Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness. If, in our heart, we still cling to anything—anger, anxiety, or possessions—we cannot be free.

Anger, resentment and jealousy doesn’t change the heart of others—it only changes yours.

Anybody can become angry—that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.

Where there is charity and wisdom, there is neither fear nor ignorance. Where there is patience and humility, there is neither anger nor vexation. Where there is poverty and joy, there is neither greed nor avarice. Where there is peace and meditation, there is neither anxiety nor doubt.

Usually when people are sad, they don’t do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.

The greatest remedy for anger is delay.

I had always hoped that this land might become a safe & agreeable Asylum to the virtuous & persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.

There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.

Liberty without Learning is always in peril and Learning without Liberty is always in vain.

Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.

The necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude and perseverance.

Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state becomes lawless or corrupt.

Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within solitude of his own heart.

All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.

True success, true wealth, does not come out of the barrel of a gun.

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.

Our task must be to free ourselves…by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.

Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time; the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence.

History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably gracious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

I am a true laborer: I earn that I eat, get that I wear, owe no man hate, envy no man’s happiness, glad of other men’s good, content with my harm.

What can be added to the happiness of a man who is in health, out of debt, and has a clear conscience?

Live each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.

Happiness is a quality of the soul, not a function of one's material circumstances.

Happiness consists more in the small conveniences of pleasures that occur every day, than in great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom to a man in the course of his life.

All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Surely human affairs would be far happier if the power in men to be silent were the same as that to speak. But experience more than sufficiently teaches that men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues.

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved.