Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousand of miles and all the years you have lived.

As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.

No one returns with good will to the place which has done him a mischief.

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages.

You write in order to change the world…the world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even but a millimetre the way people look at reality, then you change it.

Jealousy feeds upon suspicion, and it turns into fury or it ends as soon as we pass from suspicion to certainty.

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. Each of us carries his own life-form—an indeterminable form which cannot be superseded by any other.

Appearance rules the world.

Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever.

Nothing is more precious than being in the present moment. Fully alive, fully aware.

Ignorance never settle a question.

All that is important in this moment is movement. Make the movement vital and worth living. Do not let it slip away unnoticed and unused.

Most people are on the world, not in it—have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them—undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.

There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life. . . To seek a total unity is wrong. To give as much meaning to one’s life as possible is right to me.

Man can learn nothing unless he proceeds from the known to the unknown.

The growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and . . . each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement.

What is a man in nature? Nothing in relation to the infinite, everything in relation to nothing, a mean between nothing and everything.