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Favorite Quotes

“In quoting others, we cite ourselves.” -Julio Cortazar

JOHN ADAMS

  • When public virtue is gone, when the national spirit is fled, the republic is lost in essence, though it may still exist in form.

SAMUEL ADAMS

  • It is in the interest of tyrants to reduce the people to ignorance and vice. For they cannot live in any country where virtue and knowledge prevail.

THEODOR ADORNO

  • All modern fascist movements … have aimed at the ignorant; they have consciously manipulated the facts in a way that could lead to success only with those who were not acquainted with the facts. Ignorance with respect to the complexities of contemporary society makes for a state of general uncertainty and anxiety, which is the ideal breeding ground for the modern type of reactionary mass movement. 

AESCHYLUS

  • Wisdom comes through suffering.
  • Few men have the strength of character to rejoice in a friend’s success without a touch of envy.

ALEXANDER THE GREAT

  • The man who refuses to fight his battles ends up fighting them all in the end.
  • I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.
  • Through every generation of the human race there has been a constant war, a war with fear. Those who have the courage to conquer it are made free and those who are conquered by it are made to suffer until they have the courage to defeat it, or death takes them.

JAMES ALLEN

  • Self-control is strength. Right thought is mastery. Calmness is power.

HANNAH ARENDT

  • The essence of evil is its refusal to think.
  • The ideal subject of totalitarianism is … people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.

ARISTOTLE

  • “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” -Aristotle
  • I count one braver who overcomes their desires than one who conquers their enemies; for the hardest victory is over self.
  • The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.
  • Piety requires us to honor truth above our friends. 
  • The life of children, as much as that of intemperate men, is wholly governed by their desires. 
  • It is not enough to win a war; it is more important to organize the peace.
  • The intelligence consists not only in the knowledge but also in the skill to apply the knowledge into practice.
  • He who has never learned to obey cannot be a good commander.

ISAAC ASIMOV

  • When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent.
  • Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. 
  • Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.
  • Education isn’t something you can finish.
  • There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

MARCUS AURELIUS

  • The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
  • It’s the truth I’m after, and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance. 
  • Comfort is the worst addiction. 
  • The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.
  • A man’s worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions.
  • To offend a strong man, tell him a lie. To offend a weak man, tell him the truth.
  • There is but one thing of real value – to cultivate truth and justice, and to live without anger in the midst of lying and unjust men. 

JAMES BALDWIN

  • The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

  • No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility. 

RUTH BENEDICT

  • No one ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. They see it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking.

MARTIN BUBER

  • The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda. 

BUDDHA

  • Attachment and craving are the root of suffering. 

CHARLES BUKOWSKI

  • People empty me. I have to get away to refill. 

EDMUND BURKE

  • Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.

JULIUS CAESAR

  • It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die, than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience.

ALBERT CAMUS

  • As I usually do when I want to get rid of someone whose conversation bored me, I pretend to agree.
  • Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.
  • Be careful. When a democracy is sick, fascism comes to its bedside, but it is not to inquire about its health.

DALE CARNEGIE

  • If you are not in the process of becoming the person you want to be, you are automatically engaged in becoming the person you don’t want to be.
  • When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity.

CATO THE ELDER

  • If you are ruled by mind, you are a king. If by body, a slave.
  • Wise people learn more from fools than fools from the wise.

NOAH CHOMSKY

  • The world is a mysterious and confusing place. If you are not willing to be confused, you become a mere replica of someone else’s mind.

CICERO

  • Envy acquired by virtue is not really envy but glory.
  • Not for ourselves alone are we born.
  • Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.
  • Friendship improves happiness, and abates misery, by doubling our joys, and dividing our grief.
  • While there’s life, there’s hope.
  • I am not ashamed to confess I am ignorant of what I do not know.
  • The enemy is within the gates; it is with our own luxury, our own folly, our own criminality that we have to contend.
  • Freedom is participation in power.
  • It is the peculiar quality of a fool to perceive the faults of others and to forget his own.
  • To be content with what we possess is the greatest and most secure of riches.

CONFUCIUS

  • Never form a friendship with a man who is not better than you.
  • Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance. 
  • What the superior man seeks is in himself; what the small man seeks is in others.
  • By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.
  • The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.
  • The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life.
  • The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials.

JOSEPH CONRAD

  • Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.
  • Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists principally of dealings with men.
  • Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER

  • All greatness of character is dependent on individuality. The man who has no other existence than that which he partakes in common with all around him, will never have any other than an existence of mediocrity.

CORTAZAR

  • In quoting others, we cite ourselves.

SALVADOR DALI

  • Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.

CHARLES DARWIN

  • Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.

MAHMOUD DARWISH

  • We are captives of what we love, what we desire, and what we are.

RAM DASS

  • One way to get free of attachment is to cultivate the witness consciousness, to become a neutral observer of your own life. The witness place inside you is simple awareness, the part of you that is aware of everything – just noticing, watching, not judging, just being present, being here now.

LEONARDO DA VINCI

  • Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
  • Success lies in relentless execution of the basics.
  • The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.
  • Principles for the Development of a Complete Mind: Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses- especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.

EUGENE VICTOR DEBS

  • In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor, and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive or overawe the People.

ANTHONY DE MELLO

  • Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one’s awareness of one’s ignorance.

DEMOCRITUS

  • The brave man is he who overcomes not only his enemies but his pleasures.
  • The man enslaved to wealth can never be honest.

DANIEL DENNETT

  • There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.

CHARLES DICKENS

  • No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.

DENIS DIDEROT

  • We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.
  • Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
  • All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone’s feelings.

DIOGENES

  • It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.
  • Of what use is a philosopher who doesn’t hurt anybody’s feelings?
  • The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.
  • I am a citizen of the world.
  • When I look upon seamen, men of science and philosophers, man is the wisest of all beings; when I look upon priests and prophets, nothing is as contemptible as man.

FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

  • The wisest of all in my opinion is he who can, if only once a month, call himself a fool – a faculty unheard nowadays.
  • It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS

  • I would unite with anybody to do right; and with nobody to do wrong.
  • I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.
  • If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
  • It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.
  • True greatness is not found in power or wealth but in the fight for justice and humanity.
  • No republic is safe that tolerates a privileged class, or denies to any of its citizens equal rights and equal means to maintain them.

ALEXANDRE DUMAS JR

  • What distresses me is to see that human genius has limits and human stupidity none.
  • There are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory and the second philosophy. 

MAX EASTMAN

  • It is the ability to take a joke, not make one, that proves you have a sense of humor.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

  • The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.
  • Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
  • Whoever is careless with truth in small matters cannot be trusted in important affairs.
  • Information is not knowledge. The only source of knowledge is experience. You need experience to gain wisdom.
  • The belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science. Since, however, sense perception only gives information of this external world or of “physical reality” indirectly, we can only grasp the latter by speculative means. It follows from this that our notions of physical reality can never be final. We must always be ready to change these notions – that is to say, the axiomatic basis of physics – in order to do justice to perceived facts in the most perfect way. 
  • Nothing happens until something moves. When something vibrates, the electrons of the entire universe resonate with it. Everything is connected.
  • Concerning matter, we have all been wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.
  • I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.
  • I like to experience the universe as one harmonious whole. Every cell has life. Matter, too, has life; it is energy solidified. Our bodies are like prisons, and I look forward to be free, but I don’t speculate on what will happen to me. I live here now, and my responsibility is in this world now.
  • I am convinced that degeneracy follows every autocratic system of violence, for violence inevitably attracts moral inferiors. 
  • I do not believe we can have any freedom at all in the philosophical sense, for we act not only under external compulsion but also by inner necessity. Schopenhauer’s saying – “A man can surely do what he wills to do, but he cannot determine what he wills” – impressed itself upon me in youth and has always consoled me when I have witnessed or suffered life’s hardships. This conviction is a perpetual breeder of tolerance, for it does not allow us to take ourselves or others too seriously; it makes rather for a sense of humor.

T.S. ELIOT

  • Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm, but the harm (that they cause) does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
  • Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  • It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
  • Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.
  • It is not the length of life, but the depth.
  • To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
  • We gain the strength of the temptations we resist.

EPICTETUS

  • It is impossible for someone to learn what they think they already know.
  • No thing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.
  • What is the first business of one who practices philosophy? To get rid of self-conceit. For it is impossible for anyone to begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows. 
  • Freedom is not procured by a full employment of what is desired, but by controlling the desire. 
  • The trials you face will introduce you to your strengths. 
  • The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best.
  • It is the part of a wise man to resist pleasures.

EPICURUS

  • The greater the difficulty, the more the glory in surmounting it.
  • You don’t develop courage by being happy in your relationships everyday. You develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity.
  • The art of living well and the art of dying well are one.

ERASMUS

  • The less talent they have, the more pride, vanity, and arrogance they have. All these fools, however, find other fools who applaud them.
  • He who allows oppression shares the crime.

EURIPIDES

  • Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.

LUDWIG FEUERBACH

  • For the religious the holy is truth, for the philosophic the truth is holy.

RICHARD FEYNMAN

  • We must be careful not to believe things simply because we want them to be true. No one can fool you as easily as you can fool yourself.

LESLIE FIEDLER

  • This world is the only reality available to us, and if we do not love it in all its terror, we are sure to end up loving the ‘imaginary,’ our own self-deceits, the utopias of politicians, the futile promises of future reward which the misled call ‘religion.’ 

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

  • You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it.

MICHEL FOUCAULT

  • Knowledge is not for knowing; knowledge is for cutting.

ADAM FRANK (astrophysicist)

  • Rather than make claims of final theories, perhaps we should focus on our ever-continuing dialogue with the universe. It is the dialogue that matters most, not its imagined end.

ANNE FRANK

  • Human greatness does not lie in wealth or power, but in character and goodness.

VIKTOR FRANKL

  • When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.
  • Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.
  • No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

  • The only thing more expensive than education is ignorance.

SIGMUND FREUD

  • When a man is freed of religion, he has better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.
  • Who lacks sex speaks about sex, hungry talks about food, a person who has no money about money, and our oligarchs and bankers talk about morality. 

ERICH FROMM

  • Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality. 
  • The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness.

ROBERT FROST

  • Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
  • Freedom lies in being bold.
  • In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It goes on.

BUCKMINSTER FULLER

  • You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. 

JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH

  • The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

GALILEO GALILEI

  • I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

MAHATMA GANDHI

  • The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.

KHALIL GIBRAN

  • The lust for comfort murders the passions of the soul. 
  • A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.

ANDRE GIDE

  • Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.

J.W. von GOETHE

  • Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.
  • You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.
  • To think is easy. To act is difficult. To act as one thinks is the most difficult of all.

HAFEZ

  • Stay close to anything that makes you glad you are alive.

ALEXANDER HAMILTON

  • When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper . . . despotic in his ordinary demeanor – known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty – when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity – to join in the cry of danger to liberty – to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government and bringing it under suspicion – to flatter and fall in with all the nonsense of the zealots of the day – It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.

THICH NHAT HANH

  • Silence is essential. We need silence just as much as we need air, just as much as plants need light. If our minds are crowded with words and thoughts, there is no space for us.
  • In true dialogue, both sides are willing to change. 
  • We humans have lost the wisdom of genuinely resting and relaxing. We worry too much. We don’t allow our bodies to heal, and we don’t allow our minds and hearts to heal.

JIM HARRISON

  • The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.

STEPHEN HAWKING

  • The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.

FRIEDRICH HEGEL

  • We learn from history that we do not learn from history.

ROBERT HEINLEIN

  • You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

  • The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.

HERACLITUS

  • No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.
  • We are most nearly ourselves when we achieve the seriousness of the child at play.
  • Nothing endures but change.
  • Abundance of knowledge does not teach men to be wise.
  • It is in changing that we find purpose. 
  • All things come into being by conflict of opposites.

FRANK HERBERT (DUNE)

  • All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. 
  • I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

HERODOTUS

  • Of all men’s miseries the bitterest is this: to know so much and to have control over nothing.

WERNER HERZOG

  • Every man should pull a boat over a mountain once in his life.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

  • Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.
  • The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.

ERIC HOFFER

  • Rudeness is the weak person’s imitation of strength. 

HOMER

  • Any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again. 

HORACE

  • He who has begun has half done. Dare to be wise; begin!

HORATIUS

  • Rule your mind or it will rule you.

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLT

  • The most dangerous worldview is the worldview of those who have not viewed the world.

VICTOR HUGO

  • Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.

DAVID HUME

  • It is an absurdity to believe that the Diety has human passions, and one of the lowest of human passions, a restless appetite for applause.

ALDOUS HUXLEY

  • Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice. 
  • Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.
  • Unlike the masses, intellectuals have a taste for rationality and interest in facts. Their critical habit of mind makes them resistant to the kind of propaganda that works so well on the majority. 
  • The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence. 
  • The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude. 

THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY

  • Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.

HENRIK IBSEN

  • You see, the point is that the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.

WILLIAM JAMES

  • The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
  • The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.

KARL JASPERS

  • It is the search for truth, not possession of the truth, which is the way of philosophy. Its questions are more relevant than its answers, and every answer becomes a new question.

CARL JUNG

  • Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.
  • Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
  • Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.
  • Wisdom accepts that all things have two sides.
  • Midlife is the time to let go of an overdominant ego and to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence. 
  • The most dangerous psychological mistake is the projection of the Shadow onto others … this is the root of almost all conflicts.
  • Much of the evil in this world is due to the fact that man, in general, is hopelessly unconscious. 
  • Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health…
  • As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.
  • The persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual.
  • The growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness and each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement. 
  • We are so full of apprehensions, fears, that we don’t know exactly to what it points. A great change of our psychological attitude is imminent, that is certain. We need more understanding of human nature because the only real danger that exists is man himself. And we know nothing of man. His psyche should be studied because we are the origin of all coming evil. 
  • The body is a beast with a beast’s soul, an organism that gives unquestioning obedience to instinct. 
  • Fanaticism is always a sign of repressed doubt.
  • We must begin to learn about man until every Jekyll can see his Hyde.
  • Those people who are least aware of their unconscious side are the most influenced by it.
  • The difference between a good life and a bad life is how well you walk through the fire.
  • A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.
  • Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better to take things as they come along with patience and equanimity. 
  • The spiritual journey is not a career or a success story. It is a series of small humiliations of the false self that become more and more profound.
  • The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.
  • Emotions are not to be conquered; they are to be understood. 
  • Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness of other people.
  • The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.
  • Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you.
  • The journey to self-discovery is a journey of exploration, not a destination.
  • The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.
  • Laziness is the greatest passion of mankind, even greater than power or sex or anything.
  • Man has to cope with the problem of suffering. The Oriental wants to get rid of suffering by casting it off. Western man tries to suppress suffering with drugs. But suffering has to be overcome, and the only way to overcome it is to endure it.
  • Recognition of the Shadow, on the other hand, leads to the modesty we need in order to acknowledge imperfection. And it is just this conscious recognition and consideration that are needed whenever a human relationship is to be established.
  • Everything good is costly, and the development of the personality is one of the most costly of all things. It will cost you your innocence, your illusions, your certainty.
  • We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses. 

FRANZ KAFKA

  • It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves.

IMMANUEL KANT

  • Man must be disciplined, for he is by nature raw and wild.
  • We are enriched not by what we possess, but by what we can do without.
  • For peace to reign on Earth, humans must evolve into new beings who have learned to see the whole first.
  • The death of dogma is the birth of morality.
  • The people naturally adhere most to doctrines which demand the least self-exertion and the least use of their own reason, and which can best accommodate their duties to their inclinations.
  • Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness.

JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

  • I do not know which makes a man more conservative – to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.

SOREN KIERKEGAARD

  • To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.
  • The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you’ll never have.
  • It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand.
  • People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use. 
  • Geniuses are like thunderstorms. They go against the wind, terrify people, cleanse the air.
  • The task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted.
  • If I could prescribe only one remedy for all the ills of the modern world, I would prescribe silence.
  • Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

  • The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
  • One of the sure signs of maturity is the ability to rise to the point of self criticism.

RUDYARD KIPLING

  • The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
  • There is no sin so great as ignorance. Remember this.

JACK KORNFIELD

  • If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.

JON KRAKAUER

  • The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.

PETER KROPOTKIN

  • Competition is the law of the jungle, but cooperation is the law of civilization.

MILAN KUNDERA

  • The stupidity of people comes from having an answer to everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything … it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties. 

LAZARUS LAKE

  • The smartest people I know are constantly finding out something they believed is actually wrong. The dumbest people I know have never been wrong.

CHRISTOPHER LASCH

  • In a dying culture, narcissism embodies the highest attainment of spiritual enlightenment. 

D.H. LAWRENCE

  • The vast bulk of men are not pure individuals, and never will be, for the pure individual is a rarity, almost a kind of freak. The vast bulk of men need to belong to a self-governing group, a tribe, a nation, an empire. It is a necessity like the necessity to eat food.
  • Culture and civilisation are tested by vital consciousness. Are we more vitally conscious than an Egyptian 3000 years B.C. was? Are we? Probably we are less. Our conscious range is wide, but shallow as a sheet of paper. We have no depth to our consciousness.
  • The vast mass are these middling souls. They have no aristocratic individuality, such as is demanded by Christ or Buddha or Plato. So they skulk in a mass and secretly are bent on their own ultimate self-glorification.

BRUCE LEE

  • “What is” is more important than “what should be.” Too many people are looking at “what is” from the position of thinking “what should be.”

JOHN LENNON

  • Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

GEORGE LEONARD

  • To be a learner you’ve got to be willing to be a fool.

C.S. LEWIS

  • Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, art… It has no survival value; rather is is one of those things which give value to survival.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  • You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.

JOHN LOCKE

  • The greatness of a society is measured by its commitment to justice. 
  • Liberty is not doing whatever you want – it’s being free to choose what is right.
  • A wise society teaches inquiry – not obedience.

NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI

  • A sign of intelligence is an awareness of one’s own ignorance.
  • Men in general judge more from appearances than from reality. All men have eyes, but few have the gift of penetration.

GEORGE R.R. MARTIN

  • People often claim to hunger for truth, but seldom like the taste when it’s served up.

GABOR MATE

  • The flaws of our leaders perfectly mirror the emotional underdevelopment of the society that elevates them to power.

MICHELANGELO

  • Genius is eternal patience.

JOHN STUART MILL

  • I have learned to seek happiness by limiting my desires, rather than trying to satisfy them.
  • Truth emerges from the clash of adverse ideas.

JOHN MILTON

  • Hard are the ways of truth, and rough to walk.

MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

  • A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.
  • My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.
  • The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.
  • I quote others only in order the better to express myself.
  • Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.
  • He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak.

MONTESQUIEU

  • The less men think, the more they talk.

W.H. MURRAY (SCOTTISH MOUNTAINEER & WRITER)

  • “Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way.

    I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets:

    Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.
    Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”

EDWARD R. MURROW

  • Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices – just recognize them.

MIYAMOTO MUSASHI

  • Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is. And you must bend to its power or live a lie.
  • It may seem difficult at first, but everything is difficult at first.

NIETZSCHE

  • How could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?
  • There is an old illusion. It is called good and evil.
  • To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.
  • The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.
  • True strength lies not in power over others, but in mastery over oneself.
  • There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe.

GEORGE ORWELL

  • If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

THOMAS PAINE

  • The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion. 
  • It is the duty of every man, as far as his ability extends, to detect and expose delusion and error.

BLAISE PASCAL

  • Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. 

GEORGE PATTON

  • A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.

NORMAN VINCENT PEALE

  • The trouble with most of us is that we’d rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism. 

PETRARCH

  • Five great enemies of peace inhabit with us – avarice, ambition, envy, anger and pride; if these were to be banished, we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace. 
  • (On The Masses) Nothing is easier than to persuade people who want to be persuaded and already believe.

PABLO PICASSO

  • The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.

PLATO

  • For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories. 
  • Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood let alone believed by the masses.
  • The beginning is the most important part of the work.
  • Only those who do not desire power are truly qualified to hold it.
  • The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be rules by evil men.
  • The root of all evil is ignorance.
  • He who cannot question his beliefs has none worth defending.
  • Lead a meaningful life by pursuing truth, embracing justice, and seeking higher wisdom.
  • A society that mocks virtue prepares for its own collapse. 

PLUTARCH

  • Silence is an answer to a wise man.

KARL POPPER

  • No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.
  • True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.

PROVERBS

  • Pride goeth before the fall.

YUNG PUEBLO

  • To be fully happy and wise requires mental training, and most of that training revolves around having the patience to repeatedly pull yourself out of senseless narratives.

PYTHAGORAS

  • In anger we should refrain both from speech and action.
  • No man is free who cannot control himself.
  • The oldest, shortest words – “yes” and “no” – are those which require the most thought.
  • Wealth is not a sign of virtue, nor poverty a sign of disgrace. 
  • The learning of many things does not teach intelligence.
  • No one is free who has not obtained the empire of himself. No man is free who cannot command himself.
  • A man is never as big as when he is on his knees to help a child.

MAXIMILIEN ROBESPIERRE

  • The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.

CARL ROGERS

  • The curious paradox is that when I accept myself, just as I am, then I can change.
  • The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination. 

JIM ROHN

  • We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret.

FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT

  • Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.
  • …the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.

LEO ROSTIN

  • I learned that it is the weak who are cruel, and that gentleness is to be expected only from the strong.

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

  • People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.
  • I have never believed that man’s freedom consisted in doing what he wants, but rather in never doing what he does not want to do.

RUMI

  • He whose intellect overcomes his desire is higher than the angels; he whose desire overcomes his intellect is less than an animal.
  • Heaven is hidden behind things we hate, hell is hidden behind things we love.
  • I should be suspicious of what I want.

IBN RUSHD (AVERROES)

  • Ignorance leads to fear, fear leads to hatred, and hatred leads to violence. This is the equation. 

SALMAN RUSHDIE

  • ‘Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.
  • The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.

JOHN RUSKIN

  • The highest reward for a man’s toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes by it.

BERTRAND RUSSELL

  • The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
  • Too little liberty brings stagnation, and too much brings chaos.
  • Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. 
  • People’s opinions are mainly designed to make them feel comfortable; truth, for most people, is a secondary consideration.
  • The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge. 
  • When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man.
  • To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
  • The person who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of their age or nation … to such a person the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected.
  • The human heart as modern civilization has made it is more prone to hatred than to friendship. And it is prone to hatred because it is dissatisfied, because it feels deeply, perhaps even unconsciously, that it has somehow missed the meaning of life, that perhaps others, but not we ourselves, have secured the good things which nature offers man’s enjoyment.
  • You cannot be intelligent merely by choosing your opinions. The intelligent man is not the man who holds such-and-such views but the man who has sound reasons for what he believes and yet does not believe it dogmatically. 
  • The interlocking power of stupidity below and love of power above paralyses the efforts of rational men.
  • Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.
  • Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom. 
  • Cruel men believe in a cruel God, and use their belief to excuse their cruelty. Only kindly men believe in a kindly God, and they would be kindly in any case. Men tend to have the beliefs that suit their passions. 

CARL SAGAN

  • One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
  • The unrestrained pursuit of profit poses serious threats to the soul of the nation.

NICK SABAN

  • It’s not human nature to be great. It’s human nature to survive, to be average and do what you have to do to get by. That is normal. When you have something good happen, it’s the special people that can stay focused and keep paying attention to detail, working to get better and not being satisfied with what they have accomplished.

J.D. SALINGER

  • The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

  • It is a clear gain to sacrifice pleasure in order to avoid pain. 
  • Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.
  • Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things. 
  • A high degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial.
  • Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.
  • Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
  • The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.
  • A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.
  • It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.
  • To be alone is the fate of all great minds.
  • The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness.
  • All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. 
  • The majority of men are not capable of thinking, but only of believing. And are not accessible to reason, but only to authority. 
  • Men are the devils of the earth, and animals are its tormented souls.
  • Compassion is the basis of morality.
  • There are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion; and what remains but to take it ready – made from others, instead of forming opinions himself?

SENECA

  • So-called pleasures, when they go beyond a certain limit, are but punishments.
  • My anger is more likely to do me more harm than your wrong.
  • Difficulties strengthen the mind as labor does the body.
  • Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.
  • The day a man becomes superior to pleasure, he will also be superior to pain. 
  • This is our big mistake: to think we look forward to death. Most of death is already gone. Whatever time has passed is owned by death.
  • The bravest sight in the world is to see a great man struggling against adversity.

ROD SERLING

  • We’re developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  • “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” -Shakespeare
  • What a terrible era in which idiots govern the blind.
  • Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

  • I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.
  • Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it. 
  • Beware of false knowledge, it is more dangerous than ignorance.
  • Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
  • Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
  • We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.
  • Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
  • Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature.

SOCRATES

  • “True knowledge exists in knowing you know nothing.” -Socrates
  • “The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”
  • Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.
  • Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.
  • Strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people.
  • Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.
  • No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.
  • He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.
  • The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.
  • Beware the barrenness of a busy life.
  • Nothing is to be preferred before justice.

ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN

  • It’s an universal law – intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.

SOPHOCLES

  • All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride.
  • It is no weakness for the wisest man to learn when he is wrong.
  • The truth is always the strongest argument.

HERBERT SPENCER

  • The wise man must remember that while he is a descendant of the past, he is a parent of the future.

BARUCH SPINOZA

  • Reason cannot defeat emotion, an emotion can only be displaced or overcome by a stronger emotion.
  • The world would be much happier, if men were as fully able to keep silence as they are able to speak.
  • Those who are prey to their emotions are not their own master but lie at the mercy of fortune; so much so that they are often compelled, while seeing that which is better, to follow that which is worse.
  • I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of the peace.
  • The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.
  • I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.
  • The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.
  • Minds, however, are conquered not by arms, but by love and nobility.
  • The superstitious know how to reproach people for their vices better than they know how to teach them virtues, and they strive, not to guide men by reason, but to restrain them by fear, so that they flee the evil rather than love virtues. Such people aim only to make others as wretched as they themselves are, so it is no wonder that they are generally burdensome and hateful to men.
  • Reason is no match for passion.
  • Reason cannot defeat emotion, an emotion can only be displaced or overcome by a stronger emotion.
  • Laws which prescribe what everyone must believe, and forbid men to say or write anything against this or that opinion, are often passed to gratify, or rather to appease the anger of those who cannot abide independent minds.
  • The most tyrannical of governments are those which make crimes of opinions, for everyone has an inalienable right to his thoughts.

SHUNRYU SUZUKI

  • You exist as an idea in your mind.

JONATHAN SWIFT

  • When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in a confederacy against him.

PUBLILIUS SYRUS

  • Awareness, not age, leads to wisdom.

RABINDRANATH TAGORE

  • It is very simple to be happy, but it is very difficult to be simple. 

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB

  • Difficulty is what wakes up the genius.

MARY KATE TESKE

  • No one ever tells you that bravery feels like fear.

NIKOLA TESLA

  • There are too many distractions in this life for quality of thought, and it’s quality of thought, not quantity, that counts.

THALES

  • The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  • The man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest.
  • Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.

THUCYDIDES

  • Most people, in fact, will not take the trouble in finding out the truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear. 
  • Self-control is the chief element in self-respect, and self-respect is the chief element in courage.

ALVIN TOFFLER

  • The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

ECKHART TOLLE

  • The most decisive event in your life is when you discover you are not your thoughts or emotions. Instead, you can be present as the awareness behind the thoughts and emotions.

LEO TOLSTOY

  • The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
  • What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility.
  • Music is the shorthand of emotion.
  • What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.
  • It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
  • We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.
  • To destroy war, destroy patriotism.
  • One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between man and nature shall not be broken.
  • An arrogant person considers himself perfect. This is the chief harm of arrogance. It interferes with a person’s main task in life – becoming a better person. 
  • The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.
  • To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.
  • Since corrupt people unite amongst themselves to constitute a force, then honest people must do the same.

MARK TWAIN

  • “Education is the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.” -Mark Twain
  • All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success if sure.
  • Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.
  • Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON

  • You can’t use reason to convince anyone out of an argument that they didn’t use reason to get into.
  • If your Personal Beliefs deny what’s objectively true about the world, then they’re more accurately called Personal Delusions.

CHUANG TZU

  • Tao is obscured when men understand only one of a pair of opposites.
  • Rewards and punishment is the lowest form of education. 
  • Happiness is the abscence of the striving for happiness.
  • To a mind that is still, the entire universe surrenders. (Also attributed to Lao Tzu)
  • To be truly ignorant, be content with your own knowledge.
  • You can’t discuss the ocean with a well frog – he’s limited by the space he lives in. You can’t discuss ice with a summer insect – he’s bound to a single season.
  • Men honor what lies within the sphere of their knowledge, but do not realize how dependent they are on what lies beyond it.

LAO TZU

  • To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.
  • The best fighter is never angry. 
  • A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.
  • Simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures.
  • If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present.
  • Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love.
  • To attain knowledge, add things everyday. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.
  • To know that you do not know is the best. To think you know when you do not is a disease. Recognizing this disease as a disease is to be free of it.

PAUL VALERY

  • I know nothing more stupid and indeed vulgar than wanting to be right.

VOLTAIRE

  • Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.
  • Every person is a creature of the age in which he lives and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.
  • The greatest enemy of truth is not the lie – it is the lazy mind.
  • Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.

KURT VONNEGUT

  • A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.
  • The world is full of people who are very clever at seeming much smarter than they really are.

SIMONE WEIL

  • One is never got out of the cave, one comes out of it.

OSCAR WILDE

  • Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.
  • Society exists only as a mental concept. In the real world there are only individuals.

LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

  • The aim of philosophy is the logical clarification of thought. Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

TOM WOLFE

  • A cult is a religion with no political power.

MALCOLM X

  • I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.

IRVIN D. YALOM

  • Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you’ll always find despair.

WILLIAM YEATS

  • All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.

Unattributed/Miscellaneous/Social Media, etc.

  • Excuses are lies we tell ourselves so that it doesn’t have to be our fault.
  • Self discipline begins with the mastery of your thoughts. If you don’t control what you think, you can’t control what you do.
  • Steve Kamb, Nerd Fitness: Amateurs are convinced they’re right. Experts spend every day trying to become less wrong.
  • Two kinds of fools – those who take religion literally, and those who think it has no value.
  • The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.