c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Daily dance uplift the soul to spiritual realms.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of  Wisdom: Great  mind
Across the board... Not junkies or freaks, but people who were just as comfortable with drugs like weed, booze, or coke as we are - and we're not weird, are we? Hell no, we're just overworked professionals who need to relax now and then, have a bit of the whoop and the giggle, right?
— Hunter S. Thompson, Ancient Gonzo Wisdom: Interviews with Hunter S. Thompson
How had they met? By chance, like everybody else. What were there names? What's it to you? Where were they coming from? From the nearest place. Where were they going? Does anyone really know where they're going?
— Denis Diderot
There isn't an end point to excellence where you have it and you can stop. Being your best self means keeping on trying.
— Jo Walton, The Just City
I started studying law, but this I could stand just for one semester. I couldn't stand more. Then I studied languages and literature for two years. After two years I passed an examination with the result I have a teaching certificate for Latin and Hungarian for the lower classes of the gymnasium, for kids from 10 to 14. I never made use of this teaching certificate. And then I came to philosophy, physics, and mathematics. In fact, I came to mathematics indirectly. I was really more interested in physics and philosophy and thought about those. It is a little shortened but not quite wrong to say: I thought I am not good enough for physics and I am too good for philosophy. Mathematics is in between.
— George Pólya
Every new day is an opportunity to grow your love.
— Debasish Mridha
It is immoral to hold an opinion in order to curry another's favor; mercenary, servile, and against the dignity of human liberty to yield and submit; supremely stupid to believe as a matter of habit; irrational to decide according to the majority opinion, as if the number of sages exceeded the infinite number of fools.
— Giordano Bruno
Our ancestors have invented, we can at least innovate.
— Amit Kalantri
We must have a new mythology, but it must place itself at the service of ideas, it must become a mythology of reason. Mythology must become philosophical, so that the people may become rational, and philosophy must become mythological, so that philosophers may become sensible. If we do not give ideas a form that is aesthetic, i.e., mythological, they will hold no interest for people.
— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Compromise brings harmony to both, happiness to none.
— Amit Kalantri
This, in the end, is the prime purpose of a philosophy: to give us lucid ways to think about the world and how to live in it.
— Daniel Klein
My depth has no depth
— Mohadesa Najumi
If you change who you are to suit other people, you may end up dressed for the wrong occasion
— Benny Bellamacina, Philosophical Uplifting Quotes and Poems
Let's say I have a mystical soul and a rational brain, and, like Montaigne, I am incapable of choosing between them. I don't know if I believe in God, but I am often tempted to believe.
— François Mitterrand, Memoir in Two Voices
Some concepts are so incredibly risky they take an honest fool to try to articulate them.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion.
— Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects
Philosophy does not claim to secure for us anything outside our control. Otherwise it would be taking on matters that do not concern it. For as wood is the material of the carpenter, and marble that of the sculptor, so the subject matter of the art of life is the life of the self.
— Epictetus, Discourses and Selected Writings
Your youth is certainly finished and old age has definitely arrived if you feel that you are losing enthusiasm, excitement and energy towards your dreams and goals.
— Amit Kalantri
Between natural ability and education choose natural ability, as it will keep you happy and will fetch you the glory sooner.
— Amit Kalantri
People say everybody has a book inside them, so why not make your life a great story?
— Martha Louise Hunter
When the mind is free, magic happens.
— C.G. Rousing
The theistic philosopher has a tendency to devalue insufficient worldviews, ideologies, and quite often common sense for the greater good, and in such cases, one should not be discouraged when seen as a bad guy. If he stresses over man's perception of a righteous heart, then he has given his heart to man.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
Love will never let you down, if you don't give it up
— Benny Bellamacina
When I say "The good man gave his good dog a good meal," I use "good" analogically, for there is at the same time a similarity and a difference between a good man, a good dog, and a good meal. All three are desirable, but a good man is wise and moral, a good dog is tame and affectionate, and a good meal is tasty and nourishing. But a good man is not tasty and nourishing, except to a cannibal; a good dog is not wise and moral, except in cartoons, and a good meal is not tame and affectionate, unless it's alive as you eat it.
— Peter Kreeft, Socratic Logic 3.1e: Socratic Method Platonic Questions
The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.
— Joyce Carol Oates, Mudwoman
Nothing is more visible than things hidden; Nothing is more manifest than things minute; Therefore, the superior man should be aware of his aloneness
— Confucius, The Doctrine of the Mean
Want less, live more
— Benny Bellamacina
Humanity must forgive 'Humanity', for only then can we be Humane.
— Ilyas Kassam
I don’t want to accidentally end up looking back on my life to find that I’m ashamed of myself, I want to live a life I can be proud of.
— Alice Bag
In our country religion is not different from philosophy and religion & philosophy don’t differ from science.
— Virchand Gandhi
Subjectivity is strange to Science, while Relativity is an objective part of it.
— Felix Alba-Juez
To believe in nothing is as ridiculous as to believe in everything. Reason and factual evidence may convert a belief into knowledge.
— Felix Alba-Juez
Who are you? No really. Way, way down deep. Who are you?
— Doug Dillon
Comprehending and knowing better and deeper are the best guarantees we can have to attain ideas and criteria of our own; i.e. to stop depending on what other people say. In summary, to be freer to choose our own path in life.
— Manuel Toharia-Cortés, Galloping with Light - Einstein, Relativity, and Folklore
We may be living past and future lives at the same time we are living this one.
— Doug Dillon
When you’ve tried everything and failed, try everything else and succeed
— Benny Bellamacina
I can kill a bad guy, but I can't save anyone. I'm not a hero. All I am is a killer. A dead killer who shit his pants.
— Samuel Engelen, Vigilante Day
Other people are only aspects of our own greater being.
— Doug Dillon
You can change your mind, don't let your mind change you
— Benny Bellamacina
Truth is not as pompous and romantic as myth ... but it has the immeasurable value of being the Truth.
— Felix Alba-Juez, E=mc^2: The Most Famous Equation in History... and its Folklore
It is curious that the human mind could blindly accept an infinite speed but had reservations to accept a finite one, simply because it was too large!
— Felix Alba-Juez, Galloping with Sound - The Grand Cosmic Conspiracy
Grammar and ordinary language are bad guides to metaphysics. A great book might be written showing the influence of syntax on philosophy.
— Bertrand Russell
When we say two bodies 'touch', what we mean (without knowing it) is that both electromagnetic fields are interacting to avoid physical interpenetration and ... that happens well before subatomic particles touch!
— Felix Alba-Juez, Galloping with Sound - The Grand Cosmic Conspiracy
Pretend you are foolish to the foolish, and be yourself when you are alone or with others like you, because if you take the foolish seriously as your friend, you might be a fool yourself.
— A Gentlemen
Besides our eyes, skin and the other senses through which we receive the shadows of the exterior reality, we have a 'mental eye' (intelligence) with which we can perceive reality as it is.
— Jesus Zamora Bonilla, Galloping with Light - Einstein, Relativity, and Folklore
A loud smile is often a fake laugh.
— Saahil Prem
Life always involves some logic in its manifestations, and logic, as a rule, excludes the versatility of life from its considerations.
— Raheel Farooq
The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.
— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
— George Orwell
In the Kamigata area, they have a sort of tiered lunchbox they use for a single day when flower viewing. Upon returning, they throw them away, trampling them underfoot. The end is important in all things.
— Tsunetomo Yamamoto, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai
Of course, supernatural acts are what miracles are all about. They are, after all, precisely those things that circumvent the laws of nature. A god who can create the laws of nature can presumably also circumvent them at will. Although why they would have been circumvented so liberally thousands of years ago, before the invention of modern communication instruments that could have recorded them, and not today, is still something to wonder about.
— Lawrence M. Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing
Your principle should be to see everything and say nothing. The world changes so rapidly that if you want to get on you cannot afford to align yourself with any person or point of view.
— Khushwant Singh
In the process of burning out these confusions, we discover enlightenment. If the process were otherwise, the awakened state of mind would be a product dependent upon cause and effect and therefore liable to dissolution. Anything which is created must, sooner or later, die. If enlightenment were created in such a way, there would always be a possibility of ego reasserting itself, causing a return to the confused state. Enlightenment is permanent because we have not produced it; we have merely discovered it.
— Chögyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
For I have trained myself and am training myself always to be able to dance lightly in the service of thought
— Søren Kierkegaard
When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays
Once someone asked me, "What do you want to be your epitaph?" So I said, "Paulo Coelho died when he was alive.
— Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
If by any chance a playwright wishes to express a political opinion or a moral opinion or a philosophy, he must be a good enough craftsman to do it with so much spice of entertainment in it that the public get the message without being aware of it.
— Noël Coward, A Talent To Amuse: A Biography Of Noël Coward
There is desire in the perfect, beauty in the imperfect.Thus I lust over the flawless,and fall amorously forceless to the flawed.
— Ilyas Kassam, Reminiscence of the Present: Spiritual Encounters of the Analytically Insane
At the very best, a mind enclosed in language is in prison. It is limited to the number of relations which words can make simultaneously present to it; and remains in ignorance of thoughts which involve the combination of a greater number. These thoughts are outside language, they are unformulable, although they are perfectly rigorous and clear and although every one of the relations they involve is capable of precise expression in words. So the mind moves in a closed space of partial truth, which may be larger or smaller, without ever being able so much as to glance at what is outside.
— Simone Weil
Man is an end in himself.
— Ayn Rand
that you would not anticipate misery since the evils you dread as coming upon you may perhaps never reach you at least they are not yet come Thus some things torture us more than they ought, some before they ought and some which ought never to torture us at all. We heighten our pain either by presupposing a cause or anticipation
— Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
But because me and myself, as you no doubt are well aware, we are going to die, my relation—and yours too—to the event of this text, which otherwise never quite makes it, our relation is that of a structurally posthumous necessity.Suppose, in that case, that I am not alone in my claim to know the idiomatic code (whose notion itself is already contradictory) of this event. What if somewhere, here or there, there are shares in this non-secret’s secret? Even so the scene would not be changed. The accomplices, as you are once again well aware, are also bound to die.
— Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles/Eperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche
Logic in all its infinite potential, is the most dangerous of vices. For one can always find some form of logic to justify his action, and rest comfortably in the assurance, that what he did abides by reason. That is why, for us brittle beings, Intention is the only true weapon of peace.
— Ilyas Kassam
An over examination of life can deter you from life itself
— Ilyas Kassam
The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.
— Linus Pauling
Compassion is the basis of all morality
— Arthur Schopenhauer
Staring at a world too horrible to comprehend, believing -- by dint of ignorance and innocence -- that beneath this unbearable contract of guilt and blame there is always an older contract that may bind and release in a more salutary way.
— Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
To question reason is to trust it.
— Mitch Stokes
Excess of strength alone is proof of strength
— Friedrich Nietzsche
An intelligent man is one who acknowledges his intelligence as that of those who surround him.
— Ilyas Kassam
When you can't get what you want, get what you need
— Benny Bellamacina
And still the text will remain, if it is really cryptic and parodying (and I tell you that it is so through and through. I might as well tell you since it won’t be of any help to you. Even my admission can very well be a lie because there is dissimulation only if one tells the truth, only if one tells that one is telling the truth), still the text will remain indefinitely open, cryptic and parodying.
— Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles/Eperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche
If your dreams are to hard to achieve, just achieve
— Benny Bellamacina, Piddly Poems for Children, v.2
My world is about stories that entertain
—  emotions that move
There are two ways of constructing a piece of software: One is to make it so simple that there are obviously no errors, and the other is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious errors.
— Tony Hoare
The Getsmart PrayerI do my laundry and you do yours,I am not in this life to listen to your ceaseless yammering,And you are not in this world for any discernable reason at all.You are you, and I am I, and I got the better deal.And if by chance we find each other, it will be unspeakably tedious.Fuck off.
— Jon Carroll
The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Love gives you eyes.
— Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock
Your educators can only be your liberators.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations
If chance be the Father of all flesh, Disaster is his rainbow in the sky, And when you hear State of Emergency! Sniper Kills Ten! Troops on Rampage! Whites go Looting! Bomb Blasts School! It is but the sound of man worshiping his maker.
— Steve Turner, Poems
In general, I try and distinguish between what one calls the Future and “l’avenir” [the ‘to come]. The future is that which – tomorrow, later, next century – will be. There is a future which is predictable, programmed, scheduled, foreseeable. But there is a future, l’avenir (to come) which refers to someone who comes whose arrival is totally unexpected. For me, that is the real future. That which is totally unpredictable. The Other who comes without my being able to anticipate their arrival. So if there is a real future, beyond the other known future, it is l’avenir in that it is the coming of the Other when I am completely unable to foresee their arrival.
— Jacques Derrida
He was still thoughtful. 'Do you think any of us ever really knows anyone?'  'Philosophy, Lord Dryden? And yet it's daylight and everyone is still sober.
— Julie Anne Long, How the Marquess Was Won
One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone.
— Marcel Proust
What matters creative endless toil, When, at a snatch, oblivion ends the coil?
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie erster und zweiter Teil. Urfaust
It is reasonable to love the Absolute absolutely for the same reason it is reasonable to love the relative relatively.
— Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock
A tree's shade is worth more than the knowledge of truth, my sons, for a tree's shade is true while it lasts, and the knowledge of truth is false in its very truth. The leaves' greenness is worth more, for a right understanding, than a great thought, for the leaves, greenness is something you can show others, but you can never show them a great thought. We are born without knowing how to talk and we die without having known how to express ourselves. Our life runs its course between the silence of one who cannot speak and the silence of one who wasn't understood, and around it hovers — like a bee where there are no flowers — a useless, inscrutable destiny.
— Fernando Pessoa, The Education of the Stoic
The only debatable issue, it seems to me, is whether it is more ridiculous to turn to experts in social theory for general well-confirmed propositions, or to the specialists in the great religions and philosophical systems for insights into fundamental human values.
— Noam Chomsky, The Essential Chomsky
Giving importance to what we think because we thought it, taking our own selves not only (to quote the Greek philosopher) as the measure of all things but as their norm or standard, we create in ourselves, if not an interpretation, at least a criticism of the universe, which we don't even know and therefore cannot criticize. The giddiest, most weak-minded of us then promote that criticism to an interpretation that's superimposed, like a hallucination; induced rather than deduced. It's a hallucination in the strict sense, being an illusion based on something only dimly seen.
— Fernando Pessoa, The Education of the Stoic
People are, generally speaking, either dead certain or totally indifferent (Both types are crawling around deep down in the rabbit's fur!)
— Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World
The philosopher is a person who refuses no pleasures which do not produce greater sorrows, and who knows how to create new ones.
— Giacomo Casanova
Lifes like a painters palette, just when you've got everything worked out the colours change
— Benny Bellamacina, Piddly Poems for Children
What is left when honor is lost?
— Publilius Syrus
Yesterday misspent can't be recall'dVanity makes beauty contemptibleWisdom is more valuable than riches.
— Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
Visible objects therefore do not perish utterly, since nature repairs one thing from another and allows nothing to be born without the aid of another's death.
— Titus Lucretius Carus
If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself? That there is a part of man that man wants to reject? That man wants to keep from knowing what he is? That he wants to protect himself from seeing that he is something awful? And that this 'awful' part of himself might not be as awful as he thinks, but he finds it too strange and he does not know what to do with it? We talk about what to do with the atom bomb...But man's heart, his spirit is the deadliest thing in creation. Are not all cultures and civilizations just screens which men have used to divide themselves, to put between that part of themselves which they are afraid of and that part of themselves which they wish, in their deep timidity, to try to preserve? Are not all of man's efforts at order an attempt to still man's fear of himself?
— Richard Wright, The Outsider
Things which are accidentally the causes either of hope or fear are called good or evil omens.
— Baruch Spinoza
FRANCISCUS: How sweetly she looks! Oh, but there's a wrinkle in her brow as deep as philosophy.
— Thomas Middleton, The Changeling
What i took away from witnessing the broken climbers in Moshi was this: *Everything is easy until it isn't.*
— Josh Gates, Destination Truth: Memoirs of a Monster Hunter
Sometimes the only way to succeed is to fail backwards
— Benny Bellamacina, The King of Rhyme
...the fundamental things in a man are not the things he explains, but rather the things he forgets to explain.
— G.K. Chesterton, The Superstition of Divorce
But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.
— Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich
Hey, I am thinking of it myself, in this part of world (East), we all do endeavors in praying and are sweating (white liquid) and this is our situation, frustrated , but on the other part of world (West) ,they are enjoying in party and drinking liquor (white liquid) but their situation is that, successful, I do not know that the problem relates to the type of liquid or the way of drinking!!
— Ali Shariati
Giving is the only way of taking part
— Benny Bellamacina
Le bonheur, c'est continuer à désirer ce que l'on a déjà.
— Augustine of Hippo
The best ideas will eat at you for days, maybe even weeks, until something, some incident, some impulse, triggers you to finally express them.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
The Shadow-maker shapes forever.
— Lafcadio Hearn
With a philosophy education, one can infuriate his peers, intimidate his date, think of obscure, unreliable ways to make money, and never regret a thing.
— Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality
What a silly thing love is!' said the student as he walked away. 'It is not half as useful as logic, for it does not prove anything, and it is always telling one of things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true. In fact, it is quite unpractical, and, as in this age to be practical is everything, I shall go back to philosophy and study metaphysics.' So he returned to his room and pulled out a great dusty book, and began to read.
— Oscar Wilde
Violence is spiritual junk food, and boredom is spiritual anorexia.
— Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock
Reason is the power or capacity whereby we see or detect logical relationships among propositions.
— Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief
Socrates himself said, 'One thing only I know, and this is that I know nothing.' Remember this statement, because it is an admission that is rare, even among philosophers. Moreover, it can be so dangerous to say in public that it can cost you your life. The most subversive people are those who ask questions. Giving answers is not nearly as threatening. Any one question can be more explosive than a thousand answers.
— Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World
The bird of paradise alights only upon the hand that does not grasp.
— John Berry
Time is just quantified eternity.
— Deepak Chopra, The Way of the Wizard: Twenty Spiritual Lessons for Creating the Life You Want
Did you have a rough month? I did :( but, you know what? There’s no time to dwell on a missed opportunity or worry about what I should’ve done or said, beating myself up & making myself miserable about my mistakes. That doesn’t work. So will take notes from that, put it behind me, move on & finish the year STRONG
— Pablo
Because in some other universe, you are me, I am you, and we are perfectly happy together. Or perhaps not… and just like this…
— Abhimanyu Jha, A Dilli-Mumbai Story ...when Love Won Over Terror
God gives us not only the truth but also the ability to believe it
—  not only the new thing to see but also the new eye to see it with.
Molecules dissolve and pass away, but consciousness survives the death of the matter on which it rides.
— Deepak Chopra, The Way of the Wizard: Twenty Spiritual Lessons for Creating the Life You Want
Thomas Jefferson, that owner of many slaves, chose to begin the Declaration of Independence by directly contradicting the moral basis of slavery, writing "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights ..." thus undercutting simultaneously any argument that Africans were racially inferior, and also that they or their ancestors could ever have been justly and legally deprived of their freedom. In doing so, however, he did not propose some radically new conception of rights and liberties. Neither have subsequent political philosophers. For the most part, we've just kept the old ones, but with the word "not" inserted here and there. Most of our most precious rights and freedoms are a series of exceptions to an overall moral and legal framework that suggests we shouldn't really have them in the first place.
— David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years
At this point we can finally see what's really at stake in our peculiar habit of defining ourselves simultaneously as master and slave, reduplicating the most brutal aspects of the ancient household in our very concept of ourselves, as masters of our freedoms, or as owners of our very selves. It is the only way that we can imagine ourselves as completely isolated beings. There is a direct line from the new Roman conception of liberty – not as the ability to form mutual relationships with others, but as the kind of absolute power of "use and abuse" over the conquered chattel who make up the bulk of a wealthy Roman man's household – to the strange fantasies of liberal philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, and Smith, about the origins of human society in some collection of thirty- or forty-year-old males who seem to have sprung from the earth fully formed, then have to decide whether to kill each other or begin to swap beaver pelts.
— David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years
I believe in spectacles, but I think eyes necessary too.
— John Stuart Mill
O philosophy, life's guide! O searcher-out of virtue and expeller of vices! What could we and every age of men have been without thee? Thou hast produced cities; thou hast called men scattered about into the social enjoyment of life.
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
It seemed to a number of philosophers of language, myself included, that we should attempt to achieve a unification of Chomsky's syntax, with the results of the researches that were going on in semantics and pragmatics. I believe that this effort has proven to be a failure. Though Chomsky did indeed revolutionize the subject of linguistics, it is not at all clear, at the end the century, what the solid results of this revolution are. As far as I can tell there is not a single rule of syntax that all, or even most, competent linguists are prepared to agree is a rule.
— John Rogers Searle
Any fool can see the limits of seeing, but not even the wisest know the limits of knowing. Thus is ignorance rendered invisible, and are all Men made fools.
— R. Scott Bakker, The White Luck Warrior
So he came to realize that learning a language was perhaps the most profound thing a man could do. Not only did it require wrapping different sounds around the very movement of your soul, it involved learning things somehow already known, as though much of what he was somehow existed apart from him. A kind of enlightenment accompanied these first lessons, a deeper understanding of self.
— R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye
There is something almost shocking in the notion of so chaste a function carrying this Kantian hurlyburly in her womb.
— William James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol 1
religion, the most powerful of the elements which have entered into the formation of moral feeling, having almost always been governed either by the ambition of a hierarchy, seeking control over every department of human conduct, or by the spirit of Puritanism.
— John Stuart Mill
The scepticism which men affect towards their higher inspirations is often not an honest doubt, but a guilty negligence, and is a sign of narrow mind and defective wisdom.
— James Martineau, Tides of the Spirit: Selections from the Writings of James Martineau
The church has never been asked to explain anything, our speciality, along with ballistics, has always been the neutralisation of the overly curious mind through faith.
— José Saramago
If those at your top are weak, your bottom will be rotten
— Benny Bellamacina, The King of Rhyme
aquele que quer responder às injúrias com o ódio vive na tristeza ou na mágoa, aquele que quer vencer o ódio com o amor combate alegremente e sem temor. Triunfa tanto sobre um grande número de inimigos quanto sobre um único, prescindindo de todo socorro da fortuna. Aqueles a quem ele consegue vencer ficam alegres por terem sido derrotados; e, derrotados, eles não são menos fortes; ao contrário, são mais fortes.
— Baruch Spinoza
Though all men be equally frail before the world, the differences between them are terrifying.
— R. Scott Bakker, The Darkness That Comes Before
Il faut que l’homme s’évade de cette lice ridicule qu’on lui a faite: le prétendu réel actuel avec la perspective d’un réel futur qui ne vaille guère mieux. Chaque minute pleine porte en elle-même la négation de siècles d’histoire boitillante et cassée. Ceux à qui il appartient de faire virevolter ces huit flamboyants au-dessus de nous ne le pourront qu’avec de la sève pure._ Manifestes du surréalisme
— André Breton
The philosophers write about things as they are and as they appear to be, but as an artist I find that appearance is everything.
— Gary Inbinder, The Flower to the Painter
I bargained with Life for a penny,And Life would pay no more, However I begged at eveningWhen I counted my scanty store;For Life is just an employer,He gives you what you ask,But once you have set the wages,Why, you must bear the task.I worked for a menial's hire,Only to learn, dismayed,That any wage I had asked of Life,Life would have paid.
— Jessie B. Rittenhouse
You may tend to get cancer from the thing that makes you want to smoke so much, not from the smoking itself.
— William Saroyan, Not Dying: An Autobiographical Interlude
The soul exists partly in eternity and partly in time.
— Marsilio Ficino
I believe in political solutions to political problems. But man's primary problems aren't political; they're philosophical. Until humans can solve their philosophical problems, they're condemned to solve their political problems over and over and over again. It's a cruel, repetitious bore.
— Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
— Herbert Simon
This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave.
— Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man
Can a woman not walk with her possessions down the street of a city?
— Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings
Here we find further argument for Gotagga’s supposition that the world is round. How else could all men stand higher than their brothers?
— R. Scott Bakker, The Thousandfold Thought
Playing God is actually the highest expression of human nature. The urges to improve ourselves, to master our environment, and to set our children on the best path possible have been the fundamental driving forces of all of human history. Without these urges to ‘play God’, the world as we know it wouldn’t exist today.
— Ramez Naam, More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement
I am an i poet.
— E.E. Cummings
Life is the greatest of all mysteries, and though I seek to solve its many riddles, my deepest fear is that I will succeed.
— Brian Rathbone, Call of the Herald
Men, Kellhus had once told her, were like coins: they had two sides. Where one side of them saw, the other side of them was seen, and though all men were both at once, men could only truly know the side of themselves that saw and the side of others that was seen—they could only truly know the inner half of themselves and the outer half of others.At first Esmenet thought this foolish. Was not the inner half the whole, what was only imperfectly apprehended by others? But Kellhus bid her to think of everything she’d witnessed in others. How many unwitting mistakes? How many flaws of character? Conceits couched in passing remarks. Fears posed as judgements …The shortcomings of men—their limits—were written in the eyes of those who watched them. And this was why everyone seemed so desperate to secure the good opinion of others—why everyone played the mummer. They knew without knowing that what they saw of themselves was only half of who they were. And they were desperate to be whole.The measure of wisdom, Kellhus had said, was found in the distance between these two selves.Only afterward had she thought of Kellhus in these terms. With a kind of surpriseless shock, she realized that not once—not once!—had she glimpsed shortcomings in his words or actions. And this, she understood, was why he seemed limitless, like the ground, which extended from the small circle about her feet to the great circle about the sky. He had become her horizon.For Kellhus, there was no distance between seeing and being seen. He alone was whole. And what was more, he somehow stood from without and saw from within. He made whole …
— R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet
A world without poetry and art would be too much like one without birds or flowers: bearable but a lot less enjoyable.
— Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry
Settle, for sure and universally, what conduct will promote the happiness of a rational being.
— Immanuel Kant
In mathematics or physics, infinity is greater than one or two or any number countable. In how many ways can the world be destroyed based on ordered knowledge? You may be able to count this. But the truth is, you “really” don’t know. These possibilities in your mind hold a set of unpredictable orders. One effect may be causative of another of another. It could be a culmination of effects you know as events where events are sets and subsets of potential possibilities. In how many ways can the world be destroyed based on unordered possibilities?
— Dew Platt, The Rudeness of Soul
All that exists is just and unjust and is equally justified in both respects.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
....I am inclined to think that these muscles and bones of mine would have gone off long ago to Megara or Boeotia—by the dog they would, if they had been moved only by their own idea of what was best.(tr Jowett)
— Plato, Phaedo
Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing concentric circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.
— Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House
How keen everyone is to make this world their home forgetting its impermanence It's like trying to see and name constellations in a fireworks display.
— Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil
The darkness behind my closed eyelids was like the cloud-covered sky, but the gray was somewhat deeper. Every few minutes, someone would come and paint over the gray with a different-textured gray - one with a touch of gold or green or red. I was impressed with the variety of grays that existed. Human beings were so strange. All you had to do was sit still for ten minutes, and you could see this amazing variety of grays.
— Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
The Encyclopedia--the advance artillery of reason, the armada of philosophy, the siege engine of the enlightenment...
— Peter Prange, The Philosopher's Kiss
The sun symbolizes the Divine intelligence
—  the empty vastness of space symbolizes the Divine All-Possibility and also the Divine immutability
On the top of Cadair Idris,I felt how happy a man might bewith a little money and a sane intellect,and reflected with astonishment and pityon the madness of the multitude.
— Thomas Love Peacock
The delight we take in our senses is an implicit desire to know the ultimate reason for things, the highest cause. The desire for wisdom that philosophy etymologically is is a desire for the highest or divine causes. Philosophy culminates in theology. All other knowledge contains the seeds of contemplation of the divine.
— Josef Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation
La filosofía nos enseña a sentir incertidumbre ante las cosas que nos parecen evidentes. La propaganda, en cambio, nos enseña a aceptar como evidentes cosas sobre las que sería razonable suspender nuestro juicio o sentir dudas.
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
She had lost herself in this old work, her personality dissolving into it, so that she had been set free. The immortality of the soul lies in its dissolution; this was the cryptic comment that so frustrated Olivier and which Julien had only ever grasped as evidence for the history of a particular school of thought. He had known all about its history, but Julia knew what it meant. He found the realization strangely reassuring.
— Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio
Третье великое препятствие человеческого самопознания — по крайней мере в нашей западной культуре — это наследие идеалистической философии. Она делит мир на две части: мир вещей, который идеалистическое мышление считает в принципе индифферентным в отношении ценностей, и мир человеческого внутреннего закона, который один лишь заслуживает признания ценности. Такое деление замечательно оправдывает эгоцентризм человека, оно идёт навстречу его антипатии к собственной зависимости от законов природы — и потому нет ничего удивительного в том, что оно так глубоко вросло в общественное сознание. Насколько глубоко — об этом можно судить по тому, как изменилось в нашем немецком языке значение слов «идеалист» и «материалист»; первоначально они означали лишь философскую установку, а сегодня содержат и моральную оценку. Необходимо уяснить себе, насколько привычно стало, в нашем западном мышлении, уравнивать понятия «доступное научному исследованию» и «в принципе оценочно-индифферентное». Меня легко обвинить, будто я выступаю против этих трех препятствий человеческого самопознания лишь потому, что они противоречат моим собственным научным и философским воззрениям, — я должен здесь предостеречь от подобных обвинений. Я выступаю не как закоренелый дарвинист против неприятия эволюционного учения, и не как профессиональный исследователь причин — против беспричинного чувства ценности, и не как убеждённый материалист — против идеализма. У меня есть другие основания. Сейчас естествоиспытателей часто упрекают в том, будто они накликают на человечество ужасные напасти и приписывают ему слишком большую власть над природой. Этот упрёк был бы оправдан, если бы учёным можно было поставить в вину, что они не сделали предметом своего изучения и самого человека. Потому что опасность для современного человечества происходит не столько из его способности властвовать над физическими процессами, сколько из его неспособности разумно направлять процессы социальные. Однако в основе этой неспособности лежит именно непонимание причин, которое является — как я хотел бы показать — непосредственным следствием тех самых помех к самопознанию.
— Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression
Life is an essay you yourself have to write, start to finish.
— Mo
One always has a choice.
— Dona Wording
Conservatism is the antidote to tyranny. It's the only one. It's based on thousands of years of human experience. There is nothing narrow about the conservative philosophy. It's a liberating philosophy. It is a magnificent philosophy. It is a philosophy for the ages, for all times.
— Mark R. Levin
We seem to inhabit a universe made up of a small number of elements-particles-bits that swirl in chaotic clouds, occasionally clustering together in geometrically logical temporary configurations.
— Timothy Leary, Chaos & Cyber Culture
William James describes a man who got the experience from laughing-gas; whenever he was under its influence, he knew the secret of the universe, but when he came to, he had forgotten it. At last, with immense effort, he wrote down the secret before the vision had faded. When completely recovered, he rushed to see what he had written. It was: "A smell of petroleum prevails throughout.
— Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy
Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.3 What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?4 A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.5 The sun rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises.6 The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north;around and around goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns.7 All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full;to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again.8 All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it;the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.9 What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.10 Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”?It has been already in the ages before us.11 There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembranceof later things yet to be among those who come after.
— Anonymous, Holy Bible: King James Version
Dad was a philosopher and had what he called his Theory of Purpose, which held that everything in life had a purpose, and unless it achieved that purpose, it was just taking up space on the planet and wasting everybody's time.
— Jeannette Walls, Half Broke Horses
Do you know the only value life has is what life puts upon itself? And it is of course overestimated, for it is of necessity prejudiced in its own favour. Take that man I had aloft. He held on as if he were a precious thing, a treasure beyond diamonds of rubies. To you? No. To me? Not at all. To himself? Yes. But I do not accept his estimate. He sadly overrates himself. There is plenty more life demanding to be born. Had he fallen and dripped his brains upon the deck like honey from the comb, there would have been no loss to the world. The supply is too large.
— Jack London, The Sea Wolf
Serious thinkers are few, and the world is ruled by crude ideas.
— Carl Lotus Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers
O world, world when I was younger I thought there was some order governing you and your deeds. But now you seem to be a labyrinth of errors, a frightful desert, a den of wild beasts, a game in which men move in circles…a stony field, a meadow full of serpents, a flowering but barren orchard, a spring of cares, a river of tears, a sea of suffering, a vain hope.
— Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina
Misconceptions play a prominent role in my view of the world.
— George Soros
if being is many, it must be both like and unlike, and this is impossible, for neither can the like be unlike, nor the unlike like
— Zeno of Citium
Man is able to decide for or against reason, he is able to create beyond reason or to destroy below reason
— Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith
For axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses.
— John Keats, Letters of John Keats
The slope contains many wonders not found at the summit.
— Marty Rubin
Nature, it seems, is the popular namefor milliards and milliards and milliardsof particles playing their infinite gameof billiards and billiards and billiards.
— Piet Hein
The western mind makes definitions
—  it draws lines.
Man in general, if reduced to himself, is too wicked to be free.
— Joseph de Maistre
Reason may be employed to support faith as well as to destroy it.
— Carl Lotus Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers
What is this slow blue dream of living, and this fevered death by dreaming?
— Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry
The pity of it was that this discovery, if such it was, now seemed so stale, so profitless to me. What good was it? What good did thinking ever do?
— Jed Rubenfeld, The Interpretation of Murder
Of all knowledge, the wise and good seek mostly to know themselves.
— William Shakespeare
Standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality.
— Heisenberg
We live in a stocking which is in the process of being turned inside out, without our ever knowing for sure to what phase of the process our moment of consciousness corresponds.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister
...the only way to judge a philosophy is to examine the lives of those who live it.
— Karl Friedrich, Wings: A Novel of World War II Flygirls
Give love, take pride
— Benny Bellamacina, Piddly poems for children vol:3
Children are like sponges
—  they start to smell after a little while.
The summer's flower is to the summer sweetThough to itself it only live and die
— William Shakespeare, The Complete Sonnets and Poems
The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that. 
— Richard M. Rorty
What man needs is not just the persistent posing of ultimate questions, but the sense of what is feasible, what is possible, what is correct, here and now. The philosopher, of all people, must, I think, be aware of the tension between what he claims to achieve and the reality in which he finds himself.
— Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method
Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together.
— Alan W. Watts, The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are