c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Peace is not so much a political mandate as it is a shared state of consciousness that remains elevated and intact only to the degree that those who value it volunteer their existence as living examples of the same... Peace ends with the unraveling of individual hope and the emergence of the will to worship violence as a healer of private and social dis-ease.
— Aberjhani, The American Poet Who Went Home Again
In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.
— Ayn Rand
It's impossible to walk through solid rock... You have to walk between the molecules that make up the rock.
— J.M. Dattilo
Der Zweck der Philosophie ist die logische Klärung der Gedanken.Die Philosophie ist keine Lehre, sondern eine Tätigkeit.Ein philosophisches Werk besteht wesentlich aus Erläuterungen.Das Resultat der Philosophie sind nicht »philosophische Sätze«, sondern das Klarwerden von Sätzen.Die Philosophie soll die Gedanken, die sonst, gleichsam, trübe und verschwommen sind, klar machen und scharf abgrenzen.4.112The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts.Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations.The result of philosophy is not a number of "philosophical propositions", but to make propositions clear.Philosophy should make clear and delimit sharply the thoughts which otherwise are, as it were, opaque and blurred.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
A culture is made — or destroyed — by its articulate voices.
— Ayn Rand
The will of the people, moreover, practically means the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority; type people, consequently, may desire to oppress a part of their number; and precautions are as much needed against this as against any other abuse of power.
— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
By that which you kill are you bound.
— O.R. Melling, The Summer King
Contrary to the ecologists, nature does not stand still and does not maintain the kind of equilibrium that guarantees the survival of any particular species - least of all the survival of her greatest and most fragile product: man.
— Ayn Rand
Without living, how can you know? Without knowing, how can you speak?
— J.E. Seanachaí
Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?" said the March Hare."Exactly so," said Alice."Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on."I do," Alice hastily replied; "at least--at least I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know.""You might just as well say," added the Dormouse, which seemed to be talking in its sleep, "that 'I breathewhen I sleep' is the same thing as 'I sleep when I breathe!
— Lewis Carroll
Never say never
— Charles Dickens
We played for about half an hour before I realized we were actually playing two different games. What I’d thought of as ludo was actually a game called gin rummy, and what Warren was playing seemed to be a mixture of craps and table tennis. Once we started playing by one consistent set of rules, though, the fun was really over.
— Graham Parke, No Hope for Gomez!
You can believe in whatsoever you like, but the truth remains the truth, no matter how sweet the lie may taste.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in you.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
There are times when wisdom cannot be found in the chambers of parliament or the halls of academia but at the unpretentious setting of the kitchen table.
— E.A. Bucchianeri
The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Do you believe in God, doctor?"No - but what does that really mean? I'm fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out. But I've long ceased finding that original.
— Albert Camus, The Plague
I care for no man on earth, and no man on earth cares for me.
— Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Maybe I’m strange and perverse, but I’ve always thought there was something sexy about a compelling argument.
— Therese Doucet, A Lost Argument
I don’t have a philosophy: I have senses...If I talk about Nature, it’s not because I know what it is,But because I love it, and that’s why I love it,Because when you love you never know what you love,Or why you love, or what love is.Loving is eternal innocence,And the only innocence is not thinking.
— Alberto Caeiro, The Keeper of Sheep
For Reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and Passion, unattended,is a flame that burns to its own destruction.
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
I think to think. Not to be thought-full, or to reach a point of wisdom or acquire a grace of knowledge. I think for the sensuality of thought.
— Ilyas Kassam
What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.
— Theodor W. Adorno
But this wealth of information produced little or no insight.
— Stephen King, The Gunslinger
God judges men from the inside out; men judge men from the outside in. Perhaps to God, an extreme mental patient is doing quite well in going a month without murder, for he fought his chemical imbalance and succeeded; oppositely, perhaps the healthy, able and stable man who has never murdered in his life yet went a lifetime consciously, willingly never loving anyone but himself may then be subject to harsher judgment than the extreme mental patient. It might be so that God will stand for the weak and question the strong.
— Criss Jami, Healology
Ignorance isn't a sword. It's a weight that drags a soul swirling to the bottom of the sea.
— Melodie Ramone
That is why enemies can be great motivators. They serve as fuel for your fire.
— Simon Zingerman, We All Need Heroes: Stories of the Brave and Foolish
Christianity, like genius, is one of the hardest concepts to forgive. We hear what we want to hear and accept what we want to accept, for the most part, simply because there is nothing more offensive than feeling like you have to re-evaluate your own train of thought and purpose in life. You have to die to an extent in your hunger for faith, for wisdom, and quite frankly, most people aren't ready to die.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
A piece of art comes to life, when we can feel, it is breathing, when it talks to us and starts raising questions. It may dispel biased perceptions; make us recognize ignored fragments and remember forsaken episodes of our life story. Art may sometimes even be nasty and disturbing, if we don’t want to consent to its philosophy or concept, but it might, in the end, perhaps reconcile us with ourselves. ("When is Art?")
— Erik Pevernagie
Dreams. They start in your beautiful mind. Think of beautiful things and it will manifest into actions because your body will listen to you. Like it always does.
— Diana Rose Morcilla
Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it.
— E.M. Forster, Howards End
The disease of the soul is both more common and more deadly than the disease of the body. Just as medicine is the art devoted to healing the body, so philosophy is the art devoted to healing the soul, curing it of improper emotions, false beliefs, and faulty judgments, which are the causes of so much hardship and handicap. To heal the body one turns to the practitioner of the art of healing the body, but to heal the soul there is no doctor to turn to, and each of us is left to become that doctor unto himself. Yet, this need not stop us from exhorting others to imitate us in the godly art, in the forlorn hope that they might transform themselves into better citizens for Athens and better companions for us.
— Neel Burton, Plato: Letters to my Son
God save me from fools with a little philosophy—no one is more difficult to reach.
— Epictetus, The Discourses
But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but i laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.
— Anonymous, Holy Bible: King James Version
Is it possible for a man to move the earth? Yes
—  but he must first find out another earth to stand upon.
I never quite understood the question that says, is the glass half empty or half full? What’s the difference? Eventually it’ll end up empty and in the trash.
— Cyndi Goodgame, Under Cover
Pride makes us artificial
—  humility makes us real
What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.
— Peter Singer
In my opinion, our health care system has failed when a doctor fails to treat an illness that is treatable.
— Kevin Alan Lee, The Split Mind: Schizophrenia from an Insider's Point of View
Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?
— Graham Greene, The Quiet American
If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.
— Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
From the philosopher Catulus, never to be dismissive of a friend's accusation, even if it seems unreasonable, but to make every effort to restore the relationship to its normal condition.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars.” Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The moon runs away. . . . Then he was sorry for the great fish that had nothing to eat and his determination to kill him never relaxed in his sorrow for him. . . . There is no one worthy of eating him from the manner of his behavior and his great dignity. I do not understand these things, he thought. But it is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers.
— Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
Diversity is a survival factor for the community itself. A community of a hundred million species can survive anything short of total global catastrophe. Within that hundred million will be thousands that could survive a global temperature drop of twenty degrees—which would be a lot more devastating than it sounds. Within that hundred million will be thousands that could survive a global temperature rise of twenty degrees. But a community of a hundred species or a thousand species has almost no survival value at all.
— Daniel Quinn, Ishmael
The mythology of your culture hums in your ears so constantly that no one pays the slightest bit of attention to it. Of course man is conquering space and the atom and the deserts and the oceans and the elements. According to your mythology, this is what he was BORN to do.
— Daniel Quinn, Ishmael
Each day acquire something that will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against other misfortunes as well; and after you have run over many thoughts, select one to be thoroughly digested that day.
— Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
[I]n Africa I was a member of a family—of a sort of family that the people of your culture haven't known for thousands of years. If gorillas were capable of such an expression, they would tell you that their family is like a hand, of which they are the fingers. They are fully aware of being a family but are very little aware of being individuals. Here in the zoo there were other gorillas—but there was no family. Five severed fingers do not make a hand.
— Daniel Quinn, Ishmael
The principle of democracy is a recognition of the sovereign, inalienable rights of man as a gift from God, the Source of law.
— Fulton J. Sheen
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade...
— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
It is not God that is worshipped but the authority that claims to speak in His name. Sin becomes disobedience to authority not violation of integrity.
— Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
Any philosophy, whether of a religious or political nature - and sometimes the dividing line is hard to determine - fights less for the negative destruction of the opposing ideology than for the positive promotion of its own. Hence its struggle is less defensive than offensive. It therefore has the advantage even in determining the goal, since this goal represents the victory of its own idea, while, conversely,it is hard to determine when the negative aim of the destruction of a hostile doctrine may be regarded as achieved and assured. For this reason alone, the philosophy's offensive will be more systematic and also more powerful than the defensive against a philosophy, since here, too, as always, the attack and not the defence makes the decision. The fight against a spiritual power with methods of violence remains defensive, however, until the sword becomes the support,the herald and disseminator, of a new spiritual doctrine.
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
In philosophy class I think we finally decided that 'good' is an infinitely recursive term - it can't be defined except in terms of itself. Good is good because it's better than bad, though why it's better to be good than bad depends on how you define good, and on and on.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender in Exile
When the writing is good, a book becomes a mirror. The reader will see an uncanny familiarity and respond accordingly.
— Jen Knox, After the Gazebo
Listen." Jennifer reverted, "I didn't mean anything by all of that before. I understand what you were trying to do and ..." She struggled for the right words. "Sweetie, like love, people don't live inside of life, life lives inside of you. Open yourself up to it and there's no stopping your heart.
— Carroll Bryant, Children of the Flower Power
If we cannot comprehend God in his visible works, how then in his inconceivable thoughts, that call the works into being?
— Edgar Allan Poe, The Imp of The Perverse
Godshawk looked surprised, the way that people generally do when you ask them philosophical questions in shrubberies in the middle of the night.
— Philip Reeve, Fever Crumb
The tragedy is that we cannot believe the dogmas of religion and metaphysics if we have the strict methods of truth in heart and head, but on the other hand, we have become through the development of humanity so tenderly suffering that we need the highest kind of means of salvation and consolation: whence arises the danger that man may bleed to death through the truth that he realises.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Life is a book. We fill the pages.
— Victoria Valentine
Lend me your ears and you can borrow my mind
— Benny Bellamacina, The King of Rhyme
Material wealth can be bad for your health.Because when you’re in the soil it’ll make your blood boil,that you couldn’t keep it all for your self.
— Benny Bellamacina
The spectacle is at the same time the mirage of self in the mirror of things.
— Paul Ricœur
I wonder why peopke are so afraid of love. Of different kinds of love. I just don't get it. Why aren't we afraid of racism" Of war? But love? It just doesn't make sense.
— Gail Sidonie Sobat, Chance to Dance for You
Always ask the questions you want to, life is too short to know if you'll get a second chance to ask , and afterlife is probably too long to wonder what the answer may be.
— Kaitlin Hollon
Her maktul katilinde yaşamaya devam eder.
— Elif Shafak
I surround myself with things that make me happy. Why? Because ... it makes me happy.
— Kelly Epperson
Knowledge becomes evil if the aim be not virtuous.
— Plato
All the world is queer save thee and me, and even thou art a little queer.
— Robert Owen
The greatest untold story is the evolution of God.
— G.I. Gurdjieff
a spider and a flyi heard a spiderand a fly arguingwait said the flydo not eat mei serve a great purposein the worldyou will have toshow me said the spideri scurry aroundgutters and sewersand garbage canssaid the fly and gatherup the germs oftyphoid influenzaand pneumonia on my feetand wingsthen i carry these germsinto households of menand give them diseasesall the people whohave lived the rightsort of life recoverfrom the diseasesand the old soaks whohave weakened their systemswith liquor and iniquitysuccumb it is my missionto help rid the worldof these wicked personsi am a vessel of righteousnessscattering seeds of justiceand serving the noblest usesit is true said the spiderthat you are moreuseful in a ploddingmaterial sort of waythan i am but i do notserve the utilitarian deitiesi serve the gods of beautylook at the gossamer websi weave they float in the sunlike filaments of songif you get what i meani do not work at anythingi play all the timei am busy with the stuffof enchantment and the materialsof fairyland my workstranscend utilityi am the artista creator and demi godit is ridiculous to supposethat i should be deniedthe food i need in orderto continue to createbeauty i tell youplainly mister fly it is alldamned nonsense for that foodto rear up on its hind legsand say it should not be eatenyou have convinced mesaid the fly say no moreand shutting all his eyeshe prepared himself for dinnerand yet he said i couldhave made out a casefor myself too if i hadhad a better line of talkof course you could said the spiderclutching a sirloin from himbut the end would have beenjust the same if neither ofus had spoken at allboss i am afraid that whatthe spider said is trueand it gives me to thinkfuriously upon the futilityof literaturearchy
— Don Marquis, Archy and Mehitabel
With the arrival of electric technology, man has extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism. 
— Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man
Question the answers, I repeated every class. Reevaluate your conclusions when the evidence changes.
— Craig M. Mullaney, The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education
The ways of fate are indeed hard to understand. If there is not some compensation hereafter, then the world is a cruel jest.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
Step out of my sunlight.
— Diogenes Laërtius
Am I right in suggesting that ordinary life is a mean between these extremes, that the noble man devotes his material wealth to lofty ends, the advancement of science, or art, or some such true ideal; and that the base man does the opposite by concentrating all his abilities on the amassing of wealth?'Exactly; that is the real distinction between the artist and the bourgeois, or, if you prefer it, between the gentleman and the cad. Money, and the things money can buy, have no value, for there is no question of creation, but only of exchange. Houses, lands, gold, jewels, even existing works of art, may be tossed about from one hand to another; they are so, constantly. But neither you nor I can write a sonnet; and what we have, our appreciation of art, we did not buy. We inherited the germ of it, and we developed it by the sweat of our brows. The possession of money helped us, but only by giving us time and opportunity and the means of travel. Anyhow, the principle is clear; one must sacrifice the lower to the higher, and, as the Greeks did with their oxen, one must fatten and bedeck the lower, so that it may be the worthier offering.
— Aleister Crowley, Moonchild
For others, in spite of myself, from myself.
— Emmanuel Levinas
Let not the rash marble riskgarrulous breaches of oblivion's omnipotence,in many words recallingname, renown, events, birthplace.All those glass jewels are best left in the dark.Let not the marble say what men do not.The essentials of the dead man's life--the trembling hope,the implacable miracle of pain, the wonder of sensual delight--will abide forever.Blindly the uncertain soul asks to continuewhen it is the lives of others that will make that happen,as you yourself are the mirror and imageof those who did not live as long as youand others will be (and are) your immortality on earth.
— Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems
In actual fact. The manifold sexualities - those which appear with the different ages (sexualities of the infant or the child), those which become fixated on particular tastes or practices (the sexuality of the invert, the gerontophile, the fetishist), those which, in a diffuse manner, invest relationships (the sexuality of doctor and patient, teacher and student, psychiatrist and mental patient), those which haunt spaces (the sexuality of the home, the school, the prison)- all form the correlate of exact procedures of power.
— Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction
My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before,—a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.
— Henry David Thoreau
Unfortunately, religion often works to shrink and tame the very wild and mysterious forces that first drew our wonder. In the process of making the inexplicable safe for the masses, the possibilities for real illusion-piercing insight becomes reduced. One might say that they are only available to those who dare to ride the breaking crest of direct life-altering experience.
— Stephen K. Hayes
And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: 'I.
— Ayn Rand
Moments are the elements of profit
— Karl Marx, Capital, Vol 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production
As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he could live life on his own terms. To what end? To be free. But free to what end? To read books, to write books, to think.
— Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies
The old man slowly raised himself from the piano stool, fixed those cheerful blue eyes piercingly and at the same time with unimaginable friendliness upon him, and said: "Making music together is the best way for two people to become friends. There is none easier. That is a fine thing. I hope you and I shall remain friends. Perhaps you too will learn how to make fugues, Joseph.
— Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
It would be, for me, mere pointless pleasure, an illusion of order for this one frail, foolish, flicker-flash in the long dull fall of eternity.
— John Gardner, Grendel
There is a danger there - a very real danger to humanity. Consider, Watson, that the material, the sensual, the worldly would all prolong their worthless lives. The spiritual would not avoid the call to something higher. It would be the survival of the least fit. What sort of cesspool may not our poor world become?
— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes
This is the best thing to wear for today, you understand. Because I don't like women in skirts and the best thing is to wear pantyhose or some pants under a short skirt, I think. Then you have the pants under the skirt and then you can pull the stockings up over the pants underneath the skirt. And you can always take off the skirt and use it as a cape. So I think this is the best costume for today.
— Edith Bouvier Beale
How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking mother. In spite of death, the mark and seal of the parental control, man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticize, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is aquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.
— Bertrand Russell
Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history's brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind.
— Ayn Rand
I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. 
— Albert Camus
...convinced that in trying to please all, he had pleased none, and had lost his ass into the bargain.
— Aesop
Philosophy is not a spectator sport.
— Nigel Warburton, Philosophy
The world was floods above and fire below
— Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
Philosophy cannot and should not give us an account of faith, but should understand itself and know just what it has indeed to offer, without taking anything away, least of all cheating people out of something by making them think it is nothing.
— Søren Kierkegaard
If your leg is in a cast, it's really dumb to sit in front of your computer doing unnecessary stuff with it hanging down. Your leg will swell and heal slower, if at all. When you go to your doctor, he/she will give you one of those "you're really dumb and self destructive" looks. Also, "Why didn't you follow my orders and rest?" Your doctor will be right, and so will mine at my next office visit. Elevate, folk! Elevate your mind, your soul, and your leg, in the order needed!
— Sandy Nathan, Numenon
Absurdity is the ecstasy of intellectualism.
— Criss Jami, Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile
Live like a tree, giving, forgiving and free.
— Debasish Mridha
Language disguises thought.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
It is more Important to be of pure intention than of perfect action.
— Ilyas Kassam
The moon is the reflection of your heart and moonlight is the twinkle of your love.
— Debasish Mridha
Who we are now is all that really matters.
— Amy Joy, The Academie
Never underestimate the power you have to take your life in a new direction.
— Germany Kent
This is your life, and its ending one minute at a time.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
I cannot encourage any fabrication even for the sake of making people feel good. If I were to fabricate consciously and knowingly, I would not only be ordaining myself their enemy, but also ordaining myself God's enemy.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
Happiness will grow if you plant the seeds of love in the garden of hope with compassion and care.
— Debasish Mridha
Nobody is good or bad. They are either strong or weak. Strong people stick to their morals, no matter what the trials and tribulations. Weak people, many a times, do not even realise how low they have fallen.
— Amish Tripathi, The Secret of the Nagas
Poverty is a virtue which one can teach oneself.
— Diogenes of Sinope
He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it.
— G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
What are we doing to each other? Because I know that I am doing to him exactly what he is doing to me. We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness.
— Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
You are not just for the right or left, but for what is right over the wrong.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
— Voltaire
Faith in the possibilities of continued and rigorous inquiry does not limit access to truth to any channel or scheme of things. It does not first say that truth is universal and then add there is but one road to it.
— John Dewey, A Common Faith
Raise a smile and lower stress
— Benny Bellamacina
Saint Thomas Aquinas says, wisely, that the only way to drive out a bad passion is by a stronger good passion. The same is true of thoughts as of passions. When your mind wanders, like a child, your will must bring it back, like a mother. [. . .] The will-parent must discipline the mind-child, avoiding both the opposite extremes commonly made in disciplining either children or thoughts: tyranny or permissiveness.
— Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners
The last of the cherry blossom. On the tree, itturns ever more perfect. And when it’s perfect, it falls. And then of course once it hits theground it gets all mushed up. So it’s only absolutely perfect when it’s falling through the air,this way and that, for the briefest time!.!.!.
— David Mitchell
When you've had one call after another and your little one is tugging on your shirt, remember what really matters. When the milk is splattered all over the floor and those little eyes are looking at you for your reaction, remember what really matters. It takes 5 minutes to clean up spilled milk; it takes much longer to clean up a broken spirit.
— Rebecca Eanes, The Newbie's Guide to Positive Parenting
You have to be an artist and a madman...
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
A sister is a dearest friend, a closest enemy, and an angel at the time of need.
— Debasish Mridha
It’s not easy to write a poem about a poem.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Philosophy does not promise to secure anything external for man, otherwise it would be admitting something that lies beyond its proper subject-matter. For as the material of the carpenter is wood, and that of statuary bronze, so the subject-matter of the art of living is each person's own life.
— Epictetus
But time given to wishing for what can't be is not only spent, but wasted, and for all that we waste we shall be accountable.
— Penelope Fitzgerald
What great philosophers do for us is not to hand out such an all-purpose system. It is to light up and clarify some special aspect of life, to supply conceptual tools which will do a certain necessary kind of work. Wide though that area of work may be, it is never the whole, and all ideas lose their proper power when they are used out of their appropriate context. That is why one great philosopher does not necessarily displace another, why there is room for all of them and a great many more whom we do not have yet.
— Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live by
By the way, if you get mad at your Mac laptop and wonder who designed this demonic device, notice the manufacturer's icon on top: an apple with a bite out of it.
— Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock
Slowly we became silent, and silence itself if an enemy to friendship.
— Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories
A poet or philosopher should have no fault to find with his age if it only permits him to do his work undisturbed in his own corner
—  nor with his fate if the corner granted him allows of his following his vocation without having to think about other people.
My experience with forgiveness is that it sort of comes spontaneously at a certain point and to try to force it it's not really forgiveness. It's Buddhist philosophy or something spiritual jargon that you're trying to live up to but you're just using it against yourself as a reason why you're not okay.
— Pema Chödrön
Apocalypse is a frame of mind." [Nicodemus] said then. "A belief. A surrender to inevitability. It is a despair for the future. It is the death of hope.
— Jim Butcher, Death Masks
Don't hate the media
—  become the media.
I realized that conservatism was the philosophy that best suited me, with its emphasis on individual liberty, personal responsibility, and merit.
— Mark R. Levin
To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. But this also means: to be taught. The relation with the Other, or Conversation, is a non-allergic relation, an ethical relation; but inasmuch as it is welcomed this conversation is a teaching. Teaching is not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain. In its non-violent transitivity the very epiphany of the face is produced.
— Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity:  An Essay on Exteriority
Many married women who have deliberately spurned the "hour" of childbearing are unhappy and frustrated. They never discovered the joys of marriage because they refused to surrender to the obligation of their state. In saving themselves, they lost themselves!
— Fulton J. Sheen, Seven Words of Jesus and Mary: Lessons from Cana and Calvary
We in our age are faced with a strange paradox. Never before have we had so much information in bits and pieces flooded upon us by radio and television and satellite, yet never before have we had so little inner certainty about our own being. The more objective truth increases, the more our inner certitude decreases. Our fantastically increased technical power, and each forward step in technology is experienced by many as a new push toward our possible annihilation. Nietzsche was strangely prophetic when he said,“We live in a period of atomic chaos…the terrible apparition…the Nation State…and the hunt for happiness will never be greater than when it must be caught between today and tomorrow; because the day after tomorrow all hunting time may have come to an end altogether.”Sensing this, and despairing of ever finding meaning in life, people these days seize on the many ways of dulling their awareness by apathy, by psychic numbing, or by hedonism. Others, especially young people, elect in alarming and increasing numbers to escape their own being by suicide.
— Rollo May, The Discovery of Being: Writings in Existential Psychology
If the emotions are free the intellect will look after itself
— A.S. Neill
You think maybe if you just work harder and faster, you can hold off the chaos, but then one day you’re changing a patio light bulb with a five-year life span and you realize how you’ll only be changing this light maybe ten more times before you’ll be dead.
— Chuck Palahniuk
Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.
— Augustine of Hippo
Love itself is what is left over when being "in love" has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.
— Louis de Bernières, Corelli's Mandolin
The most important thing about a technology is how it changes people.
— Jaron Lanier
In a world of chance is there a better and a worse? We yield to a stranger's embrace or give ourselves to the waves; for the blink of an eyelid our vigilance relaxes; we are asleep; and when we awake, we have lost the direction of our lives. What are these blinks of an eyelid, against which the only defence is an eternal and inhuman wakefulness? Might they not be the cracks and chinks through which another voice, other voices, speak in our lives? By what right do we close our ears to them? (Susan Barton)
— J.M. Coetzee, Foe
We love ourselves notwithstanding our faults, and we ought to love our friends in like manner.
— Cyrus the Great
Irreverence is a most necessary ingredient of religion. Not to speak of its importance in philosophy. Irreverence is the only way left to us for testing our universe.
— Frank Herbert
[T]he price you've paid is not the price of becoming human. It's not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It's the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world.
— Daniel Quinn, Ishmael
Like apes, we breed, sleep, and die. Yet like God we say, "I am." We are ontological oxymorons.
— Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock
This is the paradox of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes everything. One of the first measures taken by the new Bolshevik government in 1918 was to make public the entire corpus of tsarist secret diplomacy, all the secret agreements, the secret clauses of public agreements etc. There too the target was the entire functioning of the state apparatuses of power. (Žižek, S. "Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks." London Review of Books 33.2 (2011): 9-10. )
— Slavoj Žižek
If the sum of living be love's fee,Tremble. You are my one eternity.
— Laura Benet
It is culture that is the bully."
— Sharon  Lee
If you cannot find an element of Humour in something, your not taking it seriously enough.
— Ilyas Kassam
The awful thing is that if i can forget they're people, it will be no different at all
— Suzanne Collins
[Y]our agricultural revolution is not an event like the Trojan War, isolated in the distant past and without relevance to your lives today. The work begun by those neolithic farmers in the Near East has been carried forward from one generation to the next without a single break, right into the present moment. It's the foundation of your vast civilization today in exactly the same way that it was the foundation of the very first farming village.
— Daniel Quinn, Ishmael
Life: It is better not to wrap philosophy around such an inconceivable evolving beautiful mystery. If based on perception, alone; whatever the conclusion - it is still guessing.
— T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph Over Death and Conscious Encounters with "The Divine Presence"
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few
— Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice
Quote words that affirmall men and women are yourbrothers and sisters.
— Aberjhani, The River of Winged Dreams
I believe that the imagination is the passport we create to take us into the real world. I believe the imagination is another phrase for what is most uniquely us.
— John Guare, Six Degrees of Separation
Mere philosophy will not satisfy us. We cannot reach the goal by mere words alone. Without practice, nothing can be achieved. (3)
— Swami Satchidananda, The Yoga Sutras
An attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes.
— Ayn Rand
Astonishment is the root of philosophy.
— Paul Tillich
Vivo sin vivir en mí... muero porque no muero. (I live without really being alive... I die because I am not dying.)
— Teresa of Ávila
As a rule, we don't like to feel to sad or lonely or depressed. So why do we like music (or books or movies) that evoke in us those same negative emotions? Why do we choose to experience in art the very feelings we avoid in real life?Aristotle deals with a similar question in his analysis of tragedy. Tragedy, after all, is pretty gruesome. […] There's Sophocles's Oedipus, who blinds himself after learning that he has killed his father and slept with his mother. Why would anyone watch this stuff? Wouldn't it be sick to enjoy watching it? […] Tragedy's pleasure doesn't make us feel "good" in any straightforward sense. On the contrary, Aristotle says, the real goal of tragedy is to evoke pity and fear in the audience. Now, to speak of the pleasure of pity and fear is almost oxymoronic. But the point of bringing about these emotions is to achieve catharsis of them - a cleansing, a purification, a purging, or release. Catharsis is at the core of tragedy's appeal.
— Brandon W. Forbes, Radiohead and Philosophy: Fitter Happier More Deductive
The story of terrorism is written by the state and it is therefore highly instructive… compared with terrorism, everything else must be acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic.
— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
O dear Pan and all the other gods of this place, grant that I may be beautiful inside. Let all my external possessions be in friendly harmony with what is within. May I consider the wise man rich. As for gold, let me have as much as a moderate man could bear and carry with him.
— Plato, Phaedrus
There are many who consider as an injury to themselves any conduct which they have a distaste for, and resent it as an outrage to their feelings; as a religious bigot, when charged with disregarding the religious feelings of others, has been known to retort that they disregard his feelings, by persisting in their abominable worship or creed. But there is no parity between the feeling of a person for his own opinion, and the feeling of another who is offended at his holding it; no more than between the desire of a thief to take a purse, and the desire of the right owner to keep it. And a person's taste is as much his own peculiar concern as his opinion or his purse. It is easy for any one to imagine an ideal public, which leaves the freedom and choice of individuals in all uncertain matters undisturbed, and only requires them to abstain from modes of conduct which universal experience has condemned. But where has there been seen a public which set any such limit to its censorship? or when does the public trouble itself about universal experience. In its interferences with personal conduct it is seldom thinking of anything but the enormity of acting or feeling differently from itself; and this standard of judgment, thinly disguised, is held up to mankind as the dictate of religion and philosophy, by nine tenths of all moralists and speculative writers. These teach that things are right because they are right; because we feel them to be so. They tell us to search in our own minds and hearts for laws of conduct binding on ourselves and on all others. What can the poor public do but apply these instructions, and make their own personal feelings of good and evil, if they are tolerably unanimous in them, obligatory on all the world?
— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
All beings so far have created something beyond themselves
—  and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment…
Your moral code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice…It demands that he starts, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not. A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an isolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold a man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality…To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. (The) myth decleares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge-he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil-he became a moral being…The evils for which they damn him are reasn, morality, creativeness, joy-all the cardinal values of his existence….the essence of his nature as a man. Whatever he was- that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love- he was not a man.
— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.
— Oscar Wilde
All modern philosophizing is political, policed by governments, churches, academics, custom, fashion, and human cowardice, all off which limit it to a fake learnedness.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks
The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.
— Ayn Rand
They [Nazi captors]had more liberty, more options to choose from in their environment; but he [Viktor Frankl] had more freedom, more internal power to exercise his options.
— Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change
We need to walk to know sacred places, those around us and those within. We need to walk to remember the songs.
— Joseph Bruchac
As long as your ideas of what's possible are limited by what's actual, no other idea has a chance.
— Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists
Every man knows that he will die: and nobody believes it. On that paradox stand not only a host of religions but the entity of a sane being.
— John Myers Myers
the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess sucess is our national disease
— William James
The world is a good judge of things, for it is in natural ignorance, which is man's true state. The sciences have two extremes which meet. The first is the pure natural ignorance in which all men find themselves at birth. The other extreme is that reached by great intellects, who, having run through all that men can know, find they know nothing, and come back again to that same ignorance from which they set out; but this is a learned ignorance which is conscious of itself. Those between the two, who have departed from natural ignorance and not been able to reach the other, have some smattering of this vain knowledge and pretend to be wise. These trouble the world and are bad judges of everything. The people and the wise constitute the world; these despise it, and are despised. They judge badly of everything, and the world judges rightly of them.
— Blaise Pascal, Pensées
People do not know how what is at variance agrees with itself. It is an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre.
— Heraclitus
The art of music is good, for the reason, among others, that it produces pleasure; but what proof is it possible to give that pleasure is good? If, then, it is asserted that there is a comprehensive formula, including all things which are in themselves good, and that whatever else is good, is not so as an end, but as a mean, the formula may be accepted or rejected, but is not a subject of what is commonly understood by proof.
— John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism
Think of me as an impetuous Hegel, drunk with power, and also, regular drunk.
— Eugene Mirman, The Will to Whatevs: A Guide to Modern Life
He did not wish to be divine. If there had never been a God, the emperor thought, it might have been easier to work out what goodness was. This business of worship, of the abnegation of self in the face of the Almighty, was a distraction, a false trail. Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow, clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.
— Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence