Meaning

One idea from each of the 33 books on this topic.

• Svetaketu comes home at 24 after 12 years of study, proud of himself. His father has him drop salt in water overnight. In the morning he can’t find the salt, yet every sip tastes of it. The hidden essence of things is like that: “Verily, indeed, it is here.”

  From Upanishads by Anonymous

• You don’t have to look far for the pattern. When you carve a new ax handle, the model is the handle already in your hand. Treat people by the measure you already carry in yourself.

  From The Doctrine of the Mean by Zisi

• Learning works like building a mound one basket of earth at a time. If you stop one basket short, the stopping is your own doing. If you tip in a single basket on flat ground, that step forward is yours as well.

  From The Analects by Confucius

• You arrived with nothing in your hands, and you’ll leave with nothing in your hands. Whatever pile you build in between doesn’t travel with you. Some people even manage to lose it before they die, so the whole labor of a life buys them exactly nothing, twice.

  From Ecclesiastes by Qoheleth

• Fill a bowl to the brim and it spills when you carry it. Keep sharpening a blade and the edge soon goes. When gold and jade fill the hall, their possessor cannot keep them safe. So when the work is done, step back.

  From Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu

• An empty boat drifts into yours on the river, and even a short-tempered man stays calm. If someone is sitting in it, he shouts, and by the third shout he is cursing. “If he could only roam empty through life, who would be able to injure him?”

  From Zhuangzi by Zhuangzi

• Glaucon restates a view he doesn’t hold: people are just only out of fear. A shepherd named Gyges finds a ring that makes him invisible, and uses it to seduce the queen, kill the king and take the kingdom. Given that ring, a just man would do the same.

  From The Republic by Plato

• You study to get a job, take the job to earn money, and want the money for something else again. The chain has to stop somewhere, or all your wanting would be empty. Whatever sits at the end, wanted for itself alone, is the good worth knowing.

  From Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle

• Someone insulted you, hit you, knocked you down, robbed you. You keep that list and read it again every night. Each reading makes the anger new again. People who stop reading the list are the ones whose anger finally goes quiet.

  From Dhammapada by Anonymous

• Arjuna objects that the mind is as hard to hold as the wind. Krishna agrees that it is restless and strong. It can still be trained by habit and self-command. Each time it breaks away, you bring it back.

  From Bhagavad Gita by Vyasa

• The teaching is a raft. You use it to cross the river, and on the far bank you leave it behind. If even the teaching has to be put down, the ideas you hold apart from it have to go first.

  From The Diamond Sutra by Anonymous

• Children reach into a narrow jar for figs and nuts, grab a fistful, and cry because the hand won’t come out. Drop a few and it slides free. The advice for adults is the same: “do not desire many things and you will have what you want.”

  From Discourses and Enchiridion by Epictetus

• Picture gold caked in mud. The mud hides the gold but doesn’t change it. Scrape it off and the gold is simply gold again. A soul turned ugly is dirtied by what it took on, and it is still gold underneath.

  From The Enneads by Plotinus

• You get the thing you wanted, and soon you want the next one. That itch is named in a prayer: “our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.” The restlessness is not a defect to fix. It points to what the heart was made for.

  From Confessions by Augustine

• Practice doesn’t create your true nature. It removes what blocks it, the way a farmer clears the channels and the water runs into the field by itself.

  From The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali by Patañjali

• Bad luck, Philosophy says, is more useful than good. Good luck always pretends it will stay. “Ill Fortune is always truthful, since, in changing, she shows her inconstancy.” It also shows you who your real friends are, which your success kept hidden.

  From The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius

• When someone hits you with a stick, you get angry at the person, not the stick. But the person is driven by anger, the way the stick is driven by the hand. So be angry at the anger, if at anything.

  From The Way of the Bodhisattva by Shantideva

• Most of your troubles don’t come from nature or from other people. They come from your own excess. Wanting silver dishes leads to wanting gold ones, then sapphire, and that wanting never ends.

  From Guide for the Perplexed by Moses Maimonides

• A reed flute can sing only because it was cut from the reed bed. The crying inside the music is the memory of the wet ground it grew in. Your ache works the same way. It is proof you were rooted somewhere once, and a pull back toward it.

  From The Essential Rumi by Rumi

• Sorrow has plain remedies. Any pleasure eases it, and so do tears and the sympathy of friends, who seem to share the weight. Looking at a truth helps. So do sleep and baths, because whatever sets the body right again eases the mind.

  From Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas

• You cannot live here without trial. Running from it often drops you deeper in. Meet it at the door when it first knocks, not after it has a chair inside.

  From The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis

• People go to sea, go to war, and gamble their money away for one reason: they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber. Sitting still with nothing to do, you start to feel how weak and mortal you are. The busyness is there to keep that thought away.

  From Pensées by Blaise Pascal

• A stone falls from a roof and kills a man, and someone says God meant it. Answer with the wind and his errand, and they ask why the wind blew just then. The questions go back until you take refuge in the will of God, the sanctuary of ignorance.

  From Ethics by Baruch Spinoza

• Picture an earthquake swallowing all of China. A kind man in Europe hears, says sad and thoughtful things, then sleeps soundly. Yet “if he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night.” Distant millions move him less than his own small hurt.

  From The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith

• A shop owner charges a child the same fair price he charges an adult. Every customer is served honestly. But he does it because cheating would hurt his business. The act matches what duty asks, yet duty isn’t why he does it.

  From Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant

• Your mind is not in charge. Wanting comes first and thinking serves it: “The intellect, as the will’s mere tool, is as different from it as is the hammer from the smith.” Notice which way your mistakes fall the next time you add up a bill.

  From The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer

• You pack a trunk for Naples to escape your sadness and wake up there beside the same sad self. “My giant goes with me wherever I go.” Copying other people is travel of the mind, and it fails the same way. “Insist on yourself; never imitate.”

  From Self-Reliance and Other Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Love stories, the judge says, end at the wedding, just where they should begin. Falling in love feels eternal, but it rests on a feeling. He argues that marriage keeps first love alive by adding a promise and a choice made again each day.

  From Either/Or by Søren Kierkegaard

• A girl sure her wish will come true isn’t showing faith. She has never faced the impossible. Faith admits it can’t happen and believes anyway.

  From Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard

• The other way is to shrink. You become useful, likeable, successful, and somehow smaller. The world may praise you for the shrinking. That is how the loss stays quiet.

  From The Sickness Unto Death by Søren Kierkegaard

• Everyone agreed the nation needed railroads. Under its rails lay wooden ties called sleepers, and in each one he saw an Irish or Yankee laborer, laid down so that others could ride. “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.”

  From Walden by Henry David Thoreau

• A demon says you must live this same life again. Every small pain and every small joy, in the same order, forever. If that thought got power over you, it would crush you or remake you.

  From The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche

• The heaviest thing in a person is the habit of taking everything seriously. It shows up as solemn faces and correct opinions and a slow walk. The cure is not more seriousness. Learn to dance, and learn to laugh at yourself while you do it.

  From Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche