I'm a philosophy major. That means I can think deep thoughts about being unemployed

Obey the principles without being bound by them.

All fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability. The truth is outside of all fixed patterns.

Learn the principles, abide by the principles, and then dissolve the principles.

Pliability is life; rigidity is death, whether one speaks of man's body, his mind, or his spirit.

The more we value things, the less we value our selves. — We should devote ourselves to being self-sufficient and must not depend upon the external rating by others for our happiness. So it is true that the more we value things, the less we value our self. The more we depend upon others for esteem, the less we are self-sufficient.

Why don't ye be sensible, Flask? it's easy to be sensible; why don't ye, then? any man with half an eye can be sensible. I don't know that, Stubb. You sometimes find it rather hard.

Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.

But for anything deeper, I am not certain whether to know the world and to know human nature be not two distinct branches of knowledge, which while they may coexist in the same heart, yet either may exist with little or nothing of the other.

Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy!

There are doubts, sir, which, if man have them, it is not man that can solve them.

By a curious coincidence, as each point was recalled, the black wizards of Ashantee would strike up with their hatchets, as in ominous comment on the white stranger's thoughts. Pressed by such enigmas and portents, it would have been almost against nature, had not, even into the least distrustful heart, some ugly misgivings obtruded.