Free will is an illusion. People always choose the perceived path of greatest pleasure.
I have always tried to hide my efforts and wished my works to have a light joyousness of springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labors it has cost me.
Are you beyond happiness and sorrow? Is your life, your day, a series of peaks and troughs - one minute ecstatic, next minute depressed. If you are up and down, even a little, it probably feels normal, because the swings between such extremes have been with you for so long. But you don't need the ups and downs to make life feel alive. In fact the ups we call happiness are not really happiness but a kind of false interpretation of happiness. Real happiness is not the result of rising out of depression, and it does not result into falling into regular periods of depression. Real happiness is stable, constant, lasting, not dependent on anyone or anything. Sometimes we call it contentment or serenity or joy. But it's not excitement. Excitement will result in depression. Happiness just is. It's hard to imagine it after a life of highs and lows. Faced with the choice of constant, stable contentment and all the ups and downs, some people choose to stay with the ups and downs. And this is called addiction. The ups are dependent on something and that something just does not last forever. To discover real happiness don't pursue it and don't make it dependent on anything.
A blind person who sees is better than a seeing person who is blind.
Always go to other people's funerals, otherwise they won't come to yours.
I drive way too fast to worry about cholesterol
Each generation will reap what the former generation has sown
You must learn from your past mistakes, but not lean on your past successes.
The seed cannot know what is going to happen, the seed has never known the flower. And the seed cannot even believe that he has the potentiality to become a beautiful flower. Long is the journey, and it is always safer not to go on that journey because unknown is the path, nothing is guaranteed.
Nothing can be guaranteed. Thousand and one are the hazards of the journey, many are the pitfalls - and the seed is secure, hidden inside a hard core. But the seed tries, it makes an effort; it drops the hard shell which is its security, it starts moving. Immediately the fight starts: the struggle with the soil, with the stones, with the rocks. And the seed was very hard and the sprout will be very, very soft and dangers will be many.
There was no danger for the seed, the seed could have survived for millennia, but for the sprout many are the dangers. But the sprout starts towards the unknown, towards the sun, towards the source of light, not knowing where, not knowing why. Great is the cross to be carried, but a dream possesses the seed and the seed moves.
The same is the path for man. It is arduous. Much courage will be needed.
Art is the only place you can do what you like. That's freedom.
You can free yourself from aging by reinterpreting your body and by grasping the link between belief and biology.
To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.
... joy and sorrow are inseparable. . . together they come and when one sits alone with you . . . remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.
We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.
I have come to the conclusion that politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.
