c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Doubt as sin. — Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature — is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality
If it turns out that there is a God...the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.
— Woody Allen
Wisest is she who knows she does not know.
— Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World
Happiness consists in frequent repetition of pleasure
— Arthur Schopenhauer
Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
— James     Baldwin, Giovanni's Room
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding... And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy
— Kahlil Gibran
I don't want to be a tree
—  I want to be its meaning.
You show me a capitalist, and I'll show you a bloodsucker
— Malcolm X
On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
— George Orwell, All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays
A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet "for sale", who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his "normal" contemporaries. Not rarely will he suffer from neurosis that results from the situation of a sane man living in an insane society, rather than that of the more conventional neurosis of a sick man trying to adapt himself to a sick society. In the process of going further in his analysis, i.e. of growing to greater independence and productivity,his neurotic symptoms will cure themselves. 
— Erich Fromm
Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.
— Babe Ruth
Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.
— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
People know what they do
—  frequently they know why they do what they do
I have a friend who's an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say "look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. Then he says "I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing," and I think that he's kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is ... I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it's not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there's also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.
— Richard Feynman
For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?
— George Orwell, 1984
To lose a brother is to lose someone with whom you can share the experience of growing old, who is supposed to bring you a sister-in-law and nieces and nephews, creatures who people the tree of your life and give it new branches. To lose your father is to lose the one whose guidance and help you seek, who supports you like a tree trunk supports its branches. To lose your mother, well, that is like losing the sun above you. It is like losing--I'm sorry, I would rather not go on.
— Yann Martel, Life of Pi
Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep
— Albert Camus
It takes three to make love, not two: you, your spouse, and God. Without God people only succeed in bringing out the worst in one another. Lovers who have nothing else to do but love each other soon find there is nothing else. Without a central loyalty life is unfinished.
— Fulton J. Sheen, Seven Words of Jesus and Mary: Lessons from Cana and Calvary
Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?
— Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
The flame that burns Twice as bright burns half as long.
— Lao Tzu, Te Tao Ching
Know thyself? If I knew myself, I'd run away.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
— Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost
There are no ordinary moments.
— Dan Millman, Way of the Peaceful Warrior: A Book That Changes Lives
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
— Aristotle
She said, "It's not life or death, the labyrinth.""Um, okay. So what is it?""Suffering," she said. "Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you. That's the problem. Bolivar was talking about the pain, not about the living or dying. How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?... Nothing's wrong. But there's always suffering, Pudge. Homework or malaria or having a boyfriend who lives far away when there's a good-looking boy lying next to you. Suffering is universal. It's the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about.
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
Take it easy, but take it.
— Woody Guthrie
You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.
— Alan W. Watts
The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.
— Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
The menu is not the meal.
— Alan W. Watts
Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.
— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather, we should thank God that such men lived.
— George S. Patton Jr.
The seed of suffering in you may be strong, but don't wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy.
— Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation
If you place your head in a lion's mouth, then you cannot complain one day if he happens to bite it off.
— Agatha Christie
Anyway—because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next—and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis—at any time of night or day.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage
Don't explain your philosophy. Embody it.
— Epictetus
I was never aware of any other option but to question everything.
— Noam Chomsky
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
— Pierre Dos Utt, Tanstaafl: A Plan for a New Economic World Order
Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.
— Vladimir Lenin
In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai découvert en moi un invincible été.
— Albert Camus
I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.
— Richard Feynman
The evil that is in the world almost always comes from ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.
— Albert Camus
A cult is a religion with no political power.
— Tom Wolfe
The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Perhaps not one religion contains all of the truth of the world. Perhaps every religion contains fragments of the truth, and it is our responsibility to identify those fragments and piece them together.
— Christopher Paolini, Brisingr
Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly if there wasn't someone, somewhere, laughing?
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution!
— Albert Einstein
The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.
— Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours
To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.
— Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy
Until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven.
— Arthur Miller, The Crucible
The most important reason for going from one place to another is to see what's in between, and they took great pleasure in doing just that.
— Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.
— Albert Camus, The Stranger
We are the hollow menWe are the stuffed menLeaning togetherHeadpiece filled with straw. Alas!Our dried voices, whenWe whisper togetherAre quiet and meaninglessAs wind in dry grassOr rats' feet over broken glassIn our dry cellarShape without form, shade without colour,Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
— T.S. Eliot, Poems: 1909-1925
Non est ad astra mollis e terris via" - "There is no easy way from the earth to the stars
— Seneca
I have gained this by philosophy … I do without being ordered what some are constrained to do by their fear of the law.
— Aristotle
Don't just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents." Translation by Sharon Lebell
— Epictetus, The Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness and Effectiveness
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
— William James
If you reveal your secrets to the wind,you should not blame the wind forrevealing them to the trees.
— Kahlil Gibran, The Wanderer
Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory and the second philosophy.
— Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
Even the finest sword plunged into salt water will eventually rust.
— Sun Tzu
The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible
— William S. Burroughs
The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
— Alain de Botton
Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill... we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one.
— Plato
The glory of Christianity is to conquer by forgiveness.
— William Blake
I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love.
— Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Even a soul submerged in sleep is hard at work and helps make something of the world.
— Heraclitus, Fragments
Do you know what punishments I've endured for my crimes, my sins? None. I am proof of the absurdity of men's most treasured abstractions. A just universe wouldn't tolerate my existence.
— Brent Weeks, The Way of Shadows
Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.
— David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Fair speech may hide a foul heart.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers
The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.
— Baruch Spinoza
Our ability to adapt is amazing. Our ability to change isn't quite as spectacular.
— Lisa Lutz, The Spellmans Strike Again
Who is John Galt?
— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.
— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
I consider it an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves.
— Carl Sagan
I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage
— Friedrich Nietzsche
No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness.If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
Words do not express thoughts very well; every thing immediately becomes a little different, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom of one man seems nonsense to another.
— Gautama Buddha
Doing nothing is better than being busy doing nothing.
— Lao Tzu
When you realize there is something you don't understand, then you're generally on the right path to understanding all kinds of things.
— Jostein Gaarder, The Solitaire Mystery
The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos
It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness
Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.
— Kahlil Gibran, Mirrors of the Soul
Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.
— Zhuangzi, The Butterfly as Companion: Meditations on the First Three Chapters of the Chuang-Tzu
Challenges are gifts that force us to search for a new center of gravity. Don't fight them. Just find a new way to stand.
— Oprah Winfrey
I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased. However, I don't know beans about my disease, and I am not sure what is bothering me. I don't treat it and never have, though I respect medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, let's say sufficiently so to respect medicine. (I am educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am.) No, I refuse to treat it out of spite. You probably will not understand that. Well, but I understand it. Of course I can't explain to you just whom I am annoying in this case by my spite. I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "get even" with the doctors by not consulting them. I know better than anyone that I thereby injure only myself and no one else. But still, if I don't treat it, its is out of spite. My liver is bad, well then-- let it get even worse!
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead
Criticism of others is thus an oblique form of self-commendation. We think we make the picture hang straight on our wall by telling our neighbors that all his pictures are crooked.
— Fulton J. Sheen, Seven Words of Jesus and Mary: Lessons from Cana and Calvary
Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! 'Have courage to use your own reason!'- that is the motto of enlightenment.
— Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?
One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.
— Sophocles
If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin.
— Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
When another blames you or hates you, or people voice similar criticisms, go to their souls, penetrate inside and see what sort of people they are. You will realize that there is no need to be racked with anxiety that they should hold any particular opinion about you.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don't take are snuffed out like candles, as if they'd never existed.
— Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass
The pianokeys are black and whitebut they sound like a million colors in your mind
— Maria Cristina Mena, The Collected Stories of Maria Cristina Mena
Nature is pleased with simplicity. And nature is no dummy
— Isaac Newton
Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
The only way we'll get freedom for ourselves is to identify ourselves with every oppressed people in the world. We are blood brothers to the people of Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba -- yes Cuba too.
— Malcolm X
I suppose therefore that all things I see are illusions; I believe that nothing has ever existed of everything my lying memory tells me. I think I have no senses. I believe that body, shape, extension, motion, location are functions. What is there then that can be taken as true? Perhaps only this one thing, that nothing at all is certain.
— René Descartes
I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who overcomes his enemies.
— Aristotle
Because there are three classes of intellects: one which comprehends by itself; another which appreciates what others comprehend; and a third which neither comprehends by itself nor by the showing of others; the first is the most excellent, the second is good, the third is useless.
— Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of the peace.
— Baruch Spinoza
Knowledge is power is time is money.
— Robert Thier, Storm and Silence
Learned we may be with another man's learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own.
— Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future too.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
A preoccupation with the next world clearly shows an inability to cope credibly with this one.
— Richard K. Morgan, Broken Angels
To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher.
— Blaise Pascal, Pensées
As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because, when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.
— Bertrand Russell
Choose to be happy. It is what we have all done.
— Melissa Marr, Fragile Eternity
I am my world.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen.
— François de La Rochefoucauld
Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.
— Adam Smith
He who is not satisfied with a little, is satisfied with nothing .
— Epicurus
You were born a child of light’s wonderful secret— you return to the beauty you have always been.
— Aberjhani, Visions of a Skylark Dressed in Black
The role played by time at the beginning of the universe is, I believe, the final key to removing the need for a Grand Designer, and revealing how the universe created itself. … Time itself must come to a stop. You can’t get to a time before the big bang, because there was no time before the big bang. We have finally found something that does not have a cause because there was no time for a cause to exist in. For me this means there is no possibility of a creator because there is no time for a creator to have existed. Since time itself began at the moment of the Big Bang, it was an event that could not have been caused or created by anyone or anything. … So when people ask me if a god created the universe, I tell them the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the Big Bang, so there is no time for God to make the universe in. It’s like asking for directions to the edge of the Earth. The Earth is a sphere. It does not have an edge, so looking for it is a futile exercise.
— Stephen Hawking
Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
— Alan W. Watts, The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Until the day when God shall deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words,-Wait and hope.
— Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
No man was ever wise by chance
— Seneca
Fas est ab hoste doceri.One should learn even from one's enemies.
— Ovid, Metamorphoses
It is indisputable that the being whose capacities of enjoyment are low, has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied; and a highly endowed being will always feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is constituted, is imperfect. But he can learn to bear its imperfections, if they are at all bearable; and they will not make him envy the being who is indeed unconscious of the imperfections, but only because he feels not at all the good which those imperfections qualify.  dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is only because they only know their own side of the question.
— John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism
If you don't behave as you believe, you will end by believing as you behave.
— Fulton J. Sheen
Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment's torture.
— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Philosophy ... is a science, and as such has no articles of faith; accordingly, in it nothing can be assumed as existing except what is either positively given empirically, or demonstrated through indubitable conclusions.
— Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena
The secret of Buddhism is to remove all ideas, all concepts, in order for the truth to have a chance to penetrate, to reveal itself.
— Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddha Mind, Buddha Body: Walking Toward Enlightenment
Be wiser than other people if you can
—  but do not tell them so.
One of the greatest tragedies in life is to lose your own sense of self and accept the version of you that is expected by everyone else.
— K.L. Toth
The moment you stop trying to become a better person, is the moment you start to become worse than what you already are.
— Carroll Bryant
What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are "coins" for real things.
— Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
All is mystery
—  but he is a slave who will not struggle to penetrate the dark veil.
It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions
I am one thing, my writings are another.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
My desire and wish is that the things I start with should be so obvious that you wonder why I spend my time stating them. This is what I aim at because the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.
— Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism
The inner fire is the most important thing mankind possesses.
— Edith Södergran
I think, therefore I'll think.
— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
A painting is more than the sum of its parts,' he would tell me, and then go on to explain how the cow by itself is just a cow, and the meadow by itself is just grass and flowers, and the sun peeking through the trees is just a beam of light, but put them all together and you've got magic.
— Wendelin Van Draanen, Flipped
Son, never trust a man who doesn’t drink because he’s probably a self-righteous sort, a man who thinks he knows right from wrong all the time. Some of them are good men, but in the name of goodness, they cause most of the suffering in the world. They’re the judges, the meddlers. And, son, never trust a man who drinks but refuses to get drunk. They’re usually afraid of something deep down inside, either that they’re a coward or a fool or mean and violent. You can’t trust a man who’s afraid of himself. But sometimes, son, you can trust a man who occasionally kneels before a toilet. The chances are that he is learning something about humility and his natural human foolishness, about how to survive himself. It’s damned hard for a man to take himself too seriously when he’s heaving his guts into a dirty toilet bowl.
— James Crumley
It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.
— Voltaire
As long as we are children, we have the ability to experience things around us--but then we grow used to the world. To grow up is to get drunk on sensory experience.
— Jostein Gaarder, The Solitaire Mystery
To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
— Henri Bergson
The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.
— Frédéric Bastiat
Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.
— Emil M. Cioran
Maybe sometimes we don't do the right thing because the wrong thing looks more dangerous, and we don't want to look scared, so we go and do the wrong thing just because it's dangerous. We're more concerned with not looking scared than with judging right.
— Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass
Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive.
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.
— René Descartes
I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again 'I know that that’s a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty
All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments.
— Isaac Asimov
Faith in faith' he answered himself. 'It isn't necessary to have something to believe in. It's only necessary to believe that somewhere there's something worthy of belief.
— Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination
Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.
— Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
The wealth required by nature is limited and is easy to procure
—  but the wealth required by vain ideals extends to infinity.
To learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the others.
— Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
A prudent man should always follow in the path trodden by great men and imitate those who are most excellent, so that if he does not attain to their greatness, at any rate he will get some tinge of it.
— Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
If you can't fight and you can't flee, flow.
— Robert Elias
Each star is a mirror reflecting the truth inside you.
— Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry
All men by nature desire knowledge.
— Aristotle, On Man in the Universe
Do not ruin today with mourning tomorrow.
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
...an optimistic mind-set finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem that the pessimist regards as incurable.
— Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger: Die letzten Geheimnisse der Illuminaten oder An den Grenzen des erweiterten Bewusstseins
To be alone is to be different, to be different is to be alone.
— Suzanne Gordon
Man was born for society. However little He may be attached to the World, He never can wholly forget it, or bear to be wholly forgotten by it. Disgusted at the guilt or absurdity of Mankind, the Misanthrope flies from it: He resolves to become an Hermit, and buries himself in the Cavern of some gloomy Rock. While Hate inflames his bosom, possibly He may feel contented with his situation: But when his passions begin to cool; when Time has mellowed his sorrows, and healed those wounds which He bore with him to his solitude, think you that Content becomes his Companion? Ah! no, Rosario. No longer sustained by the violence of his passions, He feels all the monotony of his way of living, and his heart becomes the prey of Ennui and weariness. He looks round, and finds himself alone in the Universe: The love of society revives in his bosom, and He pants to return to that world which He has abandoned. Nature loses all her charms in his eyes: No one is near him to point out her beauties, or share in his admiration of her excellence and variety. Propped upon the fragment of some Rock, He gazes upon the tumbling waterfall with a vacant eye, He views without emotion the glory of the setting Sun. Slowly He returns to his Cell at Evening, for no one there is anxious for his arrival; He has no comfort in his solitary unsavoury meal: He throws himself upon his couch of Moss despondent and dissatisfied, and wakes only to pass a day as joyless, as monotonous as the former.
— Matthew      Lewis, The Monk
I would prefer a sword to fight duel, but a pen to plan a war.
— Robert Thier, Storm and Silence
Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.
— Erma Bombeck
If a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which always recurs.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premise of our philosophy.
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge
I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.
— Baruch Spinoza
it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.
— Ernest Hemingway
Things are not always what they seem
—  the first appearance deceives many
...only in the surrender of the light could the darkness prevail.
— David Eddings, King of the Murgos
All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist.
— Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?
— Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
There is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal people.
— Thomas Jefferson
No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando
If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.
— David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
The more you struggle to live, the less you live. Give up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing. Instead, surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure....you are above everything distressing.
— Baruch Spinoza
All the world's a stage.
— William Shakespeare, As You Like It
To be evenminded is the greatest virtue.Wisdom is to speakthe truth and actin keeping with its nature.
— Heraclitus, Fragments
...when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases. 
— Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger Volume I: Final Secret of the Illuminati
I imagine that the intelligent people are the ones so intelligent that they don't even need or want to look 'intelligent' anymore.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
There isnt always an explanation for everything.
— Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
The only thing standing between you and your dreams is ... reluctance.
— Carroll Bryant
Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.
— Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.
— Richard Feynman
If an angelic being fell from the sky and tried to live in this world of ours I think even they would commit many wrongs.
— Sui Ishida
Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.
— Norman Mailer
Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realize how unnecessary many things are. We've been using them not because we needed them but because we had them.
— Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
All sciences are vain and full of errors that are not born of Experience, the mother of all Knowledge.
— Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo's Notebooks
Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?
— Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics
Philosophy can make people sick.
— Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing of the origin and destiny of cats?
— Henry David Thoreau, Thoreau Journal 9
I desire to live in peace and to continue the life I have begun under the motto 'to live well you must live unseen
— René Descartes, The Principles of Philosophy
We’re built of contradictions, all of us. It’s those opposing forces that give us strength, like an arch, each block pressing the next. Give me a man whose parts are all aligned in agreement and I’ll show you madness. We walk a narrow path, insanity to each side. A man without contradictions to balance him will soon veer off.
— Mark  Lawrence, King of Thorns
His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say, ‘God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,’ you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words, 'God can.' It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.
— C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self.
— Max Stirner
Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.
— Socrates, Essential Thinkers - Socrates
Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures.
— Leon Trotsky
The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.
— Wendell Berry
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
— G.K. Chesterton
The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These "anti-realist" doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself.But it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions, while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial -- notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.
— Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit
I take no pride in hopeless longing; I wouldn't hold a stillborn aspiration. I'd want to have it, to make it, to live it.
— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Plato was a bore.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.
— David Hume
I do feel that I’ve managed to make something I could maybe call my world…over time…little by little. And when I’m inside it, to some extent, I feel kind of relieved. But the very fact I felt I had to make such a world probably means that I’m a weak person, that I bruise easily, don’t you think? And in the eyes of society at large, that world of mine is a puny little thing. It’s like a cardboard house: a puff of wind might carry it off somewhere.
— Haruki Murakami, After Dark
People should decide on the books' meanings for themselves. They'll find a story that attacks such things as cruelty, oppression, intolerance, unkindness, narrow-mindedness, and celebrates love, kindness, open-mindedness, tolerance, curiosity, human intelligence.
— Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials Trilogy: The Golden Compass / The Subtle Knife / The Amber Spyglass
...reality is always plural and mutable.
— Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger Volume I: Final Secret of the Illuminati
Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.
— Aristotle, Poetics
Show me that I m everywhere and get me home for tea.
— George Harrison
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will ACT like lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now.
— Daniel Quinn, Ishmael
Truth is neither ojectivity nor the balanced view
—  truth is a selfless subjectivity.
Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion. Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave and eats a bread it does not harvest. Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero, and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful. Pity a nation that despises a passion in its dream, yet submits in its awakening. Pity the nation that raises not its voice save when it walks in a funeral, boasts not except among its ruins, and will rebel not save when its neck is laid between the sword and the block. Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox, whose philosopher is a juggler, and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpeting, and farewells him with hooting, only to welcome another with trumpeting again. Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years and whose strongmen are yet in the cradle. Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation.
— Kahlil Gibran, The Garden of The Prophet
When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies
— John Fowles, The Collector
I only know that I know nothing
— Socrates
If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.
— Flannery O'Connor