The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it. Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking. But mark this: do not say that thinking makes it so — for the brute who thinks nothing at all is happier than the man who thinks himself into despair.

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it — but that is a different matter entirely.

The demand to be loved is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions. Love is a gift, not a tribute; and the man who expects it as a due has already forfeited the capacity to receive it.

The animal needing something knows how much it needs; the man does not.

It is not the body's posture, but the mind's attitude that counts. A man may kneel in church and be spiritually proud, or stand in the marketplace and be inwardly at prayer.

The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it is not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of the other person — without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other.

The biggest source of investment error is not ignorance of finance or economics. It's the failure to understand that you are not the market — you are a person with a history, with fears, with a need to feel smart. The market doesn't know you exist, and it certainly doesn't care about your thesis.

The moment we cease to take stock of what is habitual, we begin to understand what is possible. Most men mistake the ruts of their days for the roads of their destiny.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. This is an error of the intellect as inveterate as it is pernicious, and yet it is one that we commit every day without knowing it.

A man who has no inner life is a slave to his surroundings, as the plant is a slave to the weather and the soil in which it grows.

We are always getting ready to live, but never living. And yet the secret of all life is enjoyment; it is just to notice what is happening, to see it, to taste it in its fullness, to find the curious savor of it.

We are always acting on what has just finished happening, and reflecting on what is about to begin. The moment of pure presence is always receding.

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full. A thought is a substitute for everything, and to exchange one's self for it is to lose everything.

We are never so much disposed to quarrel with others as when we are dissatisfied with ourselves.

We are not troubled by things, but by the opinions which we have of things. When, therefore, we are hindered, or disturbed, or grieved, let us never blame others, but ourselves — that is, our own opinions.

We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves. And yet we cannot make peace with ourselves by turning away from the world; we can only do it by turning more deeply into it.

The man who has no inner life is the slave of his surroundings, as the barometer is the obedient servant of the air at rest, and the weathercock of the air in motion.

We are always in our own company. Sometimes I feel I could tear myself open, not out of pain, but out of curiosity.

We are always getting ready to live, but never living. The vague promises of the future are enough to keep us tethered to the present without ever fully inhabiting it.

We are all serving a life-sentence in the dungeon of self. Blessed are they who have drugged themselves with the opium of a purpose — whether it be poetry or science or politics or the discovery of one's own soul.

The most thought-provoking thing in our over-thought world is that most people never think at all. And those who do think do not think enough — for most of their thinking is thinking about their thinking, which is no thinking at all.

We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are. And when we change, all things change with us — not because the world has shifted, but because the lens through which we read it has.

We are all serving a life-sentence in the dungeon of self. More and more, I suspect that solitude, which is the dungeon, contains also within it the key to its own liberation.

The most common form of despair is not being who you are.

We are enslaved by anything we do not consciously see. We are freed by conscious perception.

The really frightening thing about middle age is the knowledge that you'll grow out of it.

The investor's chief problem — and even his worst enemy — is likely to be himself. In the end, how your investments behave is much less important than how you behave.

We are apt to think that our ideas are a measure of things; but they are only a measure of ourselves.

To live without philosophizing is in truth the same as keeping the eyes closed without attempting to open them; and the pleasure of waking up is so much more beautiful than that of dreaming, that it must never be desired to have the eyes closed.

We are all of us the worse for too much solitude. A man who shuts himself up from the world falls into an exaggerated estimate of his own importance, and loses the power of measuring himself by his fellows.

The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.

The true paradox of consciousness is that we are never more fully ourselves than when we have forgotten ourselves—and this forgetting is not a loss but a gain, for in losing the boundary of self we touch something universal.