by introspection alone; the observer is always part of the observed, creating an irreducible gap between the thinking subject and its own thought.

The true paradox of consciousness is that the more we think about it directly, the more it eludes us; yet in the very act of eluding our grasp, it reveals itself most fully.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

The true paradox of the human condition is that we are simultaneously utterly insignificant and infinitely precious—strangers to the universe yet the only part of it that knows itself.

The paradox only disappears when we recognize that the contradictions of life are not errors to be eliminated but the very substance from which meaning emerges.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.