c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
She smiled. She knew she was dying. But it did not matter any longer. She had known something which no human words could ever tell and she knew it now. She had been awaiting it and she felt it, as if it had been, as if she had lived it. Life had been, if only because she had known it could be, and she felt it now as a hymn without sound, deep under the little whole that dripped red drops into the snow, deeper than that from which the red drops came. A moment or an eternity- did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist. She smiled, her last smile, to so much that had been possible.
— Ayn Rand, We the Living
Creation and destruction are the two ends of the same moment. And everything between the creation and the next destruction is the journey of life.
— Amish Tripathi, The Oath of the Vayuputras
There are 10,000 books in my library, and it will keep growing until I die. This has exasperated my daughters, amused my friends and baffled my accountant. If I had not picked up this habit in the library long ago, I would have more money in the bank today; I would not be richer.
— Pete Hamill
If an apology is followed by an excuse or a reason, it means they are going to commit same mistake again they just apologized for.
— Amit Kalantri
Remember, it is not enough to be hit or insulted to be harmed, you must believe that you are being harmed. If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation. Which is why it is essential that we not respond impulsively to impressions; take a moment before reacting, and you will find it easier to maintain control.
— Epictetus, The Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness and Effectiveness
If you're not happy in life then you need to change, calibrate, readjust...flush your negative energy and fill it with positive energy; How do we do that you might ask? well I would start by making others happy, deseases are not the only thing that spreads easy. We are all connected in some form of unseen energy... think how those around you will impact you and make you feel if they were happy?
— Al Munoz
In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty...
— Robert M. Pirsig
As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples. 
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
I knew a man who gave twenty years of his life to a scatterbrained woman, sacrificing everything to her, his friendships, his work, the very respectability of his life and who one evening recognized that he had never loved her. He had been bored, thats all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen even loveless slavery, even war or death.
— Albert Camus
In presence of the Moon nobody sees stars.
— Amit Kalantri
No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this
—  the only right is what is after my constitution
Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.
— Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism
I have gone around observing your activities from the outside. Because of this I have also been able to see things to which you have been blind... Every morning you have gone to work, but you have never been fully awake. Of course, you have seen the sun and the moon, the stars in the sky, and everything that moves, but you haven't really seen it at all. It is different for the Joker, because he was put into this world with a flaw: He sees too clearly and too much.
— Jostein Gaarder, The Solitaire Mystery
The best consolation in misfortune or affliction of any kind will be the thought of other people who are in a still worse plight than yourself; and this is a form of consolation open to every one. But what an awful fate this means for mankind as a whole! We are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then another for his prey.
— Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World
When you are lonely for a while don't get restless, if you had born alone, you are going to die alone then for sometime you can certainly live alone.
— Amit Kalantri
[A]ny species that exempts itself from the rules of competition ends up destroying the community in order to support its own expansion.
— Daniel Quinn, Ishmael
It's a philosophical minefield!"Cabal had a brief mental image of Aristotle walking halfway across an open field before unexpectedly disappearing in a fireball. Descartes and Nietzsche looked on appalled. He pulled himself together.
— Jonathan L. Howard, Johannes Cabal the Necromancer
We are living in the era of premeditation and the perfect crime. Our criminals are no longer helpless children who could plead love as their excuse. On the contrary, they are adults and the have the perfect alibi: philosophy, which can be used for any purpose - even for transforming murderers into judges.
— Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt
It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.
— Diogenes of Sinope
I am a citizen of the world.
— Diogenes of Sinope, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers
He walked on in silence, the solitary sound of his footsteps echoing in his head, as in a deserted street, at dawn. His solitude was so complete, beneath a lovely sky as mellow and serene as a good conscience, amid that busy throng, that he was amazed at his own existence; he must be somebody else's nightmare, and whoever it was would certainly awaken soon.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason
Skepticism is thus a resting-place for human reason, where it can reflect upon its dogmatic wanderings and make survey of the region in which it finds itself, so that for the future it may be able to choose its path with more certainty. But it is no dwelling-place for permanent settlement. Such can be obtained only through perfect certainty in our knowledge, alike of the objects themselves and of the limits within which all our knowledge of objects is enclosed.
— Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
My view is that if your philosophy is not unsettled daily then you are blind to all the universe has to offer.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson
In life man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh to someone who has not made a success of his life. But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism
If there were a party of those who aren't sure they're right, I'd belong to it. 
— Albert Camus
You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.
— Jasper Fforde, One of Our Thursdays Is Missing
Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
By what men think, we create the world around us, daily new.
— Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon
It's easy to hate and point out everything that is wrong with the world
—  it is the hardest and most important work in one's life to free oneself from the bonds of fear and attachment.
Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily.
— François de La Rochefoucauld
I am dead because I lack desire,I lack desire because I think I possess.I think I possess because I do not try to give.In trying to give, you see that you have nothing;Seeing that you have nothing, you try to give of yourself;Trying to give of yourself, you see that you are nothing:Seeing that you are nothing, you desire to become;In desiring to become, you begin to live.
— René Daumal
My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.
— Ayn Rand
But love, like the sun that it is, sets afire and melts everything. what greed and privilege to build up over whole centuries the indignation of a pious spirit, with its natural following of oppressed souls, will cast down with a single shove.
— José Martí
Patience is the only way you can endure the gray periods.
— Teri Hatcher, Burnt Toast: And Other Philosophies of Life
All things fade and quickly turn to myth.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Life is a bitter sweet journey my friend, a bitter sweet journey.
— Luellen Hoffman
If just one of [those people] experiences life as a crazy adventure--and I mean that he, or she, experiences this every single day... Then he or she is a joker in a pack of cards.
— Jostein Gaarder, The Solitaire Mystery
the serpent if it wants to become the dragon must eat itself.
— Francis Bacon
I have forgotten my umbrella. 
— Friedrich Nietzsche
I consist of body and soul - in the worlds of a child. And why shouldn't we speak like children? But the enlightened, the knowledgealbe would say: I am body through and through, nothing more; and the soul is just a word for something on the body.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest-Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.
— John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism
Philosophy and science have not always been friendly toward the idea of God, the reason being they are dedicated to the task of accounting for things and are impatient with anything that refuses to give an account of itself. The philosopher and the scientist will admit that there is much that they do not know; but that is quite another thing from admitting there is something which they can never know, which indeed they have no technique for discovering.
— A.W. Tozer
Izzi: Remember Moses Morales? Tom Verde: Who? Izzi: The Mayan guide I told you about. Tom Verde: From your trip. Izzi: Yeah. The last night I was with him, he told me about his father, who had died. Well Moses wouldn't believe it. Tom Verde: Izzi... Izzi: [embraces Tom] No, no. Listen, listen. He said that if they dug his father's body up, it would be gone. They planted a seed over his grave. The seed became a tree. Moses said his father became a part of that tree. He grew into the wood, into the bloom. And when a sparrow ate the tree's fruit, his father flew with the birds. He said... death was his father's road to awe. That's what he called it. The road to awe. Now, I've been trying to write the last chapter and I haven't been able to get that out of my head! Tom Verde: Why are you telling me this? Izzi: I'm not afraid anymore, Tommy.
— Darren Aronofsky, The Fountain
No man is crushed by misfortune unless he has first been deceived by prosperity
— Seneca, Dialogues and Letters
... every moment of our life has a purpose, that every action of ours, no matter how dull or routine or trivial it may seem in itself, has a dignity and a worth beyond human understanding... For it means that no moment can be wasted, no opportunity missed, since each has a purpose in man’s life, each has a purpose in God’s plan. Think of your day, today or yesterday. Think of the work you did, the people you met, moment by moment. What did it mean to you- and might it have meant for God? Is the question too simple to answer, or are we just afraid to ask it for fear of the answer we must give?
— Walter J. Ciszek
The unknown," said Faxe's soft voice in the forest, "the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion. ... Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, unpredictable, inevitable -- the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?"That we shall die."Yes, There's really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer. ... 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
If you alone found out what the lie was, then you're probably right—it would make no great difference. But if you ALL found out what the lie was, it might conceivably make a very great difference indeed.
— Daniel Quinn, Ishmael
I am what some would say 'holy, and wholly other than you.' The problem is that many folks try to grasp some sense of who I am by taking the best version of themselves, projecting that to the nth degree, factoring in all the goodness they can perceive, which often isn't much, and then call that God. And while it may seem like a noble effort, the truth is that it falls pitifully short of who I really am. I'm not merely the best version of you that you can think of. I am far more than that, above and beyond all that you can ask or think.
— William Paul Young, The Shack
The philosopher whose dealings are with divine order himself acquires the characteristics of order and divinity.
— Plato, The Republic
Ownership is not limited to material things. It can also apply to points of view. Once we take ownership of an idea — whether it’s about politics or sports — what do we do? We love it perhaps more than we should. We prize it more than it is worth. And most frequently, we have trouble letting go of it because we can’t stand the idea of its loss. What are we left with then? An ideology — rigid and unyielding.
— Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
What a lover’s heart knows let no man’s brain dispute.
— Aberjhani, Visions of a Skylark Dressed in Black
The meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering but in the development of the soul.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward
No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.
— Karl R. Popper
Life's managed, not cured. 
— Phillip C. McGraw
Reality is harsh. It can be cruel and ugly. Yet no matter how much we grieve over our environment and circumstances nothing will change. What is important is not to be defeated, to forge ahead bravely. If we do this, a path will open before us.
— Daisaku Ikeda
Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.
— Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time
True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self; but the point is not only to get out - you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.
— Henry James, Roderick Hudson
To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.
— Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
We live in deeds not years In thoughts not breaths In feelings not figures on a dial. We should count time by heart throbs. He most lives who thinks most, feels noblest, acts the best.
— Philip James Bailey, Festus: A Poem
down with hell and heaven and all the religious fussinfinity pleased our parents one inch looks good to us
— E.E. Cummings
Because we have for millenia made moral, aesthetic, religious demands on the world, looked upon it with blind desire, passion or fear, and abandoned ourselves to the bad habits of illogical thinking, this world has gradually become so marvelously variegated, frightful, meaningful, soulful, it has acquired color - but we have been the colorists: it is the human intellect that has made appearances appear and transported its erroneous basic conceptions into things.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Where we choose to be, where we choose to be--we have the power to determine that in our lives. We cannot reel time backward or forward, but we can take ourselves to the place that defines our being.
— Sena Jeter Naslund, Ahab's Wife, or The Star-Gazer
Deliverance is not for me in renunciation. I feel the embrace of freedom in a thousand bonds of delight.
— Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali: Song Offerings
When faith in our freedom gives way to fear of our freedom, silencing the minority view becomes the operative protocol.
— Joel Salatin, Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front
Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.
— Nikola Telsa, The Problem of Increasing Human Energy
Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness. All can know good as good only because there is evil.
— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Love is patient; love is kind and envies no one. Love is never boastful, nor conceited, nor rude; never selfish, not quick to take offense. Love keeps no score of wrongs; does not gloat over other men's sins, but delights in the truth. There is nothing love cannot face; there is no limit to its faith, its hope, and endurance. [....] In a word, there are three things that last forever: faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of them all is love.
— Anonymous, Holy Bible: King James Version
Are you not ashamed of caring so much for the making of money and for fame and prestige, when you neither think nor care about wisdom and truth and the improvement of your soul?
— Socrates
The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism.
— C.S. Lewis
This time, there was no escape, I could not turn away, could not leave without accepting what I had done. There was only one way to the other side, and that was through the pain.
— Vanessa Diffenbaugh, The Language of Flowers
The symbolism of meat-eating is never neutral. To himself, the meat-eater seems to be eating life. To the vegetarian, he seems to be eating death. There is a kind of gestalt-shift between the two positions which makes it hard to change, and hard to raise questions on the matter at all without becoming embattled.
— Mary Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter
We never realize just how many other lives we can help when their paths cross our own.
— Wil Zeus, Sun Beyond the Clouds
Yet I'm sure there's something more to be read in a man. People dare not -- they dare not turn the page. The laws of mimicry -- I call them the laws of fear. People are afraid to find themselves alone, and don't find themselves at all. I hate this moral agoraphobia -- it's the worst kind of cowardice. You can't create something without being alone. But who's trying to create here? What seems different in yourself: that's the one rare thing you possess, the one thing which gives each of us his worth; and that's just what we try to suppress. We imitate. And we claim to love life.
— André Gide, The Immoralist
My teacher asked my favorite color. ... I said ‘Rainbow’.... and I was punished to stand out of my class.
— Saket Assertive
Creativity sparks originality which then manifests itself into what we call evolution. To depreciate imagination is to depreciate life.
— Al   Stone
It is when those who are not strong enough have made some moderate amount of progress that they fail and give up...
— Confucius, The Wisdom Of Confucius
Forgiveness is created by the restitution of the abuser
—  of the wrongdoer. It is not something to be squeeeeeezed out of the victim in a further act of conscience-corrupting abuse.
For this feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy.
— Plato, Theaetetus
Few things are more deceptive than memories.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.
— John Dewey
Crazy Horse dreamed and went into the world where there is nothing but the spirits of all things. That is the real world that is behind this one, and everything we see here is something like a shadow from that one.
— Black Elk, Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux
But it so happens that everything on this planet is, ultimately, irrational; there is not, and cannot be, any reason for the causal connexion of things, if only because our use of the word "reason" already implies the idea of causal connexion. But, even if we avoid this fundamental difficulty, Hume said that causal connexion was not merely unprovable, but unthinkable; and, in shallower waters still, one cannot assign a true reason why water should flow down hill, or sugar taste sweet in the mouth. Attempts to explain these simple matters always progress into a learned lucidity, and on further analysis retire to a remote stronghold where every thing is irrational and unthinkable.If you cut off a man's head, he dies. Why? Because it kills him. That is really the whole answer. Learned excursions into anatomy and physiology only beg the question; it does not explain why the heart is necessary to life to say that it is a vital organ. Yet that is exactly what is done, the trick that is played on every inquiring mind. Why cannot I see in the dark? Because light is necessary to sight. No confusion of that issue by talk of rods and cones, and optical centres, and foci, and lenses, and vibrations is very different to Edwin Arthwait's treatment of the long-suffering English language.Knowledge is really confined to experience. The laws of Nature are, as Kant said, the laws of our minds, and, as Huxley said, the generalization of observed facts.It is, therefore, no argument against ceremonial magic to say that it is "absurd" to try to raise a thunderstorm by beating a drum; it is not even fair to say that you have tried the experiment, found it would not work, and so perceived it to be "impossible." You might as well claim that, as you had taken paint and canvas, and not produced a Rembrandt, it was evident that the pictures attributed to his painting were really produced in quite a different way.You do not see why the skull of a parricide should help you to raise a dead man, as you do not see why the mercury in a thermometer should rise and fall, though you elaborately pretend that you do; and you could not raise a dead man by the aid of the skull of a parricide, just as you could not play the violin like Kreisler; though in the latter case you might modestly add that you thought you could learn.This is not the special pleading of a professed magician; it boils down to the advice not to judge subjects of which you are perfectly ignorant, and is to be found, stated in clearer and lovelier language, in the Essays of Thomas Henry Huxley. 
— Aleister Crowley
How much evil throughout history could have been avoided had people exercised their moral acuity with convictional courage and said to the powers that be, 'No, I will not. This is wrong, and I don't care if you fire me, shoot me, pass me over for promotion, or call my mother, I will not participate in this unsavory activity.' Wouldn't world history be rewritten if just a few people had actually acted like individual free agents rather than mindless lemmings?
— Joel Salatin, Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front
The problem with religion, because it's been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation.
— Sam Harris
I have learnt through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world.
— Mahatma Gandhi
If a man who can’t count finds a four leaf clover, is he lucky?
— Stanisław Lem
To be pleasant, gentle, calm and self-possessed: this is the basis of good taste and charm in a woman. No matter how amorous or passionate you may be, as long as you are straightforward and refrain from causing others embarrassment, no one will mind. But women who are too vain and act pretentiously, to the extent that they make others feel uncomfortable, will themselves become the object of attention; and once that happens, people will find fault with whatever they say or do; whether it be how they enter a room, how they sit down, how they stand up or how they take their leave. Those who end up contradicting themselves and those who disparage their companions are also carefully watched and listened to all the more. As long as you are free from such faults, people will surely refrain from listening to tittle-tattle and will want to show you sympathy, if only for the sake of politeness. I am of the opinion that when you intentionally cause hurt to another, or indeed if you do ill through mere thoughtless behavior, you fully deserve to be censured in public. Some people are so good-natured that they can still care for those who despise them, but I myself find it very difficult. Did the Buddha himself in all his compassion ever preach that one should simply ignore those who slander the Three Treasures? How in this sullied world of ours can those who are hard done by be expected to reciprocate in kind?
— Murasaki Shikibu, The Diary of Lady Murasaki
Me, I've seen 45 years, and I've only figured out one thing. That's this: if a person would just make the effort, there's something to be learned from everything. From even the most ordinary, commonplace things, there's always something you can learn. I read somewhere that they said there's even different philosophies in razors. Fact is, if it weren't for that, nobody'd survive.
— Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973
There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.
— Richard M. Rorty
Because each of you has his or her own death, you carry it with you in a secret place from the moment you're born, it belongs to you and you belong to it.
— José Saramago
I don't think the real America is in New York or on the Pacific Coast; personally, I like the Middle West much better, places like North and South Dakota, Minneapolis and Saint Paul. There, I think, are the true Americans
— Charlie Chaplin
The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
— Richard Bach
A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
Every form of happiness if one, every desire is driven by the same motor--by our love for a single value, for the highest potentiality of our own existence--and every achievement is an expression of it.
— Ayn Rand
We are often taught to look for the beauty in all things, so in finding it, the layman asks the philosopher while the philosopher asks the photographer.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
We are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later.
— Alan Moore, Watchmen
Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realize that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions.
— G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
When our eyes are graced with wonder, the world reveals its wonders to us. There are people who see only dullness in the world and that is because their eyes have already been dulled. So much depends on how we look at things. The quality of our looking determines what we come to see.
— John O'Donohue, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace
From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back.
— Franz Kafka
I, while the gods laugh, the world's vortex am;Maelström of passions in that hidden seaWhose waves of all-time lap the coasts of me;And in small compass the dark waters cram.
— Mervyn Peake, Collected Poems
I hold strongly to this: that it is better to be impetuous than circumspect
—  because fortune is a woman and if she is to be submissive it is necessary to beat and coerce her.
It is our attitude toward events, not events themselves, which we can control. Nothing is by its own nature calamitous -- even death is terrible only if we fear it.
— Epictetus
Trebuie sa te departezi putin de tine ca sa te poti apropia de ceilalti.
— Andrei Pleșu
...we're told by TV and Reader's Digest that a crisis will trigger massive personal change--and that those big changes will make the pain worthwhile. But from what he could see, big change almost never happens. People simply feel lost. They have no idea what to say or do or feel or think. they become messes and tend to remain messes.
— Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief
There were a group of people before the Ascension known as the Astalsi. They claimed that each person was born with a certain finite amount of ill luck. And so, when an unfortunate event happened, they thought themselves blessed—thereafter, their lives could only get better.
— Brandon Sanderson, The Final Empire
If you've got the truth you can demonstrate it. Talking doesn't prove it.
— Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
Believe me there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory....everything is forgotten, even a great love. That's what's sad about life, and also what's wonderful about it. There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while. That's why it's good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion- it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we all suffer from.
— Albert Camus, A Happy Death
Thinking only begins at the point where we have come to know that Reason, glorified for centuries, is the most obstinate adversary of thinking.
— Martin Heidegger
People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind. 
— W.B. Yeats
It is hard to be angry when one has seen the sun rise,' she said.It seems to be true,' he admitted. 'I wonder why.'Because it makes one feel so small and insignificant. It has been rising forever and will rise forever no matter what we do or do not do. All our problems are as nothing to the sun.
— David Gemmell, Sword in the Storm
Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea.
— Bernard Beckett, Genesis
True philosophy must start from the most immediate and comprehensive fact of consciousness: 'I am life that wants to live, in the midst of life that wants to live
— Albert Schweitzer
We are the inheritors of a wonderful world, a beautiful world, full of life and mystery, goodness and pain. But likewise are we the children of an indifferent universe. We break our own hearts imposing our moral order on what is, by nature, a wide web of chaos.
— Colin Meloy, Wildwood
One morning you wake up with more life behind you than in front of you, not being able to understand how it’s happened.
— Fredrik Backman, Britt-Marie var här
Cannibals? Who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgement, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate de fois gras.
— Herman Melville, Moby Dick
The best things in life are crazy.
— Emme Rollins, Dear Rockstar
The stone that was rolled before Christ's tomb might appropriately be called the philosopher's stone because its removal gave not only the pharisees but, now for 1800 years, the philosophers so much to think about.
— Søren Kierkegaard
Don't appreciate me, I'm not up to it. Don't criticize me, I don't deserve it. Just be my friend and forgive me, because I am craving for it.
— Debasish Mridha
What if nobody showed up at Armageddon?
— C.R. Strahan
In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it's all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean.
— Alan W. Watts, The Essential Alan Watts
Everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity.
— Democritus
..the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man.
— Yann Martel, Life of Pi
To win true freeedom you must be a slave to philosophy.
— Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
It doesn't matter how smart you are unless you stop and think.
— Thomas Sowell
Muhabbat apni marzi se khulay pinjray main totay ki tarha bethnay ki salaahiyat hai. Muhabbat is ghulami ka toq hai jo insaan khud apnay ekhtyar se galay main dalta hai
— Bano Qudsia, Hasil Ghat / حاصل گھاٹ
Man's naked form belongs to no particular moment in history; it is eternal, and can be looked upon with joy by the people of all ages.
— Auguste Rodin
The fossil record implies trial and error, the inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with a Great Designer (though not a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament.)
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Everyone has the fire, but the champions know when to ignite the spark.
— Amit Ray, Enlightenment Step by Step
To better understand God we must first shatter our own idea of God - maybe even day after day. Maybe he's too great to stay compressed in the human mind. Maybe he splits it wide open; this is why pretentious intellectualism so often fails to comprehend the concept of God: it is only accepting of what it can explain while in the process finding higher sources offensive. What we may confidently assert is that faith is the opening that allows God, this unpredictable, unseen power, to travel in and out of the mind without all the pains of confusion.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
It is easy to be conspicuously 'compassionate' if others are being forced to pay the cost.
— Murray N. Rothbard
For it can never be that war shall preserve life, and peace destroy it.
— Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
All actual life is encounter.
— Martin Buber
I think that the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem.
— Slavoj Žižek
To live entirely without a goal! I have glimpsed this state, and have often attained it, without managing to remain there: I am too weak for such happiness.
— Emil M. Cioran
O how incomprehensible everything was, and actually sad, although it was also beautiful. One knew nothing. One lived and ran about the earth and rode through forests, and certain things looked so challenging and promising and nostalgic: a star in the evening, a blue harebell, a reed-green pond, the eye of a person or a cow. And sometimes it seemed that something never seen yet long desired was about to happen, that a veil would drop from it all, but then it passed, nothing happened, the riddle remained unsolved, the secret spell unbroken, and in the end one grew old and looked cunning . . . or wise . . . and still one knew nothing perhaps, was still waiting and listening.
— Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund
Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange, and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.
— Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
One has to take a somewhat bold and dangerous line with this existence: especially as, whatever happens, we are bound to lose it.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations
Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.
— Ayn Rand
Why' is a crooked letter and can't be made straight.
— Stephen King, The Gunslinger
Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism.
— Vladimir Lenin
A lot of people experience the world with the same incredulity as when a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat.…We know that the world is not all sleight of hand and deception because we are in it, we are part of it. Actually we are the white rabbit being pulled out of the hat. The only difference beween us and the white rabbit is that the rabbit does not realize it is taking part in a magic trick.
— Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World
Do you think you wear a mask?’‘I’m wearing one right now.’ Valentino smiled softly. ‘We both are.’‘It’s a sad thought.’‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But sometimes I wonder about the alternative. Imagine if we had no secrets, no respite from the truth. What if everything was laid bare the moment we introduced ourselves?
— Catherine Doyle, Vendetta
Absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics. 
— Thomas Nagel
In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering among innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
A writer always writes.
— Don Roff
Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think…
— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer . . . For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing, the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conceptions only as cultural posits.
— Willard Van Orman Quine
Always be friendly, always be kind,Like the most beautiful flower that you can find.
— Debasish Mridha
All my problems bow before my stubbornness.
— Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words
Intelligence is more important than strength, that is why earth is ruled by men and not by animals.
— Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words
Unless we learn to know ourselves, we run the danger of destroying ourselves.
— Ja A. Jahannes, WordSong Poets
You like me not because I like you. I like you just because I like me.
— Santosh Kalwar
He who wears his morality but as his best garment were better naked.The wind and the sun will tear no holes in his skin.
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
The question has often been asked; Is Buddhism a religion or a philosophy? It does not matter what you call it. Buddhism remains what it is whatever label you may put on it. The label is immaterial. Even the label 'Buddhism' which we give to the teachings of the Buddha is of little importance. The name one gives is inessential.... In the same way Truth needs no label: it is neither Buddhist, Christian, Hindu nor Moslem. It is not the monopoly of anybody. Sectarian labels are a hindrance to the independent understanding of Truth, and they produce harmful prejudices in men's minds.
— Walpola Rahula, What the Buddha Taught: Revised and Expanded Edition with Texts from Suttas and Dhammapada
There’s no way you can kill someone and get to the other side of the experience unchanged.
— Charlaine Harris, Definitely Dead
Can all this just be an accident? Or could there be some alien intelligence behind it?
— Gene Roddenberry
High thoughts must have high language.
— Aristophanes, Frogs and Other Plays
... is it truly possible to steal a life, if... the Self is eternal and cannot die? Should this be so, then one who 'murders' does no more than transgress against the will of another, whose choice it is to live. At bottom, a murderer offends not against the body, but against the spirit.
— Ki Longfellow, Flow Down Like Silver: Hypatia of Alexandria
When you are angry try your best to go to sleep, it keeps you away from speaking, writing and thinking while you are angry.
— Amit Kalantri
Is it better to be loved or feared?
— Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
Love is a cowboy's hardest ride.
— C.B. Smith
I'll follow you, even to death—but I won't live with you any more.
— Prosper Mérimée, Carmen
When we are shown scenes of starving children in Africa, with a call for us to do something to help them, the underlying ideological message is something like: "Don't think, don't politicize, forget about the true causes of their poverty, just act, contribute money, so that you will not have to think!
— Slavoj Žižek
And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possiblities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what the may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familar things in an unfamilar aspect
— Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy
When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, or what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost, with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.
— Blaise Pascal
Fate isn’t one straight road…there are forks in it, many different routes to different ends. We have the free will to choose the path.
— Dean Koontz, Odd Thomas
To pursue wisdom is to live in such a way that one is prepared to face death when it comes. (247)
— Gregory Bassham, The Ultimate Harry Potter and Philosophy: Hogwarts for Muggles
Perhaps what I am about to say will appear strange to you gentlemen, socialists, progressives, humanitarians as you are, but I never worry about my neighbor, I never try to protect society which does not protect me -- indeed, I might add, which generally takes no heed of me except to do me harm -- and, since I hold them low in my esteem and remain neutral towards them, I believe that society and my neighbor are in my debt.
— Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.
— Richard Feynman
We are born into this world unarmed - our mind is our only weapon.
— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Do you know what I think about crying? I think some people have to learn to do it. But once you learn, once you know how to really cry, there's nothing quite like it. I feel sorry for those who don't know the trick. It's like whistling or singing.
— Anne Rice, Memnoch the Devil
Don't think, but look! (PI 66)
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea. 
— Guy Debord
All religions are based on obsolete terminology.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
The illness of a doctor is always worse than the illnesses of his patients.The patients only feel, but the doctor, as well as feeling, has a pretty good idea of the destructive effect of the disease on his constitution.This is a case in which knowledge brings death nearer.
— Maxim Gorky, Literary Portraits
He who is in harmony with the Taois like a newborn child.Its bones are soft, its muscles are weak,but its grip is powerful.It doesn't know about the unionof male and female,yet its penis can stand erect,so intense is its vital power.It can scream its head off all day,yet it never becomes hoarse,so complete is its harmony.The Master's power is like this.He lets all things come and goeffortlessly, without desire.He never expects results;thus he is never disappointed.He is never disappointed;thus his spirit never grows old.
— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.
— Stephen Jay Gould
A toast, Jedediah, to love on my terms. Those are the only terms anybody ever knows - his own.
— Orson Welles, Citizen Kane
In the world of art, all things are possible.--George from Paradise Kiss
— Ai Yazawa
Philosophy begins in wonder. And at the end when philosophic thought has done its best the wonder remains.
— Alfred North Whitehead
The free mind, unafraid of labor, presses on to attain the good.
— Laura Cereta, Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist
Question like a child, reason like an adult, and write like a sage.
— Criss Jami, Healology
What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance.
— Epictetus
If you think life is magical or life is hard, either way you are right. Your thoughts are the source of reality.
— Debasish Mridha
Mathematicians finally developed a financial model to accurately compare apples and oranges. Any two kinds of fruit can be compared, although guavas still cause minor rounding errors.
— Graham Parke, No Hope for Gomez!
The only value of wasted time is knowledge.
— Monica Drake, Clown Girl
Every being, created by God and unspoiled by man, is perfect, strictly defined and autonomous, entirely complete and at the same time with a built-in ability to grow and develop. This is the essence of its dignity and holiness. It is not an embodiment of God’s immense Personality, but only one of the realisations of His perfection.
— Danail Hristov, The End of the Jesus Era
Whoever is going to listen to the philosophers needs a considerable practice in listening.
— Epictetus
SCREW CHILDREN! That's the mantra of the world. Instead of burying them with a national debt, shoving them in shitty schools, drugging them if they don't comply, hitting them, yelling at them, indoctrinating them with religion and statism and patriotism and military worship, what if we just did what was right for them? The whole world is built on "screw children", and if we changed that, this would be an alien planet to us.
— Stefan Molyneux
Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.
— G.K. Chesterton
Even if you are alone you wage war with yourself.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
You don't seem mad at all,' she said.But I am, although I'm undergoing a cure, because my problem is that I lack a particular chemical. However, while I hope that the chemical gets rid of my chronic depression, I want to continue being mad, living life the way I dream it, and not the way other people want it to be. Do you know what exists out there, beyond the walls of Villete?
— Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die
Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it.
— Mark Doty
We do not create life, we create death.
— Marie Symeou
YOU. ARE. PERFECT. You are. Im talking to YOU. and dont you dare think otherwise...embrace the entity of yourself...you are a puzzle piece and you are meant to be puzzling.
— Kaiden Blake
I'm probably 20 percent atheist and 80 percent agnostic. I don't think anyone really knows. You'll either find out or not when you get there, until then there's no point thinking about it.
— Brad Pitt
If it is bread that you seek, you will have bread. If it is the soul you seek, you will find the soul. If you understand this secret, you know you are that which you seek.
— Jalaluddin Rumi