c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
For every relationship involves two related terms. Sometimes relationships are not real in either term, but arise from the way we think of the terms: we think identity, for example, by thinking one thing twice over and relating it to itself; and occasionally we relate what exists to what does not exist, or generate purely logical relations like that of genus to species. Sometimes relationships are real in both terms: grounded in the quantity of both, in the case of relationships like big/small or double/half, or in their activity and passivity, in the case of causal relationships, like mover-moved and father/son. Sometimes relationships are real in only one of the terms, with the other merely thought of as related [reciprocally] to that one; and this happens whenever the two terms exist at different levels. Thus seeing and understanding really relates us to things, but being seen and understood by us is not something real in the things; and similarly a pillar to the right of us does not itself have a left and a right.
— Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation
God is not, like creatures, made up of parts. God is spirit, without bodily dimensions. Firstly, no body can cause change without itself being changed. Secondly, things with dimensions are potential of division. But the starting-point for all existence must be wholly real and not potential in any way: though things that get realized begin as potential, preceding them is the source of their realization which must already be real. Thirdly, living bodies are superior to other bodies; and what makes a body living is not the dimensions which make it a body (for then everything with dimensions would be living), but something more excellent like a soul. The most excellent existent of all then cannot be a body. So when the scriptures ascribe dimensions to God they are using spatial extension to symbolize the extent of God's power; just as they ascribe bodily organs to God as metaphors for their functions, and postures like sitting or standing to symbolize authority or strength.
— Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation
Finer feeling, which we now wish to consider, is chiefly of two kinds: the feeling of the *sublime* and that of the *beautiful*. The stirring of each is pleasant, but in different ways. The sight of a mountain whose snow-covered peak rises above the clouds, the description of a raging storm, or Milton's portrayal of the infernal kingdom, arouse enjoyment but with horror; on the other hand, the sight of flower strewn meadows, valleys with winding brooks and covered with grazing flocks, the description of Elysium, or Homer's portrayal of the girdle of Venus, also occasion a pleasant sensation but one that is joyous and smiling. In order that the former impression could occur to us in due strength, we must have *a feeling of the sublime*, and, in order to enjoy the latter well, *a feeling of the beautiful*. Tall oaks and lonely shadows in a sacred grove are sublime; flower beds, low hedges and trees trimmed in figures are beautiful. Night is sublime; day is beautiful. Temperaments that possess a feeling for the sublime are drawn gradually, by the quiet stillness of a summer evening as the shimmering light of the stars breaks through the brown shadows of night and the lonely moon rises into view, into high feelings of friendship, of disdain for the world, of eternity. The shining day stimulates busy fervor and a feeling of gaiety. The sublime *moves*, the beautiful *charms*.
— Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime
In love with myself, that is what people say I am. It doesn’t surprise me, for how could they notice that I can love when I love only you; how could anyone else suspect it when I love only you? In love with myself. Why? Because I’m in love with you, because it is you I love, you alone, and all that truly belongs to you, and it is thus I love myself, because this, my self, belongs to you, so that if I ceased loving you I would cease loving myself. What then is, in the eyes of the profane world, an expression of the greatest egoism, is for your initiated eyes the expression of purest sympathy; what in the profane eyes of the world is an expression of the most prosaic self-preservation, is for your sacred sight the expression of the most enthusiastic self-annihilation.”―Johannes de Silentio, from_Either/Or: A Fragment of Life_
— Søren Kierkegaard
Although I am still far from this kind of interior understanding of myself, with profound respect for its significance I have sought to preserve my individuality―worshipped the unknown God. With a premature anxiety I have tried to avoid coming in close contact with those things whose force of attraction might be too powerful for me. I have sought to appropriate much from them, studied their distinctive characteristics and meaning in human life, but at the same time guarded against coming, like the moth, too close to the flame. I have had little to win or to lose in association with the ordinary run of men, partly because what they do―so-called practical life―does not interest me much, partly because their coldness and indifference to the spiritual and deeper currents in man alienate me even more from them. With few exceptions my companions have had no special influence upon me. A life that has not arrived at clarity about itself must necessarily exhibit an uneven side-surface; confronted by certain facts [*Facta*] and their apparent disharmony, they simply halted there, for, as I see it, they did not have sufficient interest to seek a resolution in a higher harmony or to recognize the necessity of it. Their opinion of me was always one-sided, and I have vacillated between putting too much or too little weight on what they said. I have now withdrawn from their influence and the potential variations of my life's compass resulting from it. Thus I am again standing at the point where I must begin again in another way. I shall now calmly attempt to look at myself and begin to initiate inner action; for only thus will I be able, like a child calling itself "I" in its first consciously undertaken act, be able to call myself "I" in a profounder sense.But that takes stamina, and it is not possible to harvest immediately what one has sown. I will remember that philosopher's method of having his disciples keep silent for three years; then I dare say it will come. Just as one does not begin a feast at sunrise but at sundown, just so in the spiritual world one must first work forward for some time before the sun really shines for us and rises in all its glory; for although it is true as it says that God lets his sun shine upon the good and the evil and lets the rain fall on the just and the unjust, it is not so in the spiritual world. So let the die be cast―I am crossing the Rubicon! No doubt this road takes me into battle, but I will not renounce it. I will not lament the past―why lament? I will work energetically and not waste time in regrets, like the person stuck in a bog and first calculating how far he has sunk without recognizing that during the time he spends on that he is sinking still deeper. I will hurry along the path I have found and shout to everyone I meet: Do not look back as Lot's wife did, but remember that we are struggling up a hill."―from_Journals_, (The Search for Personal Meaning)
— Søren Kierkegaard
If women are so smart, how come hardly any philosophers have been, and now are, female?
— Juan T. Llibre
[Wither] knew that everything was lost. It is incredible how little this knowledge moved him. What had been in his far-off youth a merely aesthetic repugnance to realities that were crude or vulgar, had deepened and darkened, year after year, into a fixed refusal of everything that was in any degree other than himself. He had passed from Hegel into Hume, thence through Pragmatism, and thence through logical Positivism, and out at last into the complete void. The indicative mood now corresponded to no thought that his mind could entertain. He had willed with his whole heart that there should be no reality and no truth, and now even the imminence of his own ruin could not wake him.
— C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
Many were incarcerated with the aberrant prosaic possibilities of ataraxia. Only the mentally sensitive few were cognizant of the nuisance to serenity and an actuality that lacked a balance betwixt havoc and sangfroid. The intellectual capabilities of the excellent idiosyncratic talents of a man with an agog outlook for de minimis fringe entities had left the portal ajar for the enlightened few, to get a glimpse of the obsecure reality that most had decided to claim socratic ignorance to evade inquiries.
— O.Z. Napaeae
The third preliminary problem for every theory of reality is that of the experience of transcendence. We saw in the case of Berkeley that his erroneous principle *percipi est esse*, and his assertion that any being which we think, just for the reason that it is thought, cannot at the same time be regarded as subsisting independently of thinking, incorporate a failure to recognize the consciousness of transcendence peculiar to all intentional acts. This is an instance of the failure to recognize that not only all thinking in the narrower sense, in the sense of grasping an object on the basis of “meanings” and grasping a state of affairs through judgments, but *every* intention in general, whether perception, representation, remembering, the feeling of value, or the posing of ends and goals, points beyond the act and the contents of the act and intends something other than the act [*ein Aktfremdes*], even when what is thought is in turn itself a thought. Indeed, *intentio* signifies a goal-directed movement toward something which one does not have oneself or has only partially and incompletely. Berkeley (following Locke, who was the first to make the basic philosophical error which introduced “psychologism” into epistemology) arrived at the principle *esse est percipi* by making the idea [*Vorstellung*] (and even the sensation) into a thing, an immaterial substance, and by failing to distinguish between the act, the content of an act, and the object. Furthermore, Berkeley confused the being of objects with the fact of being-an-object, even though the latter has only a loose and variable connection with the former. On the other hand, the transcendence of the intentional object with respect to both the *intentio* and its present content is common to every instance of being-an-object. It is, for instance, proper to objects of pure mathematics which are certainly not real but ideal (for example, the number 3). These are produced from the *a priori* material of intuition in accordance with an operational law governing the steps of our thought or intuition. Transcendence is further proper to all fictitious objects and even to contradictory objects, for instance, a square circle. All these sorts of objects, e.g., the golden mountain or Little Red Riding Hood, satisfy the basic principle of the transcendence of objects over and above that aspect of them which is, at any moment, given in consciousness, just as much as do real objects existing independently of all consciousness and knowledge."―from_Idealism and Realism_
— Max Scheler
It is precisely because the principle of the transcendence of the object is completely independent of the existential status of the objects themselves and, thus, independent of the question whether they are produced by us or subsist on their own―whether they are fictions or real beings―that the fact of the consciousness of transcendence is not even remotely qualified to solve the problem of reality. This has been misunderstood equally by W. Freytag, Edith Landmann, P. Linke, and even by Husserl himself. Indeed, people have wanted to speak of an intentional realism (E. Landmann) in contrast to Critical Realism and to all other forms of realism. N. Hartmann was quite correct in emphasizing, in opposition to this, that the projection [*Hinausragen*] of the intentional object beyond the content of consciousness and its act cannot make the least contribution to solving the problem of realism. If something is an intentional object, we cannot recognize from this fact alone, whether it is real or not. If the perceived cherry, the conceived triangle, a friend’s visit anticipated in a dream, Little Red Riding Hood, a freely planned project, or a felt value, have entirely different characteristics and predicates than do the mental processes and the actual contents in which these objects appear, then the distinction between intentional and mental holds equally of both the real and the irreal. *Thus, the problem of what is real is not touched by the fact of the transcendence of the object*, and *percipi est esse*, in Berkeley’s psychologistic sense, is laid to rest. This also frustrates attempts, such as Hume’s in his *Treatise*, to derive being-an-object in general―an object as distinguished from an idea―from a psychogenetic process in which the very ideas through which this psychogenetic process is supposed to be accomplished are themselves reified [*verdinglicht*]."―from_Idealism and Realism_
— Max Scheler
True humility derives from a proper perspective of our human condition: one among billions on a small planet among billions, like a fungus on a tiny fragment of cheese. Of course, it is nearly impossible for human beings to remain this objective for very long, but truly humble people are nonetheless far more conscious of the insignificance of their true relations, an insignificance that verges on non-existence. A speck of dust does not think itself more superior or inferior than another, nor does it concern itself for what other specks of dust might or might not think. Enthralled by the miracle of existence, the truly humble person lives not for herself or her image, but for life itself, in a condition of pure peace and pleasure.
— Neel Burton, Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions
Most people are like sheep. Nice, harmless creatures who want nothing more than to be left alone so they can graze. But then of course there are wolves. Who want nothing more than to eat the sheep.But there’s a third kind of person. The sheepdog. Sheepdogs have fangs like wolves. But their instinct isn’t predation. It’s protection. All they want, what they live for, is to protect the flock.
— Barry Eisler, Livia Lone
Outrage is the special kind of anger you feel when you believe that people are getting things they don't deserve. Outrage of this kind is anger at injustice.
— Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?
(...) greed that preys on human misery (...)
— Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?
So, ‘sensation’ and ‘judgment’ have together lost their apparent clearness: we have observed that they were clear only as long as the prejudice in favour of the world was maintained. As soon as one tried by means of them, to picture consciousness in the process of perceiving, to revive the forgotten perceptual experience, and to relate them to it, they were found to be inconceivable. By dint of making these difficulties more explicit, we were drawn implicitly into a new kind of analysis, into a new dimension in which they were destined to disappear. The criticism of the constancy hypothesis and more generally the reduction of the idea of ‘the world’ opened up a *phenomenal field* which now has to be more accurately circumscribed, and suggested the rediscovery of direct experience which must be, at least provisionally, assigned its place in relation to scientific knowledge, and to psychological and philosophical reflection.”—from_Phenomenology of Perception_. Translated by Colin Smith, p. 62
— Maurice Merleau-Ponty
The truth is that I feel like a ghost already, and I have to catch my breath each time I think about it. I begin to understand why ghosts go in for so much sighing and hooting. It's not to scare their descendants. It's just that they find it so hard to breathe in a time other than their own.We don't only have a place in existence. We also have an allotted span.That's the way things are, and all I can do is extrapolate from what's around me now.
— Jostein Gaarder, The Orange Girl
I no longer feel the need to see and sense more than I've already experienced. I just want so desperately to hang on what I have.
— Jostein Gaarder, The Orange Girl
She sent me a sunny smile, and what a smile, George; it was a smile that could have melted the whole world, because if the whole world had seen it, it would have had the power to stop all wars and hatred on the face of the planet, or at lease there would have been some long ceasefires.
— Jostein Gaarder, The Orange Girl
She was a stranger. She came from a more beautiful fairytale than ours. But she’d managed to find her way into our reality, perhaps because she was here to save us from what people sometimes call ‘the monotony of life.’ Until that moment I’d been completely ignorant of such missionary work. I’d thoughts there was only two types people at least. There was the Orange Girl, and there were the rest of us.
— Jostein Gaarder
As I think therefore I amAm I more if I think more?
— Richard L.  Ratliff
Never eat potato chips without first opening the packet!
— Anthony T. Hincks
I don't fit in because I don't want to disappear.
— Anthony T. Hincks
Is a figment of our imagination actually reality coming to life?
— Anthony T. Hincks
I have a quote for every occasion, then I remembered that I don't have that many occasions.
— Anthony T. Hincks
Your beauty isn't in your laughter. It's in your soul.
— Anthony T. Hincks
Superficial people consider themselves capable of doing everything. The question, however, is who is willing to hire them?
— Eraldo Banovac
Sleep not with an albatross unless you wish your dreams to fly away.
— Anthony T. Hincks
Windows open out onto the universe around you, but doors will take you to where your imagination lies.
— Anthony T. Hincks
A road to nowhere will always go somewhere.
— Anthony T. Hincks
Do we ever get slow rain?
— Anthony T. Hincks
In the story of the Ugly Duckling, when did the Ugly Duckling stop feeling Ugly? When he realized he was a Swan. Each of us has something Special, a Swan of some sort, hidden inside somewhere. But until we recognize that it's there, what can we do but splash around, treading water?
— Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh
We must reject entirely the frequently encountered assertion that consciousness is a "primal fact," that one ought not speak of an "origin" of consciousness. The very same laws and motives in accordance with which we think of consciousness' raising itself from one level of reflection to the next will apply when we think of consciousness itself originating out of a preconscious, partly subconscious, partly supraconscious condition of the being of the contents of knowledge. (And the motive is always suffering of some sort, suffering, as we shall see, at the hands of the real being [*Realsein*] which is ecstatically given prior to all consciousness.) Only a very definite historical stage of overreflective bourgeois civilization could make the fact of consciousness the starting point of all theoretical philosophy, without characterizing more exactly the mode of being of this consciousness."―from_Idealism and Realism_
— Max Scheler
I don't have a garden full of flowers.I have a garden full of love.
— Anthony T. Hincks
When we overlook the errors of people we like and favour. We are crippling the society, because others look up to them and are copying from them. They will copy also their errors. One day we will be complaining why things are like this.
— De philosopher DJ Kyos
Once you being defensive in your answer. Just know there is the truth in the question you have been asked, or there is truth in what they are saying to you.
— De philosopher DJ Kyos
There will come a time when people will realize the greatest mysteries of the universe: will a human then meet anything other than himself?
— Eraldo Banovac
In the frame of a known phenomenon of life, a human could be defined as the only proven thinking creature.
— Eraldo Banovac
Do not look for company at all costs, and especially do not allow loneliness to lead you to fickle love or false friendship.
— Eraldo Banovac
A soul that knows it is loved but does not itself love betrays its sediment: what is at bottom comes up."―Epigrams and Interludes, Section 79
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Honor,' he said firmly. 'I have great honor. So will you. But you will find that that is not the same as power.
— Lois Lowry, The Giver
Life is the longest journey.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
No explanation is ever as good as not having one.
— Marty Rubin
We never solve the big questions
—  we outgrow them.
If I could forget you! Is my love then a work of memory? Even if time expunged everything from its tablets, expunged even memory itself, my relation to you would stay just as alive, you would still not be forgotten. If I could forget you! What then should I remember? For after all, I have forgotten myself in order to remember you: so if I forgot you I would come to remember myself; but the moment I remembered myself I would have to remember you again. If I could forget you! What would happen then? There is a picture from antiquity. It depicts Ariadne. She is leaping up from her couch and gazing anxiously after a ship that is hurrying away under full sail. By her side stands Cupid with unstrung bow and drying his eyes. Behind her stands a winged female figure in a helmet. It is usually assumed this is Nemesis. Imagine this picture, imagine it changed a little. Cupid is not weeping and his bow is not unstrung; or would you have become less beautiful, less victorious, if I had become mad? Cupid smiles and bends his bow. Nemesis does not stand inactive by your side; she too draws her bow. In that other picture we see a male figure on the ship, busily occupied. It is assumed it is Theseus. Not so in my picture. He stands on the stern, he looks back longingly, spreads his arms. He has repented, or rather, his madness has left him, but the ship carries him away. Cupid and Nemesis both aim at him, an arrow flies from each bow; their aim is true; one sees that, one understands, they have both hit the same place in his heart, a sign that his love was the Nemesis that wrought vengeance." ―Johannes de Silentio, from_Either/Or: A Fragment of Life_
— Søren Kierkegaard
Our knowledge springs from two fundamental sources of our mind; the first is to receive representations (receptivity of impressions), the second is the faculty of knowing an object through these representations (spontaneity of concepts). Through the first an object is *given* to us, through the second the object is *thought* in relation to that representation (which is a mere determination of the mind). Intuition and concepts constitute, therefore, the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts can yield knowledge. Both are either pure or empirical. They are empirical when they contain sensation (sensation presupposes the actual presence of the object). They are *pure* when no sensation is mixed in with the representation. Sensation may be called the matter of sensible knowledge. Pure intuition, therefore, contains only the form under which something is intuited, and the pure concepts contains only the form of thinking an object in general. Pure intuitions and pure concepts alone are possible *a priori*, empirical intuitions and empirical concepts only *a posteriori*. We call *sensibility* the *receptivity* of our mind to receive representations insofar as it is in some wise affected, while the *understanding*, on the other hand, is our faculty of producing representations by ourselves, or the *spontaneity* of knowledge. We are so constituted that our intuition can never be other than *sensible*; that is, it contains only the mode in which we are affected by objects. The faculty, on the contrary, which enables us to *think* the object of sensible intuition is the *understanding*. Neither of these properties is to be preferred to the other. Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. It is, therefore, just as necessary to make our concepts sensible (i.e., to add the object to them in intuition) as to make our intuitions understandable (i.e., to bring them under concepts). These two faculties or capacities cannot exchange their functions. The understanding cannot intuit anything, the senses cannot think anything. Only from their union can knowledge arise. But this is no reason for confounding their respective contributions; rather, it gives us a strong reason for carefully separating and distinguishing the one from the other. We therefore distinguish the science of the rules of sensibility in general, i.e., aesthetic, from the science of the rules of the understanding in general, i.e., logic."―Transcendental Doctrine of Elements. Transcendental Logic: The Idea of a Transcendental Logic
— Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Storm clouds will always ignite the darker side of my passion.
— Anthony T. Hincks
Acquiring knowledge through the centuries has influenced human society more than all other factors.
— Eraldo Banovac
One of my principal theses is that in every case the nature of a being (contingent as well as essential nature) can, in principle, be immanent to and truly inherent in knowledge and reflexive consciousness as it is outside of consciousness, and therefore not only as it is represented by some image, perception, idea [*Vorstellung*], or thought. This immanence of the nature of a being to consciousness occurs, of course, with totally different degrees of adequation and on completely different levels of the relativity of its existence to the existence and constitution [*Organisation*] of the "knowing" subject. Existence, however, can never be immanent to consciousness. Rather, existence necessarily transcends knowledge and consciousness and is alien to them. Existence is essentially transcendent and remains independent of them, even in the limiting case of a "divine," omniscient Mind." In other words, the nature and the existence of any possible object are separable with respect to the possibility of their being *in mente* [in the mind]. The nature of a being can be *in mente* and actually is so in any evidential cognition of what a thing is, which excludes cases of illusion and error. Existence can never be *in mente*. I shall speak later of how existence can be "given" despite this. Existence transcends thought, intuition, and perception, as well as any cooperation of thought and intuition in that higher form of knowledge we call cognition. Cognition is the "knowledge of something as something," the coincidence [*Deckung*] of intuition and thought." from_Idealism and Realism_
— Max Scheler, Selected Philosophical Essays
When you are there for people who dont need you. They make fun of you and make you a fool.
— De philosopher DJ Kyos
Nothing gets easy. It is just that you understand how it is and how it works. Nothing its difficult its just that you dont understand it and dont know how it works. Understanding something it means taking time to learn it and practising it.
— De philosopher DJ Kyos
How far removed in time must an event be for us to remember it? How far for memory's longing to be no longer able to seize it? Most people have a limit in this respect: what lies too near them in time they cannot remember, nor what lies too remote. I know no limit. What was experienced yesterday, I push back a thousand years in time, and remember as if it were yesterday."―Johannes de Silentio, from_Either/Or_
— Søren Kierkegaard
When the sea reaches the sky, then we shall all become one.
— Anthony T. Hincks
If you don't have love, you don't have much at all.
— Reuben Berger
Why people suffer thou the is government. It is because everyone fight into power to take care of themselves than to serve the people in need.
— De philosopher DJ Kyos
The problem with a philosophy or a belief is that you soon start changing the facts to fit it.
— Ashavan
Don't eat the bread unless you want to leave bread crumbs.
— Anthony T. Hincks
Shadows only come to life in our imaginations.Unfortunately for me, I've got a very vivid imagination.
— Anthony T. Hincks
I tried to count all the seconds that I have loved you for, but I gave up. I found it was easier to count the number of the stars in the universe.
— Anthony T. Hincks
It's time to fly.Care to join me?
— Anthony T. Hincks
Some poeple take God and want to apply privacy settings on him to make him private to them like their social media accounts. What they don't understand is that God is public and God is for everyone.
— De philosopher DJ Kyos
When you're as hot as you are, no amount of ice will do.
— Anthony T. Hincks
I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labour and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of the stars.
— Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker
Only by the aid of language does reason bring about its most important achievements, namely the harmonious and consistent action of several individuals, the planned cooperation of many thousands, civilization, the State; and then, science, the storing up of previous experience, the summarizing into one concept of what is common, the communication of truth, the spreading of error, thoughts and poems, dogmas and superstitions. The animal learns to know death only when he dies, but man consciously draws every hour nearer his death; and at times this makes life a precarious business, even to the man who has not already recognized this character of constant annihilation in the whole of life itself.
— Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol 1
You can't skip over nature by logic. Logic presupposes three possibilities, but there are millions! Cut away a million, and reduce it all to the question of comfort! That's the easiest solution to the problem!
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
(Love’s atopia, characteristic which causes it to escape all dissertations, would be that *ultimately* it is possible to talk about love only *according to a strict allocutive determination*; whether philosophical, gnomic, lyric, or novelistic, there is always, in the discourse upon love, a person whom one addresses, though this person may have shifted to the condition of a phantom or a creature still to come. No one wants to speak of love unless it is *for* someone.).
— Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
The development of civilization was marked by constant changes. This will continue – therefore, the future will belong to people ready for change.
— Eraldo Banovac
Only a person who is motivated in the inner depths of his being will help without hesitation and with no obligation for the one helped.
— Eraldo Banovac
Be patient in life, knowing that there is a real possibility that the desired outcome could happen without your direct involvement.
— Eraldo Banovac
In reality, there is no such thing as absolute freedom. The rules of social interaction determine one's freedom.
— Eraldo Banovac
A free man does not do what must be done, but what should be done.
— Eraldo Banovac
We should enjoy every minute we live today because who knows if we will have a chance to do so tomorrow.
— Eraldo Banovac
The people who overcome their fears are the ones who can achieve their dreams.
— Eraldo Banovac
True friendship doesn't include jealousy.
— Eraldo Banovac
A friend is a person who always understands your preoccupations, even when other people do not perceive them at all.
— Eraldo Banovac
The act of living is a revolutionary right.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
When something is dirty you wash it. That's what my mum always said.Yet...When you have dirty money and you launder it, people jump up and down.I guess that's life.
— Anthony T. Hincks
If not built on integrity, distrust crumbles mansions like sand.Similarly, if love is not built on the honest indignity of friendship, it is like a mansion built on sand, bent to be crumbled and washed away.
— Mark Sherman Smeester
Just because teachers aren't better than students does not mean students are better than teachers.
— Mark Sherman Smeester
When God sprinkled stars in the heavens, he opened our eyes to the wonders of the universe.
— Anthony T. Hincks
The joy of having no friends is that I can do anything I want; when I want.The downside is, that I have no one to share it with.
— Anthony T. Hincks
DEATH is big business.Thank god for capitalism.
— Anthony T. Hincks
Travelling allows you to see the world as it is.And that's beautiful.
— Anthony T. Hincks
The man consummatig his life dies his death triumphantly,surrounded by men filled with hope and making solmn vows, thus one should learn to die.Friedrich Nietzsche - thus spoke zarathustra.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Just because you have a brain doesn't mean you are conscious
—  just because you are alive doesn't mean you have a brain.
Death has been said to be the leveller in that it does not recognize one’s class, race,ethnicity or nationality. Death does not look at the face before it strikes; it pays noattention to one’s beliefs or outlook to issues in life. Death has often been said to beinevitable. So it is glaring that for as long as people are born, people are bound to diesomeday but how man dies is a huge mystery.
— Remi Akujobi
Each day brings with it a whole new world because each day is different from the previous day or the one it precedes.No two days will ever be the same and that is the beauty of the world and of God, because he wants us to see and experience new things each and every day.
— Anthony T. Hincks
Doors are funny things. Some lead to somewhere exciting and wonderful, while others lead to the mundane and ordinary. Some, because they are gaudy and ornate, usher us into the land of greed and money. But many look unassuming and plain, yet hidden behind their simplicity one can find love; warmth; a cozy fire; a home cooked meal and a beautiful family.It's these doors I search for in life and it's these doors that I shall find.
— Anthony T. Hincks
Each of us has no peers, because each of us is unique in who we are and what we have experienced.Anyone who tells you otherwise has quite obviously not met any of their peers either!
— Anthony T. Hincks
When you read between the lines, you must have bloody good eyesight because I can't see a bloody thing!
— Anthony T. Hincks
Imagination is the sacred intuition.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
When you speak from your heart, the words ring true, but as you speak in anger, I'll only shed tears for you.
— Anthony T. Hincks
You don't need to put on make-up to make you look pretty. All you need to do is put on a smile and that will make you pretty in anyone's book.
— Anthony T. Hincks
We go from one war to another; we go from one terrorist group to another and we go from one calamity to another, but there is a pattern there if you know where to look.It's amazing how when one war is about to end, another miraculously pops its head up.Coincidence? Hmmm...I'm highly skeptical.However, a lot of money seems to go into these 'wars' and there always seems to be little change left at the end of it.Like I said in my other quote..."War! Someone's making a hell of a lot of money!
— Anthony T. Hincks
When you walk a tightrope, you don't want to be eating buttered popcorn.
— Anthony T. Hincks
When you shut out the universe around you. You inadvertently become the very universe that you were trying to shut out.
— Anthony T. Hincks
When you stand on top of that mountain and you look out, you will know that you will never again look back.
— Anthony T. Hincks
Tyrants don't become a success.They become obsessed!
— Anthony T. Hincks
We all encounter things that may seem dim and puzzling at first, but when we actively explore them, we find bold, undauntable light igniting the way from the inside. From within.
— Kayla Severson
As commonly practiced, philosophy is the attempt to find good reasons for conventional beliefs.
— John N Gray
Of course we dance with our demons. Our angels are far too shy.
— Kayla Krantz, When Night Falls: A Collection of Short Stories and Poems
On Epicurus; He says: "Contended poverty is an honourable estate." Indeed, if it is contented, it is not poverty at all. It is not the man who has little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.
— Seneca
I have a secret to confide to you, my confidante. Who should I confide it to? To Echo? She would betray it. To the stars? They are cold. People? They do not understand. Only to you can I confide it, for you know how to safeguard it. There is a girl, more beautiful than my soul’s dream, purer than the light of the sun, deeper than the source of the ocean, more proud than the flight of the eagle―there is a girl―oh! bend your head to my ear and my words, that my secret may steal into it―this girl I love more dearly than my life, for she is my life; more dearly than all my desires, for she is the only one; more dearly than all my thoughts, for she is the only one; more warmly than the sun loves the flower, more intensely than sorrow the privacy of the troubled mind; more longingly than the desert’s burning sand loves the rain―I cling to her more tenderly than the mother’s eye to the child, more confidingly than the pleading soul to God, more inseparably than the plant to its root.―Your head grows heavy and thoughtful, it sinks down on your breast, your bosom rises to its aid―my Cordelia! You have understood me, you have understood me exactly, to the letter, not one jot have you ignored. Shall I stretch the membrane of my ear and let your voice assure me of this? Should I doubt? Will you safeguard this secret? Can I depend on you? One hears of people who, in terrible crimes, dedicate themselves to mutual silence. I have confided to you a secret which is my life and my life’s content. Have you nothing to confide to me, nothing so beautiful, so significant…?”―Johannes de Silentio, from_Either/Or_
— Søren Kierkegaard
The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely.
— John Green, Turtles All the Way Down
To know what questions may reasonably be asked is already a great and necessary proof of sagacity and insight. For if a question is absurd in itself and calls for unnecessary answers, it not only brings disgrace to the person raising it, but may prompt an incautious listener to give absurd answers, thus presenting, as the ancients said, the laughable spectacle of one person milking a he-goat, and another holding the sieve underneath.
— Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
In America, Amazon competes with yahoo and Google by competing with a gas station. Imagine if every price in QT was the same, but had a for sale sign beside higher prices, and you'll have either Amazon or Craiglist.
— Anonymous
I was well-read but perhaps that only made me stupid.
— Richard Smyth, Wild Ink
L'utilité du vivre n'est pas en l'espace: elle est en l'usage.
— Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
Heureuse la mort qui oste le loisir aux apprests de tel equipage.
— Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
D'autant que nous avons cher, estre, et estre consiste en mouvement et action.
— Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
L'honneste est stable et permanent.
— Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
J'accuse toute violence en l'education d'une ame tendre, qu'on dresse pour l'honneur, et la liberté.
— Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
Je hay entre autres vices, cruellement la cruauté, et par nature et par jugement, comme l'extreme de tous les vices.
— Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
Il n'est rien qui tente mes larmes que les larmes.
— Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
Les naturels sanguinaires à l'endroit des bestes, tesmoignent une propension naturelle à la cruauté.
— Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
Nature a, (ce crains-je) elle mesme attaché à l'homme quelque instinct à l'inhumanité
— Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
Those who crusade not for God in themselves but against the devil in others, never succeed in leaving the world better, but leave it as it was or sometimes even perceptibly worse than it was before the crusade began.
— Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudun
Even if you listen to all the advice from your parents, friends, teachers, and mentors, if you don't end up happy, you still have nobody to blame. Nobody's perfect.
— Mark Sherman Smeester
Is the undertaker joyous when his turn comes around? All those years holding the door open. To pass through - does it feel like a privileged?
— Richard Smyth, Wild Ink
Vladimir Kush , Shell Bronze , Lovers Entwined (painting)“Why, then, does the man in love hang with complete abandon on the eyes of his chosen one, and is ready to make every sacrifice for her? Because it is his immortal part that longs for her; it is always the mortal part alone that longs for everything else. That eager and even ardent longing, directed to a particular woman, is therefore an immediate pledge of the indestructibility of the kernel of our true nature…”―from_The World as Will and Representation_. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne. In Two Volumes, Volume II, p. 559
— Arthur Schopenhauer
Why, then, does the man in love hang with complete abandon on the eyes of his chosen one, and is ready to make every sacrifice for her? Because it is his immortal part that longs for her; it is always the mortal part alone that longs for everything else. That eager and even ardent longing, directed to a particular woman, is therefore an immediate pledge of the indestructibility of the kernel of our true nature…”―from_The World as Will and Representation_. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne. In Two Volumes, Volume II, p. 559
— Arthur Schopenhauer
…This singular reversal may perhaps proceed from the fact that for us the “subject” (since Christianity) is the one who suffers: where there is a wound, there is a subject: die Wunde! die Wunde! says Parsifal, thereby becoming “himself”; and the deeper the wound, at the body’s center (at the “heart”), the more the subject becomes a subject: for the subject is intimacy (“The wound…is of a frightful intimacy”). Such is love’s wound: a radical chasm (at the “roots” of being), which cannot be closed, and out of which the subject drains, constituting himself as a subject in this very draining.”―from_A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments_. Translated by Richard Howard, p. 189
— Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
Love is the unfathomable ground that is hidden in darkness, but the resolution is the triumphant victor who, like Orpheus, fetches the infatuation of falling in love to the light of day, for the resolution is the true form of love, the true explanation and transfiguration.
— Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part I
What causes love, since it is a passion, is its object; and since it is a sort of affinity or agreement with the object, what causes love is the goodness or agreeableness of that object. Evil can only be loved because it seems good, because being partially good it is perceived as wholly so. And the beautiful is a form of the good: if something is agreeable in general we call it good, and if the perception of it is agreeable we call it beautiful. But goodness must be known before it can become the object of love, so knowledge itself can be said to cause love. Knowing is an activity of reason, which abstracts from things and then makes connections between them, needing to know each part and property and power of things if it is to know them perfectly. But loving is an appetite for things as they stand, and to love perfectly we need only love them as they are perceived to exist in themselves.
— Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation
The emotion of love is an affective emotion, directly reacting to goodness, rather than an aggressive one, reacting to challenge. Not only our so-called natural ability to grow and propagate exemplify natural love, but every faculty has a built-in affinity for what accords with its nature. By passion we mean some result of being acted on: either a form induced by the agent (like weight) or a movement consequent on the form (like falling to the ground). Whatever we desire acts on us in this way, first arousing an emotional attachment to itself and making itself agreeable, and then drawing us to seek it. The first change the object produces in our appetite is a feeling of its agreeableness: we call this love (weight can be thought of as a sort of natural love); then desire moves us to seek the object and pleasure comes to rest in it. Clearly then, as a change induced in us by an agent, love is a passion: the affective emotion strictly so, the will to love by stretching of the term. Love unites by making what is loved as agreeable to the lover as if it were himself or a part of himself. Though love is not itself a movement of the appetite towards an object, it is a change the appetite undergoes rendering an object agreeable. Favour is a freely chosen and willing love, open only to reasoning creatures; and charity―literally, holding dear―is a perfect form of love in which what is loved is highly prized. To love, as Aristotle says, is to want someone’s good; so its object is twofold: the good we want, loved with a love of desire, and the someone we want it for (ourselves or someone else), loved with a love of friendship. And just as what exist in the primary sense are subjects of existence, and properties exist only in a secondary sense, as modes in which subjects exist; so too what we love in the primary sense is the someone whose good we will, and only in a secondary sense do we love the good so willed. Friendship based on convenience or pleasure is friendship inasmuch as we want our friend’s good; but because this is subordinated to our own profit or pleasure such friendship is subordinated to love of desire and falls short of true friendship.
— Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation
A person who speaks like a book is exceedingly boring to listen to; sometimes, however, it is not inappropriate to talk in that way. For a book has the remarkable property that it can be interpreted any way you wish. If one talks like a book one’s conversation acquires this property too. I kept quite soberly to the usual formulas. She was surprised, as I’d expected; that can’t be denied. To describe to myself how she looked is difficult. She seemed multifaceted; yes just about like the still to be published but announced commentary to my book, a commentary capable of any interpretation. One word and she would have laughed at me; another and she would have been moved; still another and she would have shunned me; but no such word came to my lips. I remained solemnly unemotional and kept to the ritual.― ‘She had known me for such a short time’, dear God, it’s only on the strait path of engagement one meets such difficulties, not the primrose path of love.”―from_Either/Or: A Fragment of Life_. Abridged, Translated and with an Introduction and Notes by Alastair Hannay, p. 312
— Soren Kierkegaard
Gossip reduces the other to he/she, and this reduction is intolerable to me. For me the other is neither he nor she; the other has only a name of his own, or her own name. The third-person pronoun is a wicked pronoun: it is the pronoun of the non-person, it absents, it annuls. When I realize that common discourse takes possession of my other and restores that other to me in the bloodless form of a universal substitute, applied to all the things which are not here, it is as if I saw my other dead, reduced, shelved in an urn upon the wall of the great mausoleum of language. For me, the other cannot be a referent: you are never anything but you, I do not want the Other to speak of you.
— Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
Help me to help you consider and appreciate your worst of nightmares and best of dreams.
— Mark Sherman Smeester
Sleep not under a willow tree for she weeps many tears.
— Anthony T. Hincks
To stand on a mountain top, you must first create the mountain.
— Anthony T. Hincks