c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Few among men are they who cross to the further shore. The others merely run up and down the bank on this side.
— Gautama Buddha
If tomorrow were never to come, it would not be worth living today.
— Albert Einstein, On Humanism
Normal is over rated, and so is spelling.You want perfection? Go out and buy a spell check, but know this: Spellcheck won't keep you warm at night or love you unconditionaly. I will stick to being abnormal and a bad speller. Makes life more interesting. After all, what fun is there in being normal or perfect?
— Cristina Marrero
Love isn't always a physical emotion. Sometimes it's the ones who never got to actually hold you in their arms that appreciate you for who you are
— Sarah Sprague
In the battle that is philosophy all the techniques of war, including looting and camouflage, are permissible.
— Louis Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists: And Other Essays
the body is wiser than its inhabitants. the body is the soul. the body is god’s messenger.
— Erica Jong
He recognized with absolute certainty the empty fragility of even the noblest theorizings as compared with the definitive plenitude of the smallest fact grasped in its total, concrete reality.
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn of the Universe
Imagination is not, as some poets have thought, simply synonymous with good. It may be either good or evil. As long as art remained primarily mimetic, the evil which imagination could do was limited by nature. Again, as long as it was treated as an amusement, the evil which it could do was limited in scope. But in an age when the connection between imagination and figuration is beginning to be dimly realized, when the fact of the directionally creator relation is beginning to break through into consciousness, both the good and the evil latent in the working of imagination begin to appear unlimited. We have seen in the Romantic movement an instance of the way in which the making of images may react upon the collective representations. It is a fairly rudimentary instance, but even so it has already gone beyond the dreams and responses of a leisured few. The economic and social structure of Switzerland is noticeably affected by its tourist industry, and that is due only in part to increased facilities of travel. It is due not less to the condition that (whatever may be said about their ‘particles’) the mountains which twentieth-century man sees are not the mountains which eighteenth-century man saw.It may be objected that this is a very small matter, and that it will be a long time before the imagination of man substantially alters those appearances of nature with which his figuration supplies him. But then I am taking the long view. Even so, we need not be too confident. Even if the pace of change remained the same, one who is really sensitive to (for example) the difference between the medieval collective representations and our own will be aware that, without traveling any greater distance than we have come since the fourteenth century, we could very well move forward into a chaotically empty or fantastically hideous world. But the pace of change has not remained the same. It has accelerated and is accelerating. We should remember this, when appraising the aberrations of the formally representational arts. Of course, in so far as these are due to affectation, they are of no importance. But in so far as they are genuine, they are genuine because the artist has in some way or other experienced the world he represents. And in so far as they are appreciated, they are appreciated by those who are themselves willing to make a move towards seeing the world in that way, and, ultimately therefore, seeing that kind of world. We should remember this, when we see pictures of a dog with six legs emerging from a vegetable marrow or a woman with a motorbicycle substituted for her left breast.
— Owen Barfield
If the meaning of life has become doubtful, if one's relations to others and to oneself do not offer security, then fame is one means to silence one's doubts. It has a function to be compared with that of the Egyptian pyramids or the Christian faith in immortality: it elevates one's individual life from its limitations and instability to the plane of indestructability; if one's name is known to one's contemporaries and if one can hope that it will last for centuries, then one's life has meaning and significance by this very reflection of it in the judgments of others.
— Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
Philosophy is the toil which can never tire persons engaged in it. All ways are strewn with roses, and the farther you go, the more enchanting objects appear before you and invite you on.
— Mary Wortley Montagu
i don't regret the difficulties I experienced; I think they help helped me to become the person I am today. i feel the way a warrior must feel after years of traning; he doesn't remember the details of everything he learned, but he knows how to strike when the time is right
— Paulo Coelho, The Zahir
We are creators, and yet we naively play the role of "the created." We see ourselves as helpless sheep buffeted around by the God who made us. We kneel like frightened children, begging for help, for forgiveness, for good luck. But once we realize that we are truly created in the Creator's image, we will start to understand that we, too, must be Creators. When we understand this fact, the doors will burst wide open for human potential.
— Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol
Believe in the wonderment of life, the magic of love, and the reality of death.
— Carroll Bryant
You cannot connect with anyone except through reality.
— Stefan Molyneux
If your desire is for good, the people will be good.
— Confucius
Veel van wat aanvankelijk alleen in de verbeelding bestaat, wordt werkelijkheid.
— Arthur Japin, Een schitterend gebrek
When a youth was giving himself airs in the Theatre and saying, 'I am wise, for I have conversed with many wise men,' Epictetus replied, 'I too have conversed with many rich men, yet I am not rich!’.
— Epictetus
In an earlier stage of our development most human groups held to a tribal ethic. Members of the tribe were protected, but people of other tribes could be robbed or killed as one pleased. Gradually the circle of protection expanded, but as recently as 150 years ago we did not include blacks. So African human beings could be captured, shipped to America, and sold. In Australia white settlers regarded Aborigines as a pest and hunted them down, much as kangaroos are hunted down today. Just as we have progressed beyond the blatantly racist ethic of the era of slavery and colonialism, so we must now progress beyond the speciesist ethic of the era of factory farming, of the use of animals as mere research tools, of whaling, seal hunting, kangaroo slaughter, and the destruction of wilderness. We must take the final step in expanding the circle of ethics. -
— Peter Singer
Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?
— Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
When any person harms you, or speaks badly of you, remember that he acts or speaks from a supposition of its being his duty. Now, it is not possible that he should follow what appears right to you, but what appears so to himself. Therefore, if he judges from a wrong appearance, he is the person hurt, since he too is the person deceived. For if anyone should suppose a true proposition to be false, the proposition is not hurt, but he who is deceived about it. Setting out, then, from these principles, you will meekly bear a person who reviles you, for you will say upon every occasion, "It seemed so to him."....
— Epictetus
Distraction serves evil more than any other mental state.
— Stefan Molyneux
A philosopher named Aristippus, who had quite willingly sucked up to Dionysus and won himself a spot at his court, saw Diogenes cooking lentils for a meal. "If you would only learn to compliment Dionysus, you wouldn't have to live on lentils."Diogenes replied, "But if you would only learn to live on lentils, you wouldn't have to flatter Dionysus.
— Diogenes of Sinope
God is an ever-receding pocket of﻿ scientific ignorance.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson
What we cannot bear removes us from life
—  what remains can be borne.
Kendati batas antara kebebasan dan ketidakpedulian terkadang saru
— Dee Lestari, Madre: Kumpulan Cerita
An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists? Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending -- something dead, cold, and lifeless.
— Bertrand Russell
He who conquers himself is the mightiest warrior.
— Confucius
Pursue not the outer entanglements
—  Dwell not in the inner void
Then we’re just sitting there, staring at each other. Which has been happening a lot lately. It’s likewhatever wall there was between us, however she was holding herself back from me . . . all of thatpretense is gone.“And when you find a soul mate,” Sara says, “it’s undeniable. You have to be together.”“That’s my philosophy.” I look back at her. “You have to go with the flow.”“Exactly. I think the universe guides you to make the right choices.”“Do you believe in fate?”“I guess, but . . . it’s more about creating the life you want so you can make that fate a reality. Youknow?
— Susane Colasanti
Only philosophers embark on this perilous expedition to the outermost reaches of language and existence. Some of them fall off, but others cling on desperately and yell at the people nestling deep in the snug softness, stuffing themselves with delicious food and drink. 'Ladies and Gentlemen,' they yell, 'we are floating in space!' But none of the people down there care
— Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World
Look. If I touch you with this hand, I can remember touching you, but I can't prove I ever did. If reality is nothing more than what is in our mind...then what is the difference between this world and a dream?
— Kaori Ozaki, Immortal Rain, Vol. 1
A miracle is often the willingness to see the common in an uncommon way.
— Noah Benshea, Jacob the Baker: Gentle Wisdom For a Complicated World
সহজ হওয়ার মধ্যেই আছে কালচারের পরিচয়, আড়ম্বরের মধ্যে আছে দম্ভের। সে-দম্ভ কখনও অর্থের, কখনো বিদ্যার, কখনও-বা প্রতিপত্তির।
— Jajabor, দৃষ্টিপাত
It was a dance of masks and every mask was perfect because every mask was a real face and every face was areal mask so there was no mask and there was no face for there was but one dance in which there was butone mask but one true face which was the same and which was a thing without a name which changed andchanged into itself over and over.
— Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers
Because it's much more pleasant to be obsessed over how the hero gets out of his predicament than it is over how I get out of mine.
— Woody Allen
Impossible things are really rough to do, you know.
— Brandon Sanderson, Alcatraz Versus the Shattered Lens
Body is a home, a prison and a grave.
— James Runcie, The Colour Of Heaven
when somebody plays music, you listen. you just follow those sounds, and eventually you understand the music. the point can't be explained in words because music is not words, but after listening for a while, you understand the point of it, and that point is the music itself. in exactly the same way, you can listen to all experiences.
— Alan W. Watts, Still the Mind: An Introduction to Meditation
Each voice carries a portion of value, no matter how unpalatable or distasteful that voice may be: no one person, government, ideology, transnational, or religious institution can own and dominate the whole.
— B.W. Powe, Towards a Canada of Light
The danger today is in believing there are no sick people, there is only a sick society.
— Fulton J. Sheen
If your life is Christ, then your death will be only more of Christ, forever. If your life is only Christlessness, then your death will be only more Christlessness, forever. That's not fundamentalism, that's the law of non-contradiction.
— Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock
Awkward silences rule the world. People are so terrified of awkward silences that they will literally go to war rather than face an awkward silence.
— Stefan Molyneux
Writing blooms flowers for mind, which last forever.
— Debasish Mridha
Having just enough life to enjoy being dead.
— Jim Holt, Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story
A person whose desires and impulses are his own—are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture—is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam-engine has character…
— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
A thing is only as great as the amount a person is willing to risk for it. If you are not willing to risk anything, then the thing mustn't be so great at all.
— Madeline Claire Franklin, The Poppet and the Lune
Philosophers have often held disputeAs to the seat of thought in man and bruteFor that the power of thought attends the latterMy friend, thy beau, hath made a settled matter,And spite of dogmas current in all ages,One settled fact is better than ten sages. (O,Tempora! O,Mores!)
— Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Stories and Poems
No dirt can touch me, like an ocean, everything that comes to me becomes clean.
— Debasish Mridha
No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition.
— Albert Camus
From the scientific view, the theory of karma may be a metaphysical assumption -- but it is no more so than the assumption that all of life is material and originated out of pure chance
— Dalai Lama XIV
No living creature is naturally greedy, except from fear of want - or in the case of human beings, from vanity, the notion that you're better than people if you can display more superfluous property than they can.
— Thomas More, Utopia
Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist... And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something... What chaos! What a farce!
— Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.
— Karl Marx, The German Ideology
The heart is like a woman, and the head is like a man, and although man is the head of woman, woman is the heart of man, and she turns man's head because she turns his heart.
— Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock
If you were born with the ability to change someone’s perspective or emotions, never waste that gift. It is one of the most powerful gifts God can give—the ability to influence.
— Shannon L. Alder
Who is to decide which is the grimmer sight: withered hearts, or empty skulls?
— Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot
Existence is beyond the power of wordsTo define:Terms may be usedBut are none of them absolute.In the beginning of heaven and earth there were no words,Words came out of the womb of matter;And whether a man dispassionatelySees to the core of lifeOr passionatelySees the surface,The core and the surfaceAre essentially the same,Words making them seem differentOnly to express appearance.If name be needed, wonder names them both:From wonder into wonderExistence opens.
— Lao Tzu
Only a philosopher's mind grows wings, since its memory always keeps it as close as possible to those realities by being close to which the gods are divine.
— Plato, Phaedrus
NIHILIST, n. A Russian who denies the existence of anything but Tolstoi. The leader of the school is Tolstoi.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary
You not only are hunted by others, you unknowingly hunt yourself.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Calling sex by its name thereafter [the 17th c.] became more difficult and more costly. As if in order to gain mastery of it in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of language, control its free circulation in speech, expunge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present. 
— Michel Foucault
If I had to live my life over, I'd live over a saloon.
— W.C. Fields
We can speak and think only of what exists. And what exists is uncreated and imperishable for it is whole and unchanging and complete. It was not or nor shall be different since it is now, all at once, one and continuous.
— Parmenides
This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?
— Marguerite Yourcenar
And don't tell me the end justifies the means because it doesn't. We never reach the end. All we ever get is means. That's what we live with.
— Nick Harkaway, Angelmaker
In one way, I suppose, I have been "in denial" for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can't see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it's all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.
— Christopher Hitchens, Mortality
Beyond all sciences, philosophies, theologies, and histories, a child's relentless inquiry is truly all it takes to remind us that we don't know as much as we think we know.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
In truth, Freud sees nothing and understands nothing.
— Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought.
— Don DeLillo
God has abandoned you. Fear does not serve you. Your heart has betrayed you. Only the music can guide you.
— Noah Levine
Dogs and philosophers do the greatest good and get the fewest rewards.
— Diogenes of Sinope
If you wish to make Pythocles rich, do not add to his store of money, but subtract from his desires.
— Epicurus
I drink cup of sunlight every morning to brighten myself.
— Debasish Mridha
Minds, however, are conquered not by arms, but by love and nobility.
— Baruch Spinoza, Ethics
If you can convince people that freedom is injustice, they will then believe that slavery is freedom.
— Stefan Molyneux
There is no key to open the heart of another - except curiosity.
— Stefan Molyneux
It is the man of science, eager to have his every opinion regenerated, his every idea rationalized, by drinking at the fountain of fact, and devoting all the energies of his life to the cult of truth, not as he understands it, but as he does not yet understand it, that ought properly to be called a philosopher.
— Charles Sanders Peirce
When people have invested their identities into clichés, the only counter argument they have is 'being offended'.
— Stefan Molyneux
We are supposed to call poison medicine and we wonder why we're always sick.
— Stefan Molyneux
The better organized the state, the duller its humanity.
— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
This place has only three exits, sir: Madness, and Death.
— René Daumal, A Night of Serious Drinking
There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order. It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life.
— Kakuzō Okakura, The Book of Tea
Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.
— Thomas Aquinas
A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it.
— H.L. Mencken
Words are the clothes thoughts wear.
— Samuel Beckett
Call no man happy until he is dead.
— Solon
Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
— Walter Benjamin
Philosophers can debate the meaning of life, but you need a Lord who can declare the meaning of life.
— Max Lucado, Traveling Light: Releasing the Burdens You Were Never Intended to Bear
He who says either that the time for philosophy has not yet come or that it has passed is like someone who says that the time for happiness has not yet come or that it has passed.
— Epicurus
Bring the mind into sharp focus and make it alert so that it can immediately intuit truth, which is everywhere. The mind must be emancipated from old habits, prejudices, restrictive thought processes and even ordinary thought itself.
— Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do
One picture puzzle pieceLyin' on the sidewalk,One picture puzzle pieceSoakin' in the rain.It might be a button of blueOn the coat of the womanWho lived in a shoe.It might be a magical bean,Or a fold in the redVelvet robe of a queen.It might be the one little biteOf the apple her stepmotherGave to Snow White.It might be the veil of a brideOr a bottle with some evil genie inside.It might be a small tuft of hairOn the big bouncy bellyOf Bobo the Bear.It might be a bit of the cloakOf the Witch of the WestAs she melted to smoke.It might be a shadowy traceOf a tear that runs down an angel's face.Nothing has more possibilitiesThan one old wet picture puzzle piece.
— Shel Silverstein
But is all this true?" said Brutha.Didactylos shrugged. "Could be. Could be. We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork.""You mean you don't KNOW it's true?" said Brutha."I THINK it might be," said Didactylos. "I could be wrong. Not being certain is what being a philosopher is all about.
— Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
Is it better to go with the flow or let the flow go?
— Aidan Chambers, Postcards from No Man's Land
let the speaker speak truly and the judge decide justly.
— Plato, Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. Phaedrus.
To be a god can ultimately become boring and degrading. There'd be reason enough for the invention of free will! A god might wish to escape into sleep and be alive only in the unconscious projections of his dream-creatures.
— Frank Herbert
Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Oh, why does compassion weaken us?'It doesn't, really ... Somewhere where it all balances out - don't the philosophers have a name for it, the perfect place, the place where the answers live? - if we could go there, you could see it doesn't. It only looks, a little bit, like it does, from here, like an ant at the foot of an oak tree. He doesn't have a clue that it's a tree; it's the beginning of the wall round the world, to him.
— Robin McKinley, Spindle's End
I didn't want to do it,' Kiala said. 'The universe just kind of conspired to force me to make a fool of myself. It does that quite a lot, actually.
— Graham Parke, Unspent Time
The ethos of redemption is realied in self-mastery, by means of temperance, that is, continence of desires.
— John Paul II, Blessed Are the Pure of Heart: Catechesis on the Sermon on the Mount and Writings of St. Paul
Hope burns eternal in the human heart.
— O.R. Melling
Further, an excess of legislation defeats its own ends. It makes the whole population criminals, and turns them all into police and police spies. The moral health of such a people is ruined for ever; only revolution can save it.
— Aleister Crowley, Cocaine: Impressions & Opinions
A moment or an eternity—did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist.
— Ayn Rand
Whether we like it or not, modern ways are going to alter and in part destroy traditional customs and values.
— Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science
If you ask me to tell you anything about the nature of what lies beyond the phaneron… my answer is “How should I know?”… I am not dismayed by ultimate mysteries… I can no more grasp what is behind such questions as my cat can understand what is behind the clatter I make while I type this paragraph.
— Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener
Conformity to the present is invisibility to the future.
— Stefan Molyneux
Where do one's fears come from? Where do they shape themselves? Where do they hide before coming out into the open?
— Agatha Christie, The Moving Finger
Oh, if only it were possible to find understanding,” Joseph exclaimed. “If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn’t there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?”The master had never heard him speak so fervently. He walked on in silence for a little, then said: “There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught. Be prepared for conflicts, Joseph Knecht - I can see that they already have begun.
— Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.
— Pier Paolo Pasolini
Violence begins with the fork.
— Mahatma Gandhi
We...sin not because we want what is evil, but because we want what isn't good enough.
— Scott Hahn, Lord, Have Mercy: The Healing Power of Confession
We follow the ways of wolves, the habits of tigers: or, rather we are worse than they. To them nature has assigned that they should be thus fed, while God has honoured us with rational speech and a sense of equity. And yet we are become worse than the wild beast.
— John Chrysostom
In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.
— Guy Debord
TO the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little, Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever after-ward resumes its liberty.
— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Philosophy, from the earliest times, has made greater claims, and achieved fewer results, than any other branch of learning.
— Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World
If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody and no unemployment -- assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so much leisure. In America men often work long hours even when they are well off; such men, naturally, are indignant at the idea of leisure for wage-earners, except as the grim punishment of unemployment; in fact, they dislike leisure even for their sons.
— Bertrand Russell
The most dangerous irony is, people are angry with others because of their own incompetence.
— Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words
A sign of a lover of wisdom is his delight in not running his mouth about things he doesn't know.
— Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality
The truth is, going against the internal stream of ignorance is way more rebellious than trying to start some sort of cultural revolution.
— Noah Levine, Dharma Punx: A Memoir
The power of death signifies that this real world can only have a neutral image of life, that life's intimacy does not reveal it's dazzling consumption until the moment it gives out.
— Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion
A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at five or six great men- yes, and then to get around them.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Try for once to justify the meaning of your existence as it were a posteriori by setting yourself an aim, a goal... an exalted and noble 'to this end.' Perish in pursuit of this and only this
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations
The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, 'Seek simplicity and distrust it.
— Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature: The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, 11/1919
The inner revolution will not be televised or sold on the Internet. It must take place within one's own mind and heart.
— Noah Levine, Dharma Punx: A Memoir
Les hommes construisent trop de murs et pas assez de ponts.
A writer is one who communicates ideas and emotions people want to communicate but aren't quite sure how, or even if, they should communicate them.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.
— Wallace Stegner, All the Little Live Things
You may lie with your mouth, but with the mouth you make as you do so you none the less tell the truth.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Before this moment, I have never whished to be something other than what I am. Never felt so keenly the lack of hands with which to touch, the lack of arms whith which to hold.Why did they give me this sense of self? Why allow me the intellect by which to measure this complete inadequacy? I would rather be numb than stand here in the light of a sun that can never chase the chill away
— Amie Kaufman, Illuminae
The bond between husband and wife is a strong one. Suppose the man had hunted her out and brought her back. The memory of her acts would still be there, and inevitably, sooner or later, it would be cause for rancor. When there are crises, incidents, a woman should try to overlook them, for better or for worse, and make the bond into something durable. The wounds will remain, with the woman and with the man, when there are crises such as I have described. It is very foolish for a woman to let a little dalliance upset her so much that she shows her resentment openly. He has his adventures--but if he has fond memories of their early days together, his and hers, she may be sure that she matters. A commotion means the end of everything. She should be quiet and generous, and when something comes up that quite properly arouses her resentment she should make it known by delicate hints. The man will feel guilty and with tactful guidance he will mend his ways. Too much lenience can make a woman seem charmingly docile and trusting, but it can also make her seem somewhat wanting in substance. We have had instances enough of boats abandoned to the winds and waves.It may be difficult when someone you are especially fond of, someone beautiful and charming, has been guilty of an indiscretion, but magnanimity produces wonders. They may not always work, but generosity and reasonableness and patience do on the whole seem best.
— Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji
On marriage: You sort of stumble along and reconnect and lose each other and reconnect again.
— Felicity Huffman
Naive people tend to generalize people as—-good, bad, kind, or evil based on their actions. However, even the smartest person in the world is not the wisest or the most spiritual, in all matters. We are all flawed. Maybe, you didn’t know a few of these things about Einstein, but it puts the notion of perfection to rest. Perfection doesn’t exist in anyone. Nor, does a person’s mistakes make them less valuable to the world. 1. He divorced the mother of his children, which caused Mileva, his wife, to have a break down and be hospitalized.2.He was a ladies man and was known to have had several affairs; infidelity was listed as a reason for his divorce.3.He married his cousin.4.He had an estranged relationship with his son.5. He had his first child out of wedlock.6. He urged the FDR to build the Atom bomb, which killed thousands of people.7. He was Jewish, yet he made many arguments for the possibility of God. Yet, hypocritically he did not believe in the Jewish God or Christianity. He stated, “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.
— Shannon L. Alder
We youths say “like” all the time because we mistrust reality.
— James S. Kunen, The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary
When the Aggregates arise, decay and die, O bhikkhu, every moment you are born, decay, and die.
— Gautama Buddha
The world, viewed philosophically, remains a series of slave camps, where citizens – tax livestock – labor under the chains of illusion in the service of their masters.
— Stefan Molyneux
Knowledge is responsibility, which is why people resist knowledge.
— Stefan Molyneux
A bridge of silver wings stretches from the dead ashes of an unforgiving nightmareto the jeweled vision of a life started anew.
— Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry
Thought is so cunning, so clever, that it distorts everything for its own convenience.
— Jiddu Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known
Some want to live within the soundOf church or chapel bell;I want to run a rescue shop,Within a yard of hell.
— C.T. Studd
The brightest light casts the darkest shadow.
— Jess C. Scott, The Darker Side of Life
when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world. 
— George Steiner
Never forget that there are only two philosophies to rule your life: the one of the cross, which starts with the fast and ends with the feast. The other of Satan, which starts with the feast and ends with the headache.
— Fulton J. Sheen, Seven Words of Jesus and Mary: Lessons from Cana and Calvary
Sometimes... Reason and Love are met with a violent ignorance that even what's right gets lost. Our heart bleeds, but when does the blood shed end and the healing begin?
— Solange nicole
Some day people will ask me what is the key to my success...and I will simply say, "good Karma.
— K. Crumley
A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.
— Leszek Kołakowski, Metaphysical Horror
If everyone is a product of this society, who will say the things that need to be said, and do the things that need to be done, without compromise? Truth will never start out popular in a world more concerned with marketability than righteousness. It will initially suffer ridicule and even violence- yet ultimately it is undeniable. All of humanity is living in a dream world, but suffering real consequences.
— Lauryn Hill
Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values; the bureaucrat's tool is fear.
— Ayn Rand
Then the lover, who is true and no counterfeit, must of necessity be loved by his love.
— Plato
Of Equality--as if it harm'd me, giving others the same chances and rights as myself--as if it were not indispensable to my own rights that others possess the same.
— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
There is no fate which cannot be surmounted by scorn.
— Albert Camus
It's not oil that runs the world, it's shame.
— Sherman Alexie, War Dances
Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?
— William James
You were free, you are free and you will be free.
— Santosh Kalwar
America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.
— Ayn Rand
You know, I think that only if one feels immensely important can one feel truly light.
— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
And now we step to the rhythm of miracles.--from The Light, That Never Dies
— Aberjhani, Elemental: The Power of Illuminated Love
While I was an honorable man in her eyes, she did not love me. But the minute she understood what I was, when she breathed the true and foul odor of my soul, love was born in her – for she does love me! Well, well! There is nothing real, then, except evil.
— Octave Mirbeau
Most of us try to do too much because we are secretly afraid we will not be able to do anything at all.
— Rick Aster, Fear of Nothing
It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden & Resistance to Civil Government
You are happy when you are enthusiastic and action-oriented, not when you are luxury and pleasure oriented.
— Debasish Mridha
An ignorant person is inclined to blame others for his own misfortune. To blame oneself is proof of progress. But the wise man never has to blame another or himself.
— Epictetus, The Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness and Effectiveness
It's always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned.
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
It’s not the drug that causes the junkie it’s the laws that causes the junkie because of course the drug laws means that he can’t go and get help because he is afraid of being arrested. He also can’t have a normal life because the war on drugs has made drugs so expensive and has made drug contracts unenforceable which means they can only be enforced through criminal violence. It becomes so profitable to sell drugs to addicts that the drug dealers have every incentive to get people addicted by offering free samples and to concentrate their drug to the highest possible dose to provoke the greatest amount of addiction as possible.Overall it is a completely staggering and completely satanic human calamity. It is the new gulag and in some ways much more brutal than the soviet gulag. In the soviet gulags there was not a huge prison rape problem and in this situation your life could be destroyed through no fault of your own through sometimes, no involvement of your own and the people who end up in the drug culture are walled off and separated as a whole and thrown into this demonic, incredibly dangerous, underworld were the quality of the drugs can’t be verified. Were contracts can’t be enforced except through breaking peoples kneecaps and the price of drugs would often led them to a life of crime.People say “well, I became a drug addict and I lost my house, family, and my job and all that.” It’s not because you became a drug addict but, because there is a war on drugs which meant that you had to pay so much for the drugs that you lost your house because you couldn't go and find help or substitutes and ended up losing your job. It’s all nonsense. The government can’t keep drugs out of prisons for heaven’s sakes. The war on drugs is not designed to be won. Its designed to continue so that the government can get the profits of drug running both directly through the CIA and other drug runners that are affiliated or through bribes and having the power of terrorizing the population. To frame someone for murder is pretty hard but to palm a packet of cocaine and say that you found it in their car is pretty damn easy and the government loves having that power." -Stefan Molyneux
— Stefan Molyneux
What we do not confront, we inhabit.What we do not reject, we accept.What we do not fight, we become.
— Stefan Molyneux
Medicine rests upon four pillars—philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, and ethics. The first pillar is the philosophical knowledge of earth and water; the second, astronomy, supplies its full understanding of that which is of fiery and airy nature; the third is an adequate explanation of the properties of all the four elements—that is to say, of the whole cosmos—and an introduction into the art of their transformations; and finally, the fourth shows the physician those virtues which must stay with him up until his death, and it should support and complete the three other pillars.
— Paracelsus, Paracelsus: Selected Writings
Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.
— Albert Camus
You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education.
— Bob Black, The Abolition of Work & Other Essays
The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist.
— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
There is but one true philosophical problem and that is suicide.
— Albert Camus
Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in man's heart. That is where it must be sought. One must follow and understand this fatal game that leads from lucidity in the face of existence to flight from light.
— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man’s values, it has to be earned.His own happiness is man’s only moral purpose, but only his own virtue can achieve it…Life is the reward of virtue- and happiness is the goal and the reward of life.Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy- a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your won destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but using your mind’s fullest power.Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seek nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing bu rational actions.The symbol of all relationships among such men, the moral symbol of respect for human beings, is the trade…A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved.
— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Socrates should have written comics.
— Mark Waid
Do not trouble about those who practice philosophy, whether they are good or bad; but examine the thing itself well and carefully. And if philosophy appears a bad thing to you, turn every man from it, not only your sons; but if it appears to you such as I think it to be, take courage, pursue it, and practice it, as the saying is, 'both you and your house.
— Socrates
Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.
— David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
More powerful than the mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.
— Victor Hugo
Sitting still is a pain in the ass.
— Noah Levine, Against the Stream: A Buddhist Manual for Spiritual Revolutionaries
See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalises. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all sorts of definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer. When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just why we must defer, the rationalist is unable to recognise the concretes from which his own abstraction is taken. He accuses us of denying truth; whereas we have only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought to follow it. Your typical ultra-abstractions fairly shudders at concreteness: other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer, nobler.
— William James, Pragmatism and Other Writings
Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something(All The King's Men)
— Robert Penn Warren
Slice a pear and you will find that its flesh is incandescent white. It glows with inner light. Those who carry a knife and a pear are never afraid of the dark.
— Yann Martel, Beatrice and Virgil
Be a surfer. Watch the ocean. Figure out where the big waves are breaking and adjust accordingly.
— 37 Signals, Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Web Application
When we die, as when the scenes have been fixed on to celluloid and the scenery is pulled down and burnt — we are phantoms in the memories of our descendants. Then we are ghosts, my dear, then we are myths. But still we are together. We are the past together, we are a distant past. Beneath the dome of the mysterious stars, I still hear your voice.
— Jostein Gaarder, Maya
Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, orperhaps of subconsciousness—I wouldn't know. But I amsure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.
— Aaron Copland
One can ask why the I has to appear in the cogito {Descartes’ argument “I think therefore I am.}, since the cogito, if used rightly, is the awareness of pure consciousness, not directed at any fact or action. In fact the I is not necessary here, since it is never united directly to consciousness. One can even imagine a pure and self-aware consciousness which thinks of itself as impersonal spontaneity.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
A sin is nothing more than regret. Not for doing it once, but doing it again when you know you’re going to regret it.
— Carroll Bryant
I grew up once, I decided never to do it again
— Benny Bellamacina, The King of Rhyme
An inventor is a man who asks 'Why?' of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind.
— Ayn Rand