Lao Tzu Tao Te Ching Quotes

#1. Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself? LAO-TZU, Tao-te-Ching

Jon Kabat-Zinn

#2. Revere the unity of all-that-is
carry out your daily activities with compassion;
if you do not limit your compassion,
you yourself will not be limited.

Lao-Tzu

#3. But I must own that I also felt stirred by an unselfish desire to voice all the joys and sorrows, the hopes and ambitions, of the American Negro, in classic musical form.

James Weldon Johnson

#4. Two names emerge from a single origin and both are called mysterious.

Lao-Tzu

#5. Acquisition means life to miserable mortals.

Hesiod

#6. To bear and not to own; to act and not lay claim; to do the work and let it go: for just letting it go is what makes it stay.

Lao-Tzu

#7. Earth is a divine organism
it cannot be successfully manipulated
Who attempts manipulation will encounter defeat

Lao-Tzu

#8. What is the Tao Te Ching? Five hundred years before the birth of Jesus, a God-realized being named Lao-tzu in ancient China dictated 81 verses which are regarded by many as the ultimate commentary on the nature of existence.

Wayne Dyer

#9. God must've had single women in mind when he invented dogs

Kristan Higgins

#10. Perfect tranquillity is the way of heaven and earth.

Lao-Tzu

#11. It's not our job to play judge and jury, to determine who is worthy of our kindness and who is not. We just need to be kind, unconditionally and without ulterior motive, even - or rather, especially - when we'd prefer not to be.

Josh Radnor

#12. Too many words cause exhaustion
[In the mind or from the mouth]
Better to abide in stillness

Lao-Tzu

#13. How can one know the eternal origin?
By letting go of ideas
and allowing it to reveal itself

Lao-Tzu

#14. There is
a time to live
and a time to die
but never to reject the moment.

Lao-Tzu

#15. When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.

Lao-Tzu

#16. To know non-knowing is optimal
to imagine one knows
is affliction of mind

Lao-Tzu

#17. Countless words
count less
than the silent balance
between yin and yang

Lao-Tzu

#18. Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness. All can know good as good only because there is evil.

Lao-Tzu

#19. For the sage
Heaven and Earth join
in bestowing the greatest gifts

Lao-Tzu

#20. Love had meant nothing to him but sawdust and cinders.

Virginia Woolf

#21. One can never know oneself but only narrate oneself

Simone De Beauvoir

#22. In a way, Sandy did them a disservice, provided them with dreams and legends that blocked off their perception of the truth.

Robert Coover

#23. Who acts in stillness finds stillness in his life.

Lao-Tzu

#24. Peace is our original state

Lao-Tzu

#25. Emptiness appears barren
yet is infinite fullness

Lao-Tzu

#26. Thinking, Fast and Slow

Chip Heath

#27. When the people of the world all know beauty as beauty, There arises the recognition of ugliness. When they all know the good as good, There arises the recognition of evil. - Lao Tzu, The Tao Te Ching

Scott Westerfeld

#28. The hard and mighty lie beneath the ground
While the tender and weak dance on the breeze above.

Lao-Tzu