c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Have you ever been to Paris before?" I asked Kylian."No, though from what I've seen, I'm sure it's worth a trip. And even with what little I saw I think it's quite fitting for you to be the Patroness of Paris. You're like Paris and Paris is like you.""Noisy?""A mystery.
— Natalie Herzer, Blue Moon Rising
Hem, you know I don't think that owner's wife where you live likes me. She wouldn't let me wait upstairs for you.''I'll tell her,' I said.'Don't bother. I can always wait here. It's very pleasant in the sun now, isn't it?''It's fall now,' I said. 'I don't think you dress warmly enough.''It's only cool in the evening,' Evan said. 'I'll wear my coat.''Do you know where it is?''No. But it's somewhere safe.''How do you know?''Because I left the poem in it.
— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition
I shall be in Paris in two days. Well, all is finished. The waves ofhuman mediocrity rise to the sky and they will engulf the refuge whosedams I open. Ah! courage leaves me, my heart breaks! O Lord, pity theChristian who doubts, the sceptic who would believe, the convict oflife embarking alone in the night, under a sky no longer illumined bythe consoling beacons of ancient faith.
— Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature
Picasso created blank spaces through which an imagination could fly.
— Peggy Kopman-Owens
My Illusionist, will you take me into a world filled with timeless magic?
— Con.Template
Of course the people in the metro didn't see a thing!...what a joke! petrified ratlets! but they'll still come out to refute me! make claims!...that nothing got bombed!...squished! powdered! that the firmament was calm, and me, I imagined the whole thing! chrysanthemums, sprays, roses! why, there's no more any such thing as sky-hooking shrapnel than there is anal ice cream! it's all in my mind! hallucinations and bullshit! what a crook! but I repeat and reassert! shrapnel and fiery lace stretched from one end of the horizon to the other! with lots of glow-worms mixed in...and dancing purple fireflies...
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Normance
As the shabby section of the audience rose to its feet, waving its hats and food-wrappers, a rich, stale smell wafted through the auditorium. It had something of the fog on the boulevard outside, where the pavements were sticky with rain, but also something more intimate : it suggested old stew and course tobacco, the coat racks and bookshelves of a pawnshop, and damp straw mattresses impregnated with urine and patchouli. It was - as though the set designer had intended some ironical epilogue - the smell of the real Latin Quarter.
— Graham Robb, Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris
In those days, long before, a view over the rooftops of Paris was an unaffordable luxury. The apartment he had shared with a mousy young writer from Laon had a view of the Jardin de Luxembourg – if he stuck his head out of the window as far as it would go and twisted it to the left, a smudge of green foliage appeared in the corner of one eye. That had been his best apartment to date. They had decorated it in the ‘Bohemian’ style of the 1830s : a few volumes of Shakespeare and Victor Hugo, a Phrygian cap, an Algerian hookah, a skull on a broomstick handle (from the brother of a friend, Charles Toubin, who was an intern at one of the big hospitals) and, of course, a window box of geraniums, which was not only pretty but also illegal. (Death by falling window box was always high up the official list of fatalities.) For a proper view of Paris, they visited Henry’s painter friends who lived in a warren of attic rooms near the Barriere d’Enfer and called themselves the Water-Drinkers. When the weather was fine and the smell of their own squalor became unbearable, they clambered onto the roof and sat on the gutters and ridges, sketching chimneyscapes, and sending up more smoke from their pipes than the fireplaces below.Three of the Water-Drinkers had since died of various illnesses known collectively as ‘lack of money’. When the last of the three was buried, in the spring of 1844, Henry and the others had found themselves at the graveside without a sou to give a gravedigger. ‘Never mind’, said he, “you can pay me the next time, ‘ and then, to his collegue : ‘It’s all right – these gentlemen are a regular customers.
— Graham Robb, Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris
The sun finally died in beauty, flinging out its crimson flames, which cast their reflection on the faces of passers-by, giving them a strangely feverish look. The darkness of the trees became deeper. You could hear the Seine flowing. Sounds carried farther, and people in their beds could feel, as they did every night, the vibration of the ground as buses rolled past.
— Georges Simenon, L'Enterrement de Monsieur Bouvet
... Paris was a city of love for unimaginative folks.
— Lauren Morrill, Meant to Be
If I walked down by different streets to the Jardin du Luxembourg in the afternoon I could walk through the gardens and then go to the Musée du Luxembourg where the great paintings were that have now mostly been transferred to the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume. I went there nearly every day for the Cézannes and to see the Manets and the Monets and the other Impressionists that I had first come to know about in the Art Institute at Chicago. I was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them. I was learning very much from him but I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone. Besides it was a secret. But if the light was gone in the Luxembourg I would walk up through the gardens and stop in at the studio apartment where Gertrude Stein lived at 27 rue de Fleurus.
— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition
If you have ever walked in Paris, you will see that Paris will ever walk in your memoires!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
No one said finding Paris would be easy
—  I only said it would be worth it.
It is impossible for a Parisian to resist the desire to flick through the old volumes laid out by a books
— Gérard de Nerval, Les Filles du feu - Les Chimères
Paradoxically, the freedom of Paris is associated with a persistent belief that nothing ever changes. Paris, they say, is the city that changes least. After an absence of twenty or thirty years, one still recognize
— Marguerite Duras, Outside: Selected Writings
Eiffel Tower" To Robert DelaunayEiffel Tower Guitar of the skyYour wireless telegraphy Attracts words As a rosebush the beesDuring the night The Seine no longer flowsTelescope or bugleEIFFEL TOWERAnd it's a hive of words Or an inkwell of honeyAt the bottom of dawn A spider with barbed-wire legs Was making its web of cloudsMy little boy To climb the Eiffel Tower You climb on a songDo re mi fa sol la ti do We are up on top A bird sings in the telegraph antennae It's the wind Of Europe The electric windOver there The hats fly away They have wings but they don't singJacqueline Daughter of France What do you see up thereThe Seine is asleep Under the shadow of its bridgesI see the Earth turning And I blow my bugleToward all the seasOn the path Of your perfume All the bees and the words go their wayOn the four horizons Who has not heard this song I AM THE QUEEN OF THE DAWN OF THE POLES I AM THE COMPASS THE ROSE OF THE WINDS THAT FADESEVERY FALLAND ALL FULL OF SNOW I DIE FROM THE DEATH OF THAT ROSE IN MY HEAD A BIRD SINGS ALL YEAR LONGThat's the way the Tower spoke to me one dayEiffel Tower Aviary of the world Sing SingChimes of ParisThe giant hanging in the midst of the void Is the poster of FranceThe day of Victory You will tell it to the stars
— Vicente Huidobro, The Cubist Poets in Paris: An Anthology
For example, in Paris, if one desires to buy something, you enter the store and say "Good morning, sir" or "madam," depending on what is appropriate, you wait until you are greeted, you make polite chitchat about the weather or some such, and when the salesperson asks what they can do for you, then and only then do you bring up the vulgar business of the transaction you require.
— Craig Ferguson, Between the Bridge and the River
Hélène, her eyes once more raised and remote, was deep in a dream. She was Lady Rowena, she was in love, with the deep peaceful passion of a noble soul. This spring morning, the loveliness of the great city, the first wallflowers scenting her lap, had little by little melted her heart.
— Émile Zola, Une Page d'amour
Oh ParisFrom red to green all the yellow dies awayParis Vancouver Hyeres Maintenon New York and the AntillesThe window opens like an orangeThe beautiful fruit of light("Windows")
— Guillaume Apollinaire, Zone
I know the consequences, Manon,” Ilyse conceded. “I know the fate you endured might one day be my own. But I refuse to be a prisoner for the rest of my life.
— Melika Dannese Lux, City of Lights: The Trials and Triumphs of Ilyse Charpentier
She was ready to be a fugitive with him for the rest of her life - 'Whither thou goest, I will go; thy people shall be my people' - and when a Parisienne is ready to leave Paris behind forever, that's something. ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")
— Cornell Woolrich, The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich
That name was a sadistic play on the Underground Railroad that smuggled American slaves north. The old Nazis set up their own version and used it mainly to move their people. They called it Die Spinne.
— John Pearce, Treasure of Saint-Lazare
Dear Artie: “The young fellow has disappeared into a dead end. I think the long-necked bastard planned to wind up in Paris and sent him there but he may also have used the underground railroad. Ask your round-heeled contact. Maybe you can find more than I could. “Roy
— John Pearce, Treasure of Saint-Lazare
You'd think the sight of beautiful Place Vendôme would lift my spirits but oddly the arc of jewellery - so obviously beyond the means of a jobless person like me - only depresses me more. I plod on feeling confused, guilty even, that I should feel unhappy in a place that looks like paradise.
— Sarah Turnbull, Almost French: Love and a New Life in Paris
Then she stood on tiptoe and kissed him sweetly on the lips, “I promise you a love affair with a sun-bathed Austrian princess beyond anything you imagine—in love, in beauty, in intensity. A love that will power you to the end of our time together. You are going to be a fortunate man, Geoffrey Ashbrook.
— Paul A. Myers, Vienna 1934: Betrayal at the Ballplatz
Sandrine opened her eyes to the soft gray light of early dawn. Recollections of sensual pleasure seemed to caress her body, bringing a smile to her lips. She lay back in the pillow and listened to the breathing of Philippe beside her. She lingered in the memory of the previous night, a memory that was like a warm and tender embrace, an evening of small intimate harmonies. As it should be.
— Paul A. Myers, Paris 1934: Victory in Retreat
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw another woman sitting over in a wing chair, a pleasantly attractive lady wearing the tasteful clothes of a senior redactrice, or senior civil servant, the stylish black skirt, the dark stockings, the black pumps, and the starched white linen blouse of her caste. The dark hair was swept up in a chignon, elegant and functional, dark eyes glistened as she smiled at him in a professional manner. He could see that she was a woman who met men in a highly assured way—serene, and expert at creating a proper distance.
— Paul A. Myers, Paris 1935: Destiny's Crossroads
In Paris, you couldn’t really turn around without seeing the result of lovers’ bad decisions. An artist given to sexual excess was almost a cliché, but no one seemed to mind. As long as you were making something good or interesting or sensational, you could have as many lovers as you wanted and ruin them all.
— Paula McLain, The Paris Wife
I look to the right as I cross the bridge and smile to see the tip of the Eiffel Tower soaring over rooftops in the distance on the other side of the river. I've seen it in photographs a thousand times, but seeing it in person for the first time that reminds me that I'm really, truly here, thousands of miles away, across an ocean from home.
— Kristin Harmel, The Sweetness of Forgetting
...but you drank your black coffee by choice, believeng that Paris was sufficient alcohol.
— Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s
A beautiful white silk scarf was around her neck, tucked below the fur collar. Her lips were well painted into a bright red cupid’s bow. Cute as hell I always told myself, with a tinge of regret. She had a steady girlfriend.
— Paul A. Myers, A Farewell in Paris
Night came on, the lamps were lighted, the tables near him found occupants, and Paris began to wear that peculiar evening look of hers which seems to say, in the flare of windows and theatre-doors, and the muffled rumble of swift-rolling carriages, that this is no world for you unless you have your pockets lined and your scruples drugged.
— Henry James, Madame de Mauves
...was an elegant woman in a city of so many thousands of elegant women...
— Ann Patchett, Bel Canto
She murmured, “I love the imagery of Sappho, the warm summer air across the velvety darkness, the lover between love’s thighs.” She stayed quiet a moment. “But it takes a man’s kiss to put the fire to the metaphor.
— Paul A. Myers, A Farewell in Paris
When he craved contact, he stopped in to visit the Cézannes and Monets at the Musée du Luxembourg, believing they had already done what he was striving for—distilling places and people and objects to their essential qualities.
— Paula McLain, The Paris Wife
The last time I saw Paris.Her heart was warm and gay.
— Oscar Hammerstein II
Moonlight floods the whole sky from horizon to horizon
— How much it can fill your room depends on its windows.
This is the one and onlyfirmament
—  thereforeit is the absolute world.There is no other world.The circle is complete.I am living in Eternity.The ways of this worldare the ways of Heaven.
Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.
— Aldous Huxley, Island
The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.
— Benjamin Disraeli
Remember that the Tarot is a great and sacred arcanum - its abuse is an obscenity in the inner and a folly in the outer. It is intended for quite other purposes than to determine when the tall dark man will meet the fair rich widow.
— Jack Parsons
You are as prone to love, as the sun is to shine.
— Thomas Traherne, Centuries Of Meditations
In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black.
— Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism
Conscious Evolution"Conscious evolution inspires in us a mysterious and humble awareness that we have been created by this awesome process of evolution and are now being transformed by it." Barbara Marx Hubbard 
— Barbara Marx Hubbard
Energy defines life not flesh and blood. WE are infinite energies experiencing infinity. Through a finite aperture.
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
High towers, and metaphysically-great men resembling them, round both of which there is commonly much wind, are not for me. My place is the fruitful bathos, the bottom-land, of experience; and the word transcendental, does not signify something passing beyond all experience, but something that indeed precedes it a priori, but that is intended simply to make cognition of experience possible.
— Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
And further, observing that all this indeterminate substance is in motion, and that no true predication can be made of that which changes, they supposed that it is impossible to make any true statement about that which is in all ways and entirely changeable. For it was from this supposition that there blossomed forth the most extreme view of those which we have mentioned, that of the professed followers of Heraclitus, and such as Cratylus held, who ended by thinking that one need not say anything, and only moved his finger; and who criticized Heraclitus for saying that one cannot enter the same river twice, for he himself held that it cannot be done even once.
— Aristotle
Reality is in the mind of the eye.
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
... It is possible to be a meta-physician without believing in a transcendent reality; for we shall see that many metaphysical utterances are due to the commission of logical errors, rather than to a conscious desire on the part of their authors to go beyond the limits of experience.
— A.J. Ayer
We make it all up, even that we don't.
— Zero Jones, Metamagik
There was a metal rod inside of Colin. The rod went from his stomach to the middle of his head. It was made of steel and sugar, and had been dissolving inside of Colin for ten or fifteen years, slow and sweet, above and behind his tongue; and he could taste it in that way, like an aftertaste, removed and seeping and outside of the mouth. Sometimes he’d glimpse it with the black, numb backs of his eyes. But what he really wanted was to wrench it out. Cut it up and chew it. Or melt it. Bathe in the hard, sweet lava of it.
— Tao Lin, Bed
Morality is totally God’s standard, and his standards and conditions are revealed to us through his written word, the Scriptures (The Bible).
— Reid A. Ashbaucher, Made in the Image of God: Understanding the Nature of God and Mankind in a Changing World
You look like you bin whupped with a ugly stick.
— Bo Diddley
Fractional Multiplicity' allows for a minute amount of our energy to be present in all places at all times.
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
Any landscape is a condition of the spirit.
— Henri-Frédéric Amiel
It is true, no doubt, that this principle of the necessary unity of apperception is itself an identical and therefore an analytic proposition; but it shows, nevertheless, the necessity of a synthesis of the manifold given in an intuition, a synthesis without which it would be impossible to think the thoroughgoing identity of self-consciousness. For through the *I*, as a simple representation, nothing manifold is given; only in intuition, which is distinct from this representation, can a manifold be given, and then, through *combination*, be thought in one consciousness. An understanding in which through self-consciousness all the manifold would be given at the same time would be one that *intuits*; our understanding can do nothing but *think*, and must seek intuition in the senses. I am conscious, therefore, of the identical self with respect to the manifold of the representations that are given to me in an intuition, because I call them one and all *my* representations, as constituting *one* intuition. This means that I am conscious *a priori* of a necessary synthesis of them, which is called the original synthetic unity of apperception, and under which all representations given to me must stand, but under which they must also be brought by means of a synthesis.”—from_Critique of Pure Reason_. Translated, edited, and with an Introduction by Marcus Weigelt, based on the translation by Max Müller, pp. 128-129
— Immanuel Kant
Philosophy in its old form could exist only in the absence of engineering, but with engineering in existence and daily more active and far reaching, the old verbalistic philosophy and metaphysics have lost their reason to exist. They were no more able to understand the "production" of the universe and life than they are now able to understand or grapple with "production" as a means to provide a happier existence for humanity. They failed because their venerated method of "speculation" can not produce, and its place must be taken by mathematical thinking. Mathematical reasoning is displacing metaphysical reasoning. Engineering is driving verbalistic philosophy out of existence and humanity gains decidedly thereby. Only a few parasites and "speculators" will mourn the disappearance of their old companion "speculation." The world of producers -the predominating majority of human beings- will welcome a philosophy of ordered thought and production.
— Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity
Ontically, of course, Dasein is not only close to us―even that which is closest: we *are* it, each of us, we ourselves. In spite of this, or rather for just this reason, it is ontologically that which is farthest. To be sure, its ownmost Being is such that it has an understanding of that Being, and already maintains itself in each case as if its Being has been interpreted in some manner. But we are certainly not saying that when Dasein's own Being is thus interpreted pre-ontologically in the way which lies closest, this interpretation can be taken over as an appropriate clue, as if this way of understanding Being is what must emerge when one's ownmost state of Being is considered as an ontological theme. The kind of Being which belongs to Dasein is rather such that, in understanding its own Being, it has a tendency to do so in terms of that entity towards which it comports itself proximally and in a way which is essentially constant―in terms of the 'world'. In Dasein itself, and therefore in its own understanding of Being, the way the world is understood is, as we shall show, reflected back ontologically upon the way in which Dasein itself gets interpreted.Thus because Dasein is ontico-ontologically prior, its own specific state of Being (if we understand this in the sense of Dasein's 'categorial structure') remains concealed from it. Dasein is ontically 'closest' to itself and ontologically farthest; but pre-ontologically it is surely not a stranger."―from_Being and Time_. Translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, pp. 36-37
— Martin Heidegger
He is romantic—romantic,” he repeated. “And that is very bad—very bad. . . . Very good, too,” he added. “But is he?” I queried.‘“Gewiss,” he said, and stood still holding up the candelabrum, but without looking at me. “Evident! What is it that by inward pain makes him know himself? What is it that for you and me makes him—exist?”‘At that moment it was difficult to believe in Jim’s existence—starting from a country parsonage, blurred by crowds of men as by clouds of dust, silenced by the clashing claims of life and death in a material world—but his imperishable reality came to me with a convincing, with an irresistible force! I saw it vividly, as though in our progress through the lofty silent rooms amongst fleeting gleams of light and the sudden revelations of human figures stealing with flickering flames within unfathomable and pellucid depths, we had approached nearer to absolute Truth, which, like Beauty itself, floats elusive, obscure, half submerged, in the silent still waters of mystery. “Perhaps he is,” I admitted with a slight laugh, whose unexpectedly loud reverberation made me lower my voice directly; “but I am sure you are.” With his head dropping on his breast and the light held high he began to walk again. “Well—I exist, too,” he said.
— Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
Oh Time, you arise with parting! [О, Время, ты от разлуки!]
— Vladislav Khalyavkin, The Operator
The Clochemerle 1929 was a magnificent wine. Drinking it in small sips, his grace the Archbishop felt himself well disposed towards the Clochemerlins. It takes all sorts to make a world and a Church, to people Heaven and Hell. But there was no denying that it took capable vignerons to make a wine like this, men whose minds must on no account be distracted by excessive metaphysical cares.
— Gabriel Chevallier, Clochemerle Babylon
Philosophy is about everything when I say everything I mean both something and nothing. Something is what we can perceive and nothing is beyond our senses.
— Mark D. Ekperi
And just as the same town, when looked at from different sides, appears quite different and is, as it were, multiplied in perspective, so also it happens that because of the infinite number of simple substances, it is as if there were as many different universes, which are however but different perspective representations of a single universe form the different point of view of each monad.
— Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Monadology
I have been considering the possibility that the facts that can be ascertained about this cheese fail to satisfy because the facts themselves mask a metaphysical truth that can be known only through the transcendent, poetic expression of the cheddar. That is, though the world itself can never truly be known, one might begin to know some truth about the world through a metaphysical cheese
— Mark Beauregard, The Whale: A Love Story
Philosophically literate anthropomorphism is exactly what one would expect of any worldview which affirms that human beings are made in the image o
— Eleanore Stump
Can you really believe that a drop of urine is an infinity of monads, and that each of these has ideas, however obscure, of the universe as a whole?
— Voltaire, Œuvres complètes - 109 titres et annexes
Wisdom plus knowledge equals understanding.
— Reid A. Ashbaucher, Made in the Image of God:  Understanding the Nature of God and mankind in a Changing World
Once I knew, then I forgot. It was as if I had fallen asleep in a field only to discover at waking that a grove of trees had grown up around me. “Doubt nothing, believe everything,” was my friend’s idea of metaphysics, although his brother ran away with his wife. He still bought her a rose every day, sat in the empty house for the next twenty years talking to her about the weather. I was already dozing off in the shade, dreaming that the rustling trees were my many selves explaining themselves all at the same time so that I could not make out a single word. My life was a beautiful mystery on the verge of understanding, always on the verge! Think of it! My friend’s empty house with every one of its windows lit. The dark trees multiplying all around it.
— Charles Simic, The World Doesn't End
Being is always becoming
—  people change and stay the same.
Scientifically, just because the spiritual person can manifest a drink of coffee, does not mean that he or she knows how it happens!
— Richard Gentle, Quantum Mass Superstructures
Heidegger is the philosopher to whom especially postmodernists chiefly appeal in their radical rejections of metaphysics and of any and every conception of the entirety of actuality, of Being as such and as a whole. To be sure, their appeals to Heidegger are as a rule extraordinarily superficial ones. These authors come nowhere near to providing adequate interpretations of or appropriations from Heid
— Lorenz B. Puntel
It is true, there could be a metaphysical world; the absolute possibility of it is hardly to be disputed. We behold all things through the human head and cannot cut off this head; while the question nonetheless remains what of the world would still be there if one had cut it off.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
If an evil spirit had to hide from God, it would hide in a diamond. If an angel had to hide from the Devil, it would hide in rose quartz.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
For seven centuries the existence of Grand Unification Theories and hyperstring post-quantum physics and Core-given understanding of the universe as self-contained and boundless, without Big Bang singularities or corresponding endpoints, had pretty much eliminated any role of God—primitively anthropomorphic or sophisticatedly post-Einsteinian—even as a caretaker or pre-Creation former of rules. The modern universe, as machine and man had come to understand it, needed no Creator; in fact, allowed no Creator. Its rules allowed very little tinkering and no major revisions. It had not begun and would not end, beyond cycles of expansion and contraction as regular and self-regulated as the seasons on Old Earth
— Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion
A witch is a woman who emerges from deep within herself. She is a woman who has honestly explored her light and learned to celebrate her darkness. She is a woman who is able to fall in love with the magnificent possibilities of her power. She is a woman who radiates mystery. She is magnetic. She is a witch.
— Dacha Avelin
The term 'Being' does not define that realm of entities which is uppermost when these are articulated conceptually according to genus and species: the 'universality' of Being 'transcends' any universality of genus.
— Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
Notice that your judgments of what exists are the same kind of judgments you make about how to live your life. There aren't two kinds of things we do: judge what exists and decide what we want to do about it. Fundamentally, there is one kind of thing we do: live our lives. And we can reflect on this activity more or less abstractly.
— Eric Kaplan, Does Santa Exist?: A Philosophical Investigation
When you decide to appreciate something, no matter how subtle, you absolutely do pivot and shift your vibration significantly.
— Debbianne DeRose, How I Met the Man of My Dreams: a guide to MANifesting yours
Your manifesting results comprise a chain with a zillion tiny links—moments, experiences, conversations, physical objects, and coinciding events—all leading up to what you'd consider "the finished product" or the goal achieved. Be open to recognizing and appreciating every link. Normally the mind glosses, or even steamrollers, over them, discounting them as stupid, unimportant, too-little-too-late, irrelevant or uninteresting.
— Debbianne DeRose, Manifesting for Simpletons: a 30-Day Outrageously Simple Guide to Gettin' the Goods
But had Minkowski and Einstein not recognized it long before us, our schizophrenic children would have taught us that space-time is a unity that precedes any separate understanding of either category; just as grasping this unity is a precondition for understanding causality.
— Bruno Bettelheim, Empty Fortress
Jo knew nothing about philosophy or metaphysics of any sort, but a curious excitement, half pleasurable, half painful, came over her, as she listened with a sense of being turned adrift into time and space, like a young balloon out on a holiday.
— Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
In periods when shallow speculation is rife, one might think that metaphysics would shine forth, at least, by the brilliance of its modest reserve. But the very age that is unaware of the majesty of metaphysics, likewise overlooks its poverty. Its majesty? It is wisdom. Its poverty? It is human science.
— Jacques Maritain
Everything in the seen world is a dim reflection or representation of the unseen world.
— Dan   Pedersen, The Higher Life: An Inner Presence
We may hop when the gods say 'frog,' but we still get to choose how fast and how high.
— Katherine Lampe, The Unquiet Grave
No matter how you arrive at the awareness and belief that you've lived before and will live again, the most lasting healing benefit will be the change in your attitude. You are creating your future lives right at this moment, and every moment of decision-making.
— Lianne Downey, Speed Your Evolution: Become the Star Being You Are Meant to Be
In reality, mankind is still metaphysically in God’s likeness, butGod’s image in mankind has been altered by sin. We can no longerduplicate or reflect God’s attitudes as we once could do. That is, we canno longer be holy as God is holy. Our morality has been altered and nolonger has the capability to duplicate or reflect God’s image. So what isthe answer? Can this image be repaired or made whole again? The answeris, YES!
— Reid A. Ashbaucher, Made in the Image of God: Understanding the Nature of God and Mankind in a Changing World
The type of nothing from which something can arise is truly something.
— John K.  Brown
Comrades in the struggle! The position of modern man is not merely lamentable; one might even say that there is no condition, because man hardly exists. Nothing exists to which one could point and say: 'There, that is Homo Zapiens.' HZ is simply the residual luminescence of a soul fallen asleep; it is a film about the shooting of another film, shown on a television in an empty house.
— Victor Pelevin, Homo Zapiens
The accusation of metaphysics has become in philosophy something like the accusation of being a security risk in the public service. I do not for my part know what is meant by the word 'metaphysics'. The only definition I have found that fits all cases is: 'a philosophical opinion not held by the present author'.
— Bertrand Russell, My Philosophical Development
To bracket form and finality out of one's investigations as far as reason allows is a matter of method, but to deny their reality altogether is a matter of metaphysics.
— David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss
...being aware that the sacred quality hidden in the experience of eroticism is something impossible for language to reach (this is also due to the impossibility of experiencing of re-experiencing anything through language), Bataille still expresses it in words. (Mishima on Bataille)
— Georges Bataille, My Mother/Madame Edwarda/The Dead Man
Attaining consciousness is connected with the gradual liberation from mechanicalness, for man is fully and completely under mechanical laws.
— P.D. Ouspensky, The Fourth Way
But you don’t really mean to say that you couldn’t love me if my name wasn’t Ernest?GWENDOLEN: But your name is Ernest.JACK: Yes, I know it is. But supposing it was something else? Do you mean to say you couldn’t love me
— Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
Man lives on earth not once, but three times: the first stage of his life is his continual sleep; the second, sleeping and waking by turns; the third, waking forever.
— Gustav Fechner
Perception is the illusion that gives all matter mass," The Flight of the Eagle A.K. Luthienne
— A.K. Luthienne, Flight of the Eagle
To deny the necessity or value of metaphysics is to assert a metaphysical principle, just as to say a religion must be without dogmas is to assert a dogma.
— Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophy of Science
God is triune, and all reality is structured in terms of Him. A brief definition of the Trinity might be this: One God without division in a plurality of Persons, and three Persons without confusion in a unity of essence. God is not 'basically' One, with the individual Persons being derived from the oneness; nor is God 'basically' Three, with the unity of the Persons being secondary. God is One, and God is Three. There are not three Gods; there is only one God. Yet each of the Persons is Himself God — and They are distinct, individual Persons. But there is only one God. "To put it in more philosophical language, God’s unity (oneness) and diversity (threeness, individuality) are equally ultimate. God is 'basically' One and 'basically' Three at the same time. And the same goes for all of creation. Both unity and diversity are important – equally important. Neither aspect of reality has priority over the other.
— David H. Chilton
...knowing about your past lives is worse than useless if that knowledge doesn't bring you some kind of positive change or healing.
— Lianne Downey, Speed Your Evolution: Become the Star Being You Are Meant to Be
Derrida… labels as ‘metaphysical’ any such thought system which depends on an unassailable foundation, a first principle or unimpeachable ground upon which a whole hierarchy of meanings may be constructed. It is not that he believes that we can merely rid ourselves of the urge to forge such first principles, for such an impulse is deeply embedded in our history, and cannot — at least as yet — be eradicated or ignored. Derrida would see his own work as inescapably ‘contaminated’ by such metaphysical thought, much as he strives to give it the slip. But if you examine such first principles closely, you can see that they may always be ‘deconstructed’: they can be shown to be products of a particular system of meaning, rather than what props it up from the outside.
— Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction
My metaphysical thinking is more in alignment with Plato rather than Aristotle's." ~R. Alan Woods [2013]
— R. Alan Woods, The Journey Is the Destination: A Book of Quotes With Commentaries
Historically mystics have claimed that for a true understanding of reality metaphysics is too “scientific”. Metaphysics is not reality. Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand-page menu and no food.
— Robert M. Pirsig
Knowlede is power and Absolute Knowledge is Absolute Power or the Power of Truth, which is constantly shaping events and circumstances to reveal the errors in our beliefs.
— Matthew A. Petti, The Metaphysics of Truth -Unobserved Realities and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
The Truth is always trying to reveal itslef to us in our physical world.
— Matthew A. Petti, The Metaphysics of Truth -Unobserved Realities and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
There is so much more than we can see, there is so much more that we can be.
— Tom Kenyon M.A.
If you don't break your ropes while you're alive, do you think ghosts will do it after?
— Kabir
Serenity comes from the ability to say “Yes” to existence. Courage comes from the ability to say “No” to the wrong choices made by others.
— Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It
God who gave Animals self motion beyond our understanding is without doubt able to implant other principles of motion in bodies [which] we may understand as little. Some would readily grant this may be a Spiritual one; yet a mechanical one might be showne, did not I think it better to pass it by.
— Isaac Newton, The Correspondence of Isaac Newton: Published for the Royal Society. VOLUMES 1 through 7
Do not commit spiritual suicide through a passion for discussing metaphysical subtleties.
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon, All of Grace
For one to define and understand the nature of the universe, one must firstunderstand the nature of the force behind its existence.
— Reid A. Ashbaucher, Made in the Image of God: Understanding the Nature of God and Mankind in a Changing World
Attitude is a state of mind that results in an action taken or anemotion displayed. Attitude, in the end, is a motivator or that whichgenerates or reflects motives.
— Reid A. Ashbaucher, Made in the Image of God: Understanding the Nature of God and Mankind in a Changing World
I knew in that moment, we were never meant to surrender our childlike innocence, to trade a world in which we fit like a glove for one that hung on us like ill-fitting hand-me-downs. However, all about us insisted on our membership. And instead of a handshake or a mystical password as entrance into this spurious society, we agreed instead to share a lie, the one that says we’re safe, secure, and fulfilled living this way.
— Christina Carson, Dying to Know
That afternoon She listened to the grievances of the dead from two warring nations. Both sides had suffered, both sides had legitimate grievances, both pled their cases earnestly. She covered Her ears and moaned in misery. She knew Her humans were multidimensional and She could no longer live under the rigid architecture of Her youthful choices.
— David Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
It was a wonderful experience. She mistrusted his very slumbers--and she seemed to think I could tell her why! Thus a poor mortal seduced by the charm of an apparition might have tried to wring from another ghost the tremendous secret of the claim the other world holds over a disembodied soul astray amongst the passions of this earth. The very ground on which I stood seemed to melt under my feet. And it was so simple too; but if the spirits evoked by our fears and our unrest have ever to vouch for each other's constancy before the forlorn magicians that we are, then I--I alone of us dwellers in the flesh--have shuddered in the hopeless chill of such a task.
— Joseph Conrad
So live. I'll be the nun for you. I am now.
— Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
To understand an issue or someone’s argument about anything,one needs to understand the very nature of the issue, which is thefoundational question concerning anything.
— Reid A. Ashbaucher, Made in the Image of God: Understanding the Nature of God and Mankind in a Changing World
Walk tall, or baby don't walk at all.
— Bruce Springsteen
There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one's own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.
— Thomas Mann
Respect yourself enough to walk away from anything that no longer serves you, grows you, or makes you happy.
— Robert Tew
A quest for self-respect is proof of its lack
— Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
You got nothin' to lose but your self-respect.
— Wendelin Van Draanen, Flipped
But I think that because they trusted themselves and respected themselves as individuals, because they knew beyond doubt that they were valuable and potentially moral units -- because of this they could give God their own courage and dignity and then receive it back. Such things have disappeared perhaps because men do not trust themselves anymore, and when that happens there is nothing left except perhaps to find some strong sure man, even though he may be wrong, and to dangle from his coattails.
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignation with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. One shuffles flashily but in vain through one's marked cards- the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed.
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Stuck in my own trap of writing about a nonsubject, I think I can defend my own self-respect, and also the integrity of a lost girl, by saying two things. First, the trivial doings of Paris Hilton are of no importance to me, or anyone else, and I should not be forced to contemplate them. Second, she should be left alone to lead such a life as has been left to her. If this seems paradoxical, then very well.
— Christopher Hitchens
being well and well being is my way of life
— Akosua Dardaine Edwards, What Did I Learn Today? Lessons on The Journey to Unconditional Self-Love
These characters depend to such a high degree on their own sense of integrity that for them, victory has nothing to do with happiness. It has more to do with a settling within oneself, a movement inward that makes them whole. Their reward is not happiness...what James's characters gain is self-respect.
— Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran
The fact is no one has understood me in entirety till now!
— Ramana Pemmaraju
From beggar to thief is one step, but a step in two directions at the same time, for what a beggar loses in morality when he becomes a thief he regains in self-respect.
— Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
I have never consciously boasted myself but from hereon I make a point not to even unconsciously undermine or degrade myself!
— Ramana Pemmaraju
What ultimately got me through was my single-minded determination, voiced aloud to myself and recorded in my diary, to discover the causes of my blindness and never to repeat them. Fearlessly pursuing insight was my badge of honor, my route back to self-respect.
— Jeanne Safer, The Golden Condom: And Other Essays on Love Lost and Found
Teach people how to treat you
— DivineConspiracy
The existence of homosexuality, not as a circumstantial matter of passing sexual whim, but as a shared condition and identity, raises the intriguing possibility of homosexual culture, or at least of a minority subculture with sexual identity as its base. At the very least, by sympathetic identification with cultural texts which appeared to be affirmative, homosexual people saw a way to shore up their self-respect in the face of constant moral attack, and they found materials with which to justify themselves not only to each other but also to those who found their very existence, let alone their behaviour, unjustifiable.
— Gregory Woods, A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition
Empowered Women 101: A confident woman doesn't have to talk a man into loving her. He either loves her completely, not enough or not at all. Regardless, she doesn't settle for less than she deserves.
— Shannon L. Alder
Self-respect cannot be hunted. It cannot be purchased. It is never for sale. It cannot be fabricated out of public relations. It comes to us when we are alone, in quiet moments, in quiet places, when we suddenly realize that, knowing the good, we have done it; knowing the beautiful, we have served it; knowing the truth we have spoken it
— Alfred Whitney Griswold
I may not be a king or a queen, but I'll be damned if I'm not treated like royalty.
— Samuel Crone
To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out – since our self-image is untenable – their false notion of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course I will play Francesca to your Paolo, Helen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan; no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we cannot but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.
— Joan Didion
There is a common superstition that “self-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Humility is one of the best expressions of self respect.
— Debasish Mridha
Look deep into my soul than what stretches the fabric of my clothes
— Morgan Chabane
I'll never know why it was important to him that the couple (he said it later that he'd never seen them before) would take a picture of the whole Mr. Johnson back to Little Rock.He must have been tired of being crippled, as prisoners tire of penitentiary bars and the guilty tire of blame. The high topped shoes and the cane, his uncontrollable muscles and thick tongue, and the looks he suffered of either contempt or pity had simply worn him out, and for one afternoon, one part of an afternoon, he wanted no part of them.I understood and felt closer to him at that moment than ever before or since.
— Maya Angelou
The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others — who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something people with courage can do without.To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that deals with one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there’s the hurt on X’s face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, the Phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commissions and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice, or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.
— Joan Didion
There are worse things than suffering and death... it is worse to lose one's self-respect.
— Sándor Márai, Embers
If you’re so far down the totem pole that someone considers it a favor to you just to have you in their circle (no matter how far outside the ring you are), you should probably cut them out of yours.
— Michelle N. Onuorah
Even if the world was falling apart, that was no reason to let his appearance and good habits fall apart with it.
— S.R. Ford, Mimgardr