c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
A student, filled with emotion and crying, implored, "Why is there so much suffering?"Suzuki Roshi replied, "No reason.
— Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Is Right Here: Teaching Stories and Anecdotes of Shunryu Suzuki, Author of "ZEN Mind, Beginner's Mind"
There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery
— Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Things always become obvious after the fact
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The shame of being a man - is there any better reason to write?
— Gilles Deleuze
A child who does not think about what happens around him and is content with living without wondering whether he lives honestly is like a man who lives from a scoundrel's work and is on the road to being a scoundrel.
— José Martí
Love is our most unifying and empowering common spiritual denominator. The more we ignore its potential to bring greater balance and deeper meaning to human existence, the more likely we are to continue to define history as one long inglorious record of man’s inhumanity to man.
— Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry
Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle.
— Vladimir Lenin
This inhuman place makes human monsters.
— Stephen King, The Shining
When you come to the edge of all that you know, you must believe one of two things: either there will be ground to stand on, or you will be given wings to fly.
— O.R. Melling, The Summer King
The map is not the territory.
— Alfred Korzybski
Un-winged and naked, sorrow surrenders its crown to a throne called grace.
— Aberjhani, The River of Winged Dreams
A prison becomes a home when you have the key.
— George Sterling
Whoever cannot seek the unforeseen sees nothing for the known way is an impasse.
— Heraclitus, Fragments
Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of it, from materialism and theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt that they were much too simple. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth that are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy. That is the reason why I have no philosophy myself, and must be my excuse for dreaming.
— J.B.S. Haldane, Possible Worlds
Everyone is the other and no one is himself.
— Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
Philosophy is really nostalgia, the desire to be at home.
— Novalis
To ridicule philosophy is really to philosophize.
— Blaise Pascal
You asked me how to get out of the finite dimensions when I feel like it. I certainly don't use logic when I do it. Logic's the first thing you have to get rid of.
— J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
If someone can prove me wrong and show me my mistake in any thought or action, I shall gladly change. I seek the truth, which never harmed anyone: the harm is to persist in one's own self-deception and ignorance.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Too many people get credit for being good, when they are only being passive. They are too often praised for being broadminded when they are so broadminded they can never make up their minds about anything.
— Fulton J. Sheen
Nothing important is learned
—  it is simply remembered.
Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason, it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it.
— Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths:  Selected Stories and Other Writings
Hope does not leave without being given permission.
— Rick Riordan
There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again.
— Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Vol. 1
Yet the ivory gods, And the ebony gods, And the gods of diamond-jade, Are only silly puppet gods That people themselves Have made.-
— Langston Hughes
In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
Many of our most serious conflicts are conflicts within ourselves. Those who suppose their judgements are always consistent are unreflective or dogmatic.
— John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement
...the rarest of all human qualities is consistency.
— Jeremy Bentham
Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class -- whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.
— Frank Herbert, Children of Dune
Philosophy is common sense with big words.
— James Madison
In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.
— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
I hope it is not necessary for me to stress the platonic nature of our relationship- not platonic in the purest sense, there was no philosophical discourse, but we certainly didn't fuck, which is usually what people mean by platonic; which I bet would really piss Plato off, that for all his thinking and chatting his name has become an adjective for describing sexless trysts.
— Russell Brand, My Booky Wook
We grown-up people think that we appreciate music, but if we realized the sense that an infant has brought with it of appreciating sound and rhythm, we would never boast of knowing music. The infant is music itself.
— Hazrat Inayat Khan
Wisdom is the oneness of mind that guides and permeates all things.
— Heraclitus, Fragments
Too lazy to be ambitious,I let the world take care of itself.Ten days' worth of rice in my bag;a bundle of twigs by the fireplace.Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment?Listening to the night rain on my roof,I sit comfortably, with both legs stretched out.
— Ryōkan
How small a thought it takes to fill a life.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
We look for the Secret - the Philosopher's Stone, the Elixir of the Wise, Supreme Enlightenment, 'God' or whatever...and all the time it is carrying us about...It is the human nervous system itself.
— Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger Volume I: Final Secret of the Illuminati
Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it is impossible. Humans hide their secrets too well....
— René Magritte
The premise of the Taker story is 'the world belongs to man'. … The premise of the Leaver story is 'man belongs to the world'.
— Daniel Quinn, Ishmael
False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.
— Plato
The truth always carries the ambiguity of the words used to express it.
— Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune
It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours.
— Diogenes of Sinope
Socrates: Have you noticed on our journey how often the citizens of this new land remind each other it is a free country? Plato: I have, and think it odd they do this.Socrates: How so, Plato?Plato: It is like reminding a baker he is a baker, or a sculptor he is asculptor.Socrates: You mean to say if someone is convinced of their trade, they haveno need to be reminded.Plato: That is correct.Socrates: I agree. If these citizens were convinced of their freedom, they would not need reminders.
— E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you'll be happy; if not, you'll become a philosopher.
— Socrates
It's a thought," I said with a grin."That's exactly what it is, Dan - a thought - no more real than the shadow of a shadow. Consciousness is not In the body; the body is In Consciousness. And you Are that Consciousness - no the phantom mind that troubles you so. You are the body, but you are everything else, too. That is what your visions revealed to you. Only the mind resists change. When you relax mindless into the body, you are happy and content and free, sensing no separation. Immortality is Already yours, but not in the same way you imagined or hope for. You have been immortal since before you were born and will be long after the body dissolves. The body is in Consciousness; never born; never dies; only changes. The mind - your ego, personal beliefs, history, and identity - is all that ends at death. And who needs it?" Socrates leaned back into his chair."I'm not sure all of that sank in.""Of course not." He laughed. "Words mean little unless you realize the truth of it yourself. And when you do, you'll be free at last.
— Dan Millman, Way of the Peaceful Warrior: A Book That Changes Lives
Those who are without compassion cannot see what is seen with the eyes of compassion.
— Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation
Do you shovel to survive, or survive to shovel?
— Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes
For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.
— Elie Wiesel, Night
Our lives are part of a unique adventure... Nevertheless, most of us think the world is 'normal' and are constantly hunting for something abnormal--like angels or Martians. But that is just because we don't realize the world is a mystery. As for myself, I felt completely different. I saw the world as an amazing dream. I was hunting for some kind of explanation of how everything fit together.
— Jostein Gaarder, The Solitaire Mystery
I remember growing up, saying you’re an artist it sounds pretentious but now it’s one of the only dignified things that you can call yourself. 
— Marilyn Manson
The point of modernity is to live a life without illusions while not becoming disillusioned
— Antonio Gramsci
To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust.
— Henry David Thoreau
There is no justice in the laws of nature, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The Universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the Sun, or the sky. But they don't have to! WE care! There IS light in the world, and it is US!
— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
Philosophy cannot be taught
—  it is the application of the sciences to truth.
Of course there is no formula for success, except perhaps an unconditional acceptance of life, and what it brings
— Arthur Rubinstein
Thoughts become things. If you see it in your mind, you will hold it in your hand.
— Bob Proctor, You Were Born Rich
I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.
— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
The discovery of what is true and the practice of that which is good are the two most important aims of philosophy.
— Voltaire
The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless—one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan’s will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite’s will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special. They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is—well, some things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads.
— G.K. Chesterton
All things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.
— Elias Canetti
Although you may not stumble across a Martian in the garden, you might stumble across yourself. The day that happens, you'll probably also scream a little. And that'll be perfectly all right, because it's not every day you realize you're a living planet dweller on a little island in the universe.
— Jostein Gaarder, The Solitaire Mystery
The thoughts of all men arise from the darkness. If you are the movement of your soul, and the cause of that movement precedes you, then how could you ever call your thoughts your own? How could you be anything other than a slave to the darkness that comes before?
— R. Scott Bakker, The Darkness That Comes Before
Save your explanations, I got some questions for you first and you'd better answer them!' [slurred Hellian.] 'With what?' [Banaschar] sneered. 'Explanations?' 'No. Answers. There's a difference-' 'Really? How? What difference?' 'Explanations are what people use when they need to lie. Y'can always tell those,'cause those don't explain nothing and then they look at you like they just cleared things up when really they did the opposite and they know it and you know it and they know you know and you know they know that you know and they know you and you know them and maybe you go out for a pitcher later but who picks up the tab? That's what I want to know.' 'Right, and answers?' 'Answers is what I get when I ask questions. Answers is when you got no choice. I ask, you tell. I ask again, you tell some more. Then I break your fingers, 'cause I don't like what you're telling me, because those answers don't explain nothing!
— Steven Erikson, The Bonehunters
Few if any seemed to have grasped the Principle of Reality
—  new knowledge leads always to yet more awesome mysteries. Greater physiological knowledge of the brain makes the existence of the soul less possible yet more probable by the nature of the search.
Life... is a paradise to what we fear of death.
— William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among the most powerful promoters of decadence.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power
if you want it really, you get it !!!
— Ravinder Singh
Everybody knows that Aristotelian two-value logic is fucked.
— Philip K. Dick, VALIS
Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?
— Margaret Atwood, Der blinde Mörder
Accustom yourself to the belief that death is of no concern to us, since all good and evil lie in sensation and sensation ends with death. Therefore the true belief that death is nothing to us makes a mortal life happy, not by adding to it an infinite time, but by taking away the desire for immortality. For there is no reason why the man who is thoroughly assured that there is nothing to fear in death should find anything to fear in life. So, too, he is foolish who says that he fears death, not because it will be painful when it comes, but because the anticipation of it is painful; for that which is no burden when it is present gives pain to no purpose when it is anticipated. Death, the most dreaded of evils, is therefore of no concern to us; for while we exist death is not present, and when death is present we no longer exist. It is therefore nothing either to the living or to the dead since it is not present to the living, and the dead no longer are.
— Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus
Philosophy is the highest music.
— Plato
I used to think I knew what was right and what was wrong, and who the good guys are, and who the bad guys are. Then the world got very gray, and I didn't know anything for a long time
— Laurell K. Hamilton, Incubus Dreams
A philosopher knows that in reality he knows very little. That is why he constantly strives to achieve true insight. Socrates was one of these rare people. He knew that he knew nothing about life and about the world. And now comes the important part: it troubled him that he knew so little.
— Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World
I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.
— Ayn Rand
Who is wise? He that learns from everyone. Who is powerful? He that governs his passions. Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.
— Benjamin Franklin
Eccentricity is not, as some would believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.
— Edith Sitwell
Never say that I have taken it, only that I have given it back.
— Epicurus
Just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read. If one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost.
— Arthur Schopenhauer
I believe that the universe was formed around 15 billion years ago and that humans have evolved from their apelike ancestors over the past few million years. I believe we are more likely to live a good life if all humans try to work together in a world community, preserving planet earth. When decisions for groups are made in this world, I believe that the democratic process should be used. To protect the individual, I believe in freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom from religion, freedom of inquiry, and a wall of separation between church and state. When making decisions about what is right or wrong, I believe I should use my intelligence to reason about the likely consequences of my actions. I believe that I should try to increase the happiness of everyone by caring for other people and finding ways to cooperate. Never should my actions discriminate against people simply because of their race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age, or national origin. I believe that ideas about what is right and wrong will change with education, so I am prepared to continually question ideas using evidence from experience and science. I believe there is no valid evidence to support claims for the existence of supernatural entities and deities. I will use these beliefs to guide my thinking and my actions until I find good reasons for revising them or replacing them with other beliefs that are more valid.
— Ronald P. Carver
I've often thought that there isn't any "I" at all; that we are simply the means of expression of something else; that when we think we are ourselves, we are simply the victims of a delusion.
— Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend
songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality. Some different republic, some liberated republic... whatever the case, it wasn't that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambition to stir things up. I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick. It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window and you had to have awkward footgear to walk with.
— Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Vol. 1
What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
People ought to fight to keep their law as to defend the citys walls.
— Heraclitus, Fragments
In the end mortals always expired before faeries. They were such finite creatures. Their first heartbeat and breath were but a blink from death. To add the weight of nourishing his insatiable court in a time of peace was to hasten that unconscionably.
— Melissa Marr, Ink Exchange
In practice people who study philosophy too long become very odd birds, not to say thoroughly vicious; while even those who are the best of them are reduced by...[philosophy] to complete uselessness as members of society.
— Plato, Republic: The Theatre of the Mind
Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?
— Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy
How can a society that exists on instant mashed potatoes, packaged cake mixes, frozen dinners, and instant cameras teach patience to its young? 
— Paul Sweeney
Going green doesn’t start with doing green acts — it starts with a shift in consciousness. This shift allows you to recognize that with every choice you make, you are voting either for or against the kind of world you wish to see. When you assume this as a way of being, your choices become easier. Using a reusable water bottle, recycling and making conscious daily consumer choices are just a few…
— Ian Somerhalder
Do you see the slightest evidence anywhere in the universe that creation came to an end with the birth of man? Do you see the slightest evidence anywhere out there that man was the climax toward which creation had been straining from the beginning? ...Very far from it. The universe went on as before, the planet went on as before. Man's appearance caused no more stir than the appearance of jellyfish.
— Daniel Quinn, Ishmael
If we wish to draw philosophical conclusions about our own existence, our significance, and the significance of the universe itself, our conclusions should be based on empirical knowledge. A truly open mind means forcing our imaginations to conform to the evidence of reality, and not vice versa, whether or not we like the implications.
— Lawrence M. Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing
The square root of I is I.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister
To live is not to breathe but to act. It is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile or On Education
The best ideas are common property
— Seneca
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
— Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi
All are one
— Heraclitus
If you haven't said 'I love you' to someone today, do it. You won't always be happy, but you should try to be. Don't be too afraid of germs. Those people have no fun. Remember to look around sometimes. You might see something you haven't seen before or at the very least avoid being hit by a flying object. Speaking of flying objects, don't spend your life looking for extraterrestrial life, unless you work for NASA. Remember that you always have to cooperate with someone. Life is an endless negotiation. Play fair. Stay out of jail. Don't live in the past. Eat breakfast. It really is the most important meal of the day. Try to make new friends, even when you think you're too old to do that. ...And finally, remember this" 'Yes' is always a better work than 'no'. Unless, of course, someone has just asked you to commit a felony.
— Lisa Lutz
So, let me get this straight-- You want me to stop being a lesbian and being attracted to women because it is a 'sin'? Last time I checked, when you lie you are sinning. Sure, I could tell you I am no longer a lesbian or that I am no longer attracted to women and am straight, or I could even tell you the moon is made of cheese. I could tell you many things, but the moon will still not be made of cheese, and I will still not be attracted to men. I could tell you a lie in order to placate you, but isn’t the truth supposed to set me free? I choose truth over lies any day of the week. 
— Cristina Marrero
Imagine that you were on the threshold of this fairytale, sometime billions of years ago when everything was created. And you were able to choose whether you wanted to be born to a life on this planet at some point. You wouldn’t know when you were going to be born, nor how long you’d live for, but at any event it wouldn’t be more than a few years. All you’d know was that, if you chose to come into the world at some point, you’d also have to leave it again one day and go away from everything. This might cause you a good deal of grief, as lots of people think that life in the great fairytale is so wonderful that the mere thought of it ending can bring tears to their eyes. Things can be so nice here that it’s terribly painful to think that at some point the days will run out. What would you have chosen, if there had been some higher power that had gave you the choice? Perhaps we can imagine some sort of cosmic fairy in this great, strange fairytale. What you have chosen to live a life on earth at some point, whether short or long, in a hundred thousand or a hundred million years? Or would you have refused to join in the game because you didn’t like the rules? (...) I asked myself the same question maybe times during the past few weeks. Would I have elected to live a life on earth in the firm knowledge that I’d suddenly be torn away from it, and perhaps in the middle of intoxicating happiness? (...) Well, I wasn’t sure what I would have chosen. (...) If I’d chosen never to the foot inside the great fairytale, I’d never have known what I’ve lost. Do you see what I’m getting at? Sometimes it’s worse for us human beings to lose something dear to us than never to have had it at all.
— Jostein Gaarder, The Orange Girl
Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.
— Bertrand Russell
The only safe thing is to take a chance.
— Elaine May
It takes too much energy to be against something unless it's really important. 
— Madeleine L'Engle
Men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.
— Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
I discovered that it is necessary, absolutely necessary, to believe in nothing. That is, we have to believe in something which has no form and no color--something which exists before all forms and colors appear... No matter what god or doctrine you believe in, if you become attached to it, your belief will be based more or less on a self-centered idea.
— Shunryu Suzuki
Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attibutable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.
— Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy
Philosophers are people who know less and less about more and more, until they know nothing about everything. Scientists are people who know more and more about less and less, until they know everything about nothing.
— Konrad Lorenz
Rockabye Baby, in the treetopDont you know a treetopis no safe place to rock?And who put you up there,and your cradle too?Baby,I think someone down herehas got it in for you!
— Shel Silverstein
Like a wild animal, the soul is tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy, and self-sufficient: it knows how to survive in hard places. I learned about these qualities during my bouts with depression. In that deadly darkness, the faculties I had always depended on collapsed. My intellect was useless; my emotions were dead; my will was impotent; my ego was shattered. But from time to time, deep in the thickets of my inner wilderness, I could sense the presence of something that knew how to stay alive even when the rest of me wanted to die. That something was my tough and tenacious soul.
— Parker J. Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life
We feel most alive when we are closest to death.
— Nenia Campbell, Terrorscape
Let mental culture go on advancing, let the natural sciences progress in even greater extent and depth, and the human mind widen itself as much as it desires: beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity, as it shines forth in the Gospels, it will not go.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Whenever I think of something but can't think of what it was I was thinking of, I can't stop thinking until I think I'm thinking of it again. I think I think too much.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
And although I have seen nothing but black crows in my life, it doesn't mean that there's no such thing as a white crow. Both for a philosopher and for a scientist it can be important not to reject the possibility of finding a white crow. You might almost say that hunting for 'the white crow' is science's principal task.
— Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World
To assess the quality of thoughts of people, don't listen to their words, but watch their actions.
— Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words
Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.
— Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
And last are the few whose delight is in meditation and understanding; who yearn not for goods, nor for victory, but for knowledge; who leave both market and battlefield to lose themselves in the quiet clarity of secluded thought; whose will is a light rather than a fire, whose haven is not power but truth: these are the men of wisdom, who stand aside unused by the world.
— Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers
He who is more mindful of one, loses the love and the faith of both.
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live. … You are captives—and you have made a captive of the world itself. That's what's at stake, isn't it?—your captivity and the captivity of the world.
— Daniel Quinn, Ishmael
I knew I was alone in a way that no earthling has ever been before.
— Michael  Collins
The stronger a culture, the less it fears the radical fringe. The more paranoid and precarious a culture, the less tolerance it offers.
— Joel Salatin, Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front
Freedom is obedience to self-formulated rules.
— Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics
An age cannot bind itself and ordain to put the succeeding one into such a condition that it cannot extend its (at best very occasional) knowledge , purify itself of errors, and progress in general enlightenment. That would be a crime against human nature, the proper destination of which lies precisely in this progress and the descendants would be fully justified in rejecting those decrees as having been made in an unwarranted and malicious manner..
— Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?
Were we incapable of empathy – of putting ourselves in the position of others and seeing that their suffering is like our own – then ethical reasoning would lead nowhere. If emotion without reason is blind, then reason without emotion is impotent.
— Peter Singer, Writings on an Ethical Life
Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
— Immanuel Kant
Il n'y a de réalité que dans l'action.(There is no reality except in action.)
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism
As soon as you have made a thought, laugh at it.
— Lao Tzu
To study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die.
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
Imagine others complexly.
— John Green, Paper Towns
If you wake up tired, you’ve been chasing dreams. If you go to bed tired, your making your dreams happen.
— Benny Bellamacina, The King of Rhyme
Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Maker of the world, but degenerates once it gets into the hands of man
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Change is not always growth, but growth is often rooted in change.Drizzt Do'Urden
— R.A. Salvatore
Nothing is as it seems, but something is everything it is made out to be.
— Carroll Bryant
How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?
— Plato, The Allegory of the Cave
The man who alters his way of thinking to suit others is a fool.
— Marquis de Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings
A man leaves his great house because he's boredWith life at home, and suddenly returns,Finding himself no happier abroad.He rushes off to his villa driving like mad,You'ld think he's going to a house on fire,And yawns before he's put his foot inside,Or falls asleep and seeks oblivion,Or even rushes back to town again.So each man flies from himself (vain hope, becauseIt clings to him the more closely against his will)And hates himself because he is sick in mindAnd does not know the cause of his disease.
— Titus Lucretius Carus
My heart knows what my mind only think it knows.
— Noah Benshea, Jacob the Baker: Gentle Wisdom For a Complicated World
To be an outlaw you must first have a base in law to reject and get out of, I never had such a base. I never had a place I could call home that meant any more than a key to a house, apartment or hotel room. … Am I alien? Alien from what exactly? Perhaps my home is my dream city, more real than my waking life precisely because it has no relation to waking life…
— William S. Burroughs
Those who are wise won't be busy, and those who are too busy can't be wise.
— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living
A photograph shouldn't be just a picture, it should be a philosophy.
— Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words
There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.
— R. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker
Pactum serva" - "Keep the faith
— Horace
No man was ever yet a great poet, without at the same time being a profound philosopher.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Time deals gently only with those who take it gently.
— Anatole France, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard
Only by examining our personal biases can we truly grow as artists
—  only by cultivating empathy can we truly grow as people.
Don't fear the gods,Don't worry about death;What is good is easy to get, andWhat is terrible is easy to endure.
— Epicurus, The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia
I strive for perfection - I settle for satisfaction
— Carroll Bryant
We can't avoid reasoning
—  we can only avoid doing it well.
The love of money is the root of all evil, therefore selfishness must be the seed.
— M.D. Birmingham
There is your truth and there is my truth. As for the universal truth, it does not exist.
— Amish Tripathi
Out of love for mankind, and out of despair at my embarrassing situation, seeing that I had accomplished nothing and was unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, and moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere.
— Søren Kierkegaard
Know you not that a good man does nothing for appearance sake, but for the sake of having done right?
— Epictetus
You can't just skip the boring parts.""Of course I can skip the boring parts.""How do you know they're boring if you don't read them?""I can tell.""Then you can't say you've read the whole play.""I think I can live a happy life, Meryl Lee, even if I don't read the boring parts of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.""Who knows?" she said. "Maybe you can't.
— Gary D. Schmidt, The Wednesday Wars
And, drunk with my own madness, I shouted at him furiously, "Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!
— Charles Baudelaire
Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
You say, it's dark. And in truth, I did place a cloud before your sun. But do you not see how the edges of the cloud are already glowing and turning light.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
The life of the enemy . Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy's staying alive.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Whether you take the doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.
— Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase
YOU are the big drop of dew under the lotus leaf, I am the smaller one on its upper side,'said the dewdrop to the lake.
— Rabindranath Tagore
I’m not superstitious. I’m a witch. Witches aren’t superstitious. We are what people are superstitious of.
— Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith
Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, 'atheism' is a term that should not even exist. No one needs to identify himself as a 'non-astrologer' or a 'non-alchemist.' We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.
— Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation
Mother used to say that however miserable one is, there’s always something to be thankful for. And each morning, when the sky brightened and light began to flood my cell, I agreed with her.
— Albert Camus, The Stranger
What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary.
— Stephen Hawking
Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look.
— Flannery O'Connor
The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
— Elie Wiesel
Calvin:"It says here that 'religion is the opiate of the masses.'...what do you suppose that means?"Television: "...it means that Karl Marx hadn't seen anything yet
— Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes: Sunday Pages 1985-1995: An Exhibition Catalogue
This is the secret of life: the self lives only by dying, finds its identity (and its happiness) only by self-forgetfulness, self-giving, self-sacrifice, and agape love.
— Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock
Philosophy when superficially studied, excites doubt, when thoroughly explored, it dispels it.
— Francis Bacon
I’ve always hated the “Who are you?" question. This is a philosophical inquiry. Answering that question is why we’re on earth. You can’t answer it in thirty seconds or in an elevator.
— Sandy Nathan, Numenon
A prince must not have any other object nor any other thought… but war, its institutions, and its discipline; because that is the only art befitting one who commands.
— Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
I always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memory’s gone, all the old fluency’s disappeared. I don’t write a single sentence without saying to myself, ‘It’s a lie!’ So I know I was right. It’s the best chance I’ve ever had.
— Samuel Beckett
How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do.
— Arthur Schopenhauer
The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.
— Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose
I had to philosophize. Otherwise, I could not live in this world.
— Edmund Husserl
Death isn't the end, it's the beginning.
— Jennifer Love Hewitt
Let whoever can do so deceive me, he will never bring it about that I am nothing, so long as I continue to think I am something.
— René Descartes
The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world, in respect to time and space. His life falls into a set routine; he is limited to contact and conversation with a few friends and acquaintances, and he sees only what happens in his immediate neighbourhood. From this prison there is no escape. But the moment he takes up a book, he immediately enters a different world, and if it is a good book, he is immediately put in touch with one of the best talkers of the world. This talker leads him on and carries him into a different country or a different age, or unburdens to him some of his personal regrets, or discusses with him some special line or aspect of life that the reader knows nothing about. An ancient author puts him in communion with a dead spirit of long ago, and as he reads along, he begins to imagine what the ancient author looked like and what type of person he was.
— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living
Youth is an intoxication without wine, someone says. Life is an intoxication. The only sober man is the melancholiac, who, disenchanted, looks at life, sees it as it really is, and cuts his throat. If this be so, I want to be very drunk. The great thing is to live, to clutch at our existence and race away with it in some great and enthralling pursuit. Above all, I must beware of all ultimate questions- they are too maddeningly unanswerable- let me eschew philosophy and burn Omar.
— W.N.P. Barbellion, The Journal of a Disappointed Man
All things of the body stream away like a river, all things of the mind are dreams and delusion; life is warfare, and a visit to a strange land; the only lasting fame is oblivion.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.
— John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.
— Plato, The Republic
The only moral it is possible to draw from this story is that one should never throw the Q letter into a privet bush, but unfortunately there are times when it is unavoidable.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Returning home is the most difficult part of long-distance hiking
—  You have grown outside the puzzle and your piece no longer fits.
They can't tell so much about you if you got your eyes closed.
— Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork.
— Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit.
— Guy Debord
The Study of philosophy is not that we may know what men have thought, but what the truth of things is. 
— Thomas Aquinas
Here is my final point. About drugs, about alcohol, about pornography and smoking and everything else. What business is it of yours what I do, read, buy, see, say, think, who I fuck, what I take into my body - as long as I do not harm another human being on this planet?
— Bill Hicks
We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus