“Beyond a given point man is not helped by more "knowing", but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way.”

“Partly from being a more scattered population, which leads to self-dependence — partly to their religious struggles having given an historical character to their ordinary remembrances, nourished by that family pride which loves to look back — there is more individuality among the Scotch than among any other peasantry.”

“forget the past, for it is gone from your domain! forget the future, for it is beyond your reach! control the present! Live supremely well now! This is the way of the wise…”

“There were more ways to live than the ones given by one's superiors”

“It follows that the more definition is given, the more omniscient the management must be, so that no functions are left whole or partly undischarged, no person is overburdened with undelegated responsibility, or left without the authority to do his job properly.”

“The earlier views, those of Hobbes or Locke for instance, saw language as an instrument, and understood meaning in terms of designation. Discovering the meaning of words is finding what ideas or things they stood for. … By contrast, a hermeneutical view requires a very different conception. If we are partly constituted by our self-understanding, and this in turn can be very different according to the various languages which articulate for us a background of distinctions of worth, then language does not only serve to depict ourselves and the world, it also helps constitute our lives. Certain ways of being, of feeling, of relating to each other are only possible given certain linguistic resources.”

“Talent is God-given; be humble. Fame is man-given; be thankful. Conceit is self-given; be careful.”

“The only way to have eternal love is to never let your heart forget what it’s like to live without it.”

“And there is another way to rise above self-centeredness and that is by having the proper inner attitude toward your position or toward your status in life or whatever it is. You conquer self-centeredness by coming to the point of seeing that you are where you are today because somebody helped you to get there. And so many people, you see, live a self-centered, egocentric life because they have the attitude that they are responsible for everything and for their position in life. For everything they do in life, they feel, somehow, that they are responsible and solely responsible for it.”

“Man is the only living being who has a developed self-awareness and death-awareness.”