Even though human life may be the most precious thing on earth, we always behave as if there were something of higher value than human life.

People are the most important things in this life. Treat them as something precious because that is exactly what they are. Just like our beautiful Planet, we are all insignificant compared to the vastness of the Universe. We are all essentially equal. We are not alone and isolated: when you hurt someone, you hurt yourself; when you help someone, you help yourself.

The ethics of reverence for life makes no distinction between higher and lower, more precious and less precious lives. It has good reasons for this omission. For what are we doing, when we establish hard and fast gradations in value between living organisms, but judging them in relation to ourselves, by whether they seem to stand closer to us or farther from us. This is a wholly subjective standard. How can we know what importance other living organisms have in themselves and in terms of the universe?

There is a loneliness more precious than life. There is a freedom more precious than the world. Infinitely more precious than life and the world is that moment when one is alone with God.

Everyone matters more than you except to yourself.

When our mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters are considered both different and inferior in the eyes of the God we worship, this belief tends to permeate society and everyone suffers.

If you perceive yourself better than others, pride sets in. If you perceive yourself inferior to others, you lose self-esteem. When you do something, you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself. Each one of us is special because we are different. Whatever Nature creates is useful. Nature does not discriminate. Outside the realm of human perception, the concept of better or worse is meaningless.

Sometimes we behave as though there was something more important than life. But what?

Prestige! Sir, is it nothing? To be revered by fools, gaped at by children, envied by the rich and scorned by the wise.

Every being is incomparably precious to himself. This is the most mournful feature in human psychology. We did not invent it. It was handed to us along with our fingers and our fondness fo eating. It is the psychic calamity of the animal kingdom.

When you think that you are beautiful, you are liable to think that you are more beautiful than others, and such a thought is not a beautiful thought. To recognize or criticize ugliness and inferiority in others is to create the inferior and the ugly in yourself, and what you create in yourself will sooner or later be expressed through your mind and personality.

if you shall seem to some to be a person of importance, distrust yourself.

The most important single thing we had to pound into ourselves is that we were not important, we musn't be pedants; we were not to feel superior to anyone else in the world. We're nothing more than dust jackets for books, of no significance otherwise.

The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another; it is never the given that confers superiorities: ‘virtue’, as the ancients called it, is defined on the level of ‘that which depends on us’.