c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
We have negative mental habits that come up over and over again. One of the most significant negative habits we should be aware of is that of constantly allowing our mind to run off into the future. Perhaps we got this from our parents. Carried away by our worries, we're unable to live fully and happily in the present. Deep down, we believe we can't really be happy just yet—that we still have a few more boxes to be checked off before we can really enjoy life. We speculate, dream, strategize, and plan for these "conditions of happiness" we want to have in the future; and we continually chase after that future, even while we sleep. We may have fears about the future because we don't know how it's going to turn out, and these worries and anxieties keep us from enjoying being here now.
— Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Breath: A Practice for Our Busy Lives
And yet we have what purports, or professes, or is claimed, to be a contract—the Constitution—made eighty years ago, by men who are now all dead, and who never had any power to bind us, but which (it is claimed) has nevertheless bound three generations of men, consisting of many millions, and which (it is claimed) will be binding upon all the millions that are to come; but which nobody ever signed, sealed, delivered, witnessed, or acknowledged; and which few persons, compared with the whole number that are claimed to be bound by it, have ever read, or even seen, or ever will read, or see.
— Lysander Spooner, No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority
If you know how to be happy with the wonders of life that are already there for you to enjoy, you don't need to stress your mind and your body by striving harder and harder, and you don't need to stress this planet by purchasing more and more stuff. The Earth belongs to our children. We have already borrowed too much from it, from them; and the way things have been going, we're not sure we'll be able to give it back to them in decent shape. And who are our children, actually? They are us, because they are our own continuation. So we've been shortchanging our own selves. Much of our modern way of life is permeated by mindless overborrowing. The more we borrow, the more we loser. That's why it's critical that we wake up and see we don't need to do that anymore. What's already available in the here and now is plenty for us to be nourished, to be happy. Only that kind of insight will get us, each one of us, to stop engaging in the compulsive, self-sabotaging behaviors of our species. We need a collective awakening. One Buddha is not enough. All of us have to become Buddhas in order for our planet to have a chance. Fortunately, we have the power to wake up, to touch enlightenment from moment to moment, in our very own ordinary and, yes, busy lives. So let's start right now. Peace is your every breath.
— Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Breath: A Practice for Our Busy Lives
Never let yourself be diverted, either by what you wish to believe, or what you think could have beneficent social effects if it were believed; but look only and solely at what are the facts.
— Bertrand Russell
In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of "world history"- yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Untruth: Selected Writings
Sitting there on the heather, on our planetary grain, I shrank from the abysses that opened up on every side, and in the future. The silent darkness, the featureless unknown, were more dread than all the terrors that imagination had mustered. Peering, the mind could see nothing sure, nothing in all human experience to be grasped as certain, except uncertainty itself; nothing but obscurity gendered by a thick haze of theories. Man's science was a mere mist of numbers; his philosophy but a fog of words. His very perception of this rocky grain and all its wonders was but a shifting and a lying apparition. Even oneself, that seeming-central fact, was a mere phantom, so deceptive, that the most honest of men must question his own honesty, so insubstantial that he must even doubt his very existence.
— Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker
When your tears become invisible, disappear
— Benny Bellamacina
What's the survival value of obsessing on a sunset?
— Peter Watts, Blindsight
We are seeds as well as parasites to the earth. We can either give or take, depending on our perception of growth.
— Zephyr McIntyre
Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an· other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once.
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
All is flux
— Heraclitus, The Fragments of the Work of Heraclitus of Ephesus on Nature with an Introduction Historical and Critical
Free your mind from routine, keep your brain somewhere else
— Benny Bellamacina
♫ I learned a lesson today: never judge a person by the way they act, nor how they dress, or the way they have their disabilities. Because everyone on Earth suffers the same hell, whether in love or hate, life or death.
— Nandanie Phalgoo, Bodiless
You have made the moon," The Jester said. "That is the moon.
— James Thurber, Many Moons
I Take Life Very Seriously: One Joke At A Time.
— Sandra Chami Kassis
Such Excessive Preoccupation With The Faults Of Others Only Manages To Bring The Spotlight To Shine Bright On Whatever It Is You May Have Hiding Behind All Your Self Perceived Glory.
— Marcie Leeper
In every ancient religious and sacred text, faith is a verb; a thing to be demonstrated. It is in modern days that we have diluted faith from an act to a philosophy.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
Never let your uniqueness be compromised
— Benny Bellamacina
Why is it so difficult for us to think in relative terms? Well, for the good reason that human nature loves absoluteness, and erroneously considers it as a state of higher knowledge.
— Felix Alba-Juez, Who was Right: Ptolemy or Copernicus?
Пустинните бурени оцеляват, а пролетното цвете разцъфва и повяхва.
— Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
We co-create our reality with others in unseen ways.
— Doug Dillon
God created philosophy for all the intellects that got bored of hearing the same bible stories every Sunday.
— Shannon L. Alder
Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression...
— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
The best ship, the best culture, the best knowledge, is the one which allows us to go farther, explore more territories or oceans of reality, and have the least damaging leaks possible.
— Jesus Zamora Bonilla, Galloping with Light - Einstein, Relativity, and Folklore
În clipa când ți se impune să nu te gândești la un lucru, te vei gândi doar la el, obsesiv. Interdicția devine obligație.
— Jean-Claude Carrière, Nu sperați că veți scăpa de cărți
The command of our language is crucial to focusing our thoughts and communicating them with precision to others.
— Felix Alba-Juez, Galloping with Light - Einstein, Relativity, and Folklore
Life is a complexwith real and imaginary parts
— Angela Suba, From My Pen, On Life
True, life is complex. But so are a great many accidents.
— Foz Meadows, The Key to Starveldt
MIGHT, something God only has.
— A Gentlemen
At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.
— Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories
Yet even in the loneliness of the canyon I knew there were others like me who had brothers they did not understand but wanted to help. We are probably those referred to as "our brother's keepers," possessed of one of the oldest and possible one of the most futile and certainly one of the most haunting instincts. It will not let us go.
— Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories
If you live consciously, if you try to bring consciousness to every act that you go through, you will be living in a silent, blissful state, in serenity, in joy, in love. Your life will have the flavour of a festival. That is the meaning of heaven: your life will have many flowers in it, much fragrance will be released through you. You will have an aura of delight. Your life will be a song of life-affirmation, it will be a sacred yes to all that existence is. You will be in communion with existence — in communion with stars, with the trees, with the rivers, with the mountains, with people, with animals. This whole life and this whole existence will have a totally different meaning for you. From every nook and corner, rivers of bliss will be flowing towards you. Heaven is just a name for that state of mind. Hell means you are living so unconsciously, so absurdly, in such contradiction, that you go on creating more and more misery for yourself.
— Osho
The maturity of man—that means, to have reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child at play
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
The most total opposite of pleasure is not pain but boredom, for we are willing to risk pain to make a boring life interesting.
— Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock
Everything smaller than Heaven bores us because only Heaven is bigger than our hearts.
— Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock
But understanding will always require some effort. You probably wouldn't admire a friend who was good at everything if it cost her no effort.
— Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World
I should attempt to treat human vice and folly geometrically... the passions of hatred, anger, envy, and so on, considered in themselves, follow from the necessity and efficacy of nature... I shall, therefore, treat the nature and strength of the emotion in exactly the same manner, as though I were concerned with lines, planes, and solids.
— Baruch Spinoza, Ethics
I believed that I was approaching the end of my days without having tasted to the full any of the pleasures for which my heart thirsted...without having ever tasted that passion which, through lack of an object, was always suppressed. ...The impossibility of attaining the real persons precipitated me into the land of chimeras; and seeing nothing that existed worthy of my exalted feelings, I fostered them in an ideal world which my creative imagination soon peopled with beings after my own heart.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions
You can recognize a small truth because its opposite is a falsehood. The opposite of a great truth is another truth.
— Niels Bohr
Ben, if you get pee in my brand-new car, I am going to cut your balls off."Still peeing, Ben looks over at me smirking. "You´re gonna need a hell of a big knife, bro.
— John Green, Paper Towns
A hydrogen atom in a cell at the end of my nose was once part of an elephant's trunk. A carbon atom in my cardiac muscle was once in the tail of a dinosaur.
— Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World
Without man and his potential for moral progress, the whole of reality would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final purpose.
— Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace
There is no sickness worse for me than words that to be kind must lie.
— Aeschylus
The gods are fond of the cryptic and dislike the evident.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived—forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward- looking position.
— Søren Kierkegaard, The Diary Of Soren Kierkegaard
Only God may be adored, because only God is unlimited goodness, truth, and beauty, and thus only God deserves unlimited love.
— Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock
When the road ahead seems impossible, start the engine
— Benny Bellamacina, Piddly Poems for Children
One of the professors told me last week that he feels bad teaching with the way the economy is now. ‘What’s the point?’ he said. ‘Kids aren’t getting jobs.’ You never hear faculty talk that way. He did.
— Daniel Amory, Minor Snobs
An apple a day keeps the doctor away.' But eating too many, is quite enough-plenty. And you'll have to go see the good doc anyway.
— Solange nicole
As individuals express their life, so they are.
— Karl Marx, The German Ideology
Of course there’s a risk that that could happen, but what is the alternative? To never allow myself to get close to anyone ever again? Never know the joy of loving someone for fear that it could end up in tears? My heart might stay safe, but it wouldn’t be much of a life.
— Chantelle Shaw, The Ultimate Risk
I believe that just because something didn’t go the way you planned it once, it’s no reason not to try again.
— Chantelle Shaw, The Ultimate Risk
...even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.
— G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
For me, writing is immortality. It is wisdom. It is never-ending.
— Al   Stone
Men would no longer be victims of nature or of their own largely irrational societies: reason would triumph; universal harmonious cooperation, true history, would at last begin. For if this was not so, do the ideas of progress, of history, have any meaning? Is there not a movement, however tortuous, from ignorance to knowledge, from mythical thought and childish fantasies to perception of reality face to face, to knowledge of true goals, true values as well as truths of fact? Can history be a mere purposeless succession of events, caused by a mixture of material factors and the play of random selection, a tale full of sound and fury signifying nothing? This was unthinkable. The day would dawn when men and women would take their lives in their own hands and not be self-seeking beings or the playthings of blind forces that they did not understand. It was, at the very least, not impossible to conceive that such an earthly paradise could be; and if conceivable we could, at any rate, try to march towards it. That has been at the centre of ethical thought from the Greeks to the Christian visionaries of the Middle Ages, from the Renaissance to progressive thought in the last century; and indeed, is believed by many to this day.
— Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas
Philosophizing is simply one way of being afraid, a cowardly pretense that doesn't get you anywhere.
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night
To sum it all up, the [Ayn] Rand belief system looks like this:1. Facts are facts: things can be absolutely right or absolutely wrong, as determined by reason.2. According to my reasoning, I am absolutely right.3. Charity is immoral.4. Pay for your own fucking schools.
— Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America
Observe the movements of the stars as if you were running their courses with them, and let your mind constantly dwell on the changes of the elements into each other. Such imaginings wash away the filth of life on the ground.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
See the moon? It hates us.
— Donald Barthelme
Theology, philosophy, metaphysics, and quantum physics are merely ways for God to have his smart people believe in him
— Jeremy Aldana
Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.
— Peter Singer, Animal Liberation
Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible.
— Lois McMaster Bujold, Barrayar
In the liquid amber within the ivory porcelain, the initiated may touch the sweet reticence of Confucius, the piquancy of Laotse, and the ethereal aroma of Sakyamuni himself.
— Kakuzō Okakura, The Book of Tea
A scientist may not be sure of the answer, but he's often sure he can find one. And that's a condition which is clearly not enjoyed by philosophy.
— B.F. Skinner, Walden Two
I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object.
— Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn
You cannot be buried in obscurity: you are exposed upon a grand theater to the view of the world. If your actions are upright and benevolent, be assured they will augment your power and happiness.
— Cyrus the Great
Civilization is only possible for deeply unpleasant animals. It is only an ape that can be truly civilized.
— Mark Rowlands, The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death, and Happiness
In my heart's most secret place,I pity them as angels do.
— Sara Teasdale
Action is the activity of the rational soul, which abhors irrationality and must combat it or be corrupted by it. When it sees the irrationality of others, it must seek to correct it, and can do this either by teaching or engaging in public affairs itself, correcting through its practice. And the purpose of action is to enable philosophy to continue, for if men are reduced to the material alone, they become no more than beasts.
— Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio
It is suicide to be abroad. But what it is to be at home, ... what it is to be at home? A lingering dissolution.
— Samuel Beckett, All That Fall and Other Plays for Radio and Screen
Words are made for a certain exactness of thought, as tears are for a certain degree of pain. What is least distinct cannot be named; what is clearest is unutterable.
— René Daumal, A Night of Serious Drinking
Islam deals not only with what man must and must not do, but also with what he needs to know. In other words, Islam is both a way of acting and doing things and a way of knowing.
— Osman Bakar, Tawhid and Science
Laughter is the antidote to existential pain
— S. Spencer Baker, Slabscape: Reset
In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg.Shall I swallow cave-phantoms?
— Samuel Beckett, Collected Poems in English and French
Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoretically they are very confused, and one easily makes the obscurest assumptions in this science without realizing, until challenged, what internal difficulties they involve.
— William James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol 1
The best of humanity's recorded history is a creative balance between horrors endured and victories achieved, and so it was during the Harlem Renaissance.
— Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry
The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
To the untutored sage, the concentration of population was the prolific mother of all evils, moral no less than physical. He argued that food is good, while surfeit kills; that love is good, but lust destroys; and not less dreaded than the pestilence following upon crowded and unsanitary dwellings was the loss of spiritual power inseparable from too close contact with one's fellow-men.
— Charles Alexander Eastman, The Soul of the Indian
Ideas and philosophies have a shelf-life. They must be kept fresh and renewed or they will spoil. If left unattended, the same ideas and philosophies that once nourished you and helped you grow can poison you and make you sick. Become aware of new ideas that can refresh your way of life and be open to the fact that your old ideas and philosophies can work for you for some time, but when the shelf-life has passed, those ideas and philosophies could also harm you.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
Quando ouvimos os sinos, ouvimos aquilo que já trazemos em nós mesmos como modelo. Sou da opinião que não se deverá desprezar aquele que olhar atentamente para as manchas da parede, para os carvões sobre a grelha, para as nuvens, ou para a correnteza da água, descobrindo, assim, coisas maravilhosas. O génio do pintor há-de se apossar de todas essas coisas para criar composições diversas: luta de homens e de animais, paisagens, monstros, demónios e outras coisas fantásticas. Tudo, enfim, servirá para engrandecer o artista.
— Leonardo da Vinci
[T]he concern of man is not his future but his present, not the world but his soul. We must be just, we must strive, we must engage ourselves with the business of the world for our own sake, because through that, and through contemplation in equal measure, our soul is purified and brought closer to the divine. ... Thought and deed conjoined are crucial. ... The attempt must be made; the outcome is irrelevant. Right action is a pale material reflection of the divine, but reflection it is, nonetheless. Define your goal and exert reason to accomplish it by virtuous action; successs or failure is secondary.
— Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio
Marriage can be made to work if both the partners can see beyond themselves and understand the limitations,needs and abilities of the other person and are willing to embrace the positive and negative aspects of each other in their understanding.But it never happens that way. We expect others to understand and comply with us while we fail to do the same.Thus marriage loses all it's sheen by the time the couple reaches middle age.
— Chitralekha Paul, Delayed Monsoon
The line between him and the enemy had simultaneously blurred and solidified. Somehow, while perhaps it shouldn't have, this thought provided a strange sense of peace.
— Kristina McMorris, Bridge of Scarlet Leaves
This primary question of life organization is immensely important. If making money is the main goal, a person can often forget what his or her true interests are or how he or she wants to deserve recognition from others. It is much more difficult to add on other values to a life that started out with just making money in mind than it is to make some personally interesting endeavor financially possible or even profitable.
— Pekka Himanen, The Hacker Ethic: A Radical Approach to the Philosophy of Business
If you think fate is fickle, try tempting it
— S. Spencer Baker, Slabscape: Reset
Man is not born to solve the problem of the universe, but to find out what he has to do; and to restrain himself within the limits of his comprehension.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Every country has the government it deserves.
— Joseph de Maistre
No one species shall make the life of the world its own.' … That's one expression of the law. Here's another: 'The world was not made for any one species.
— Daniel Quinn, Ishmael
Communism is the final logic of the dehumanization of man.
— Fulton J. Sheen
Time (again, Time) like the soul, wears many faces, many bodies and climates and attitudes. The past is one face, the present a second and the future yet another.
— Aberjhani, Elemental: The Power of Illuminated Love
A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling effect of ephemerality. All knowledge is transient linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes, whereas wisdom, true wisdom is eternal immutable. To be philosophical one must love wisdom for its own sake, accept its permanent validity and yet its perpetual irrelevance. It is the fate of the wise to understand the process of history and yet never to shape it.
— Shashi Tharoor
By the time we began to understand enough about what the world to ask the right questions, our visit is over, and someone else is visiting, asking the same questions.
— D.K. LeVick, Bridges: A Tale of Niagara
Faith is not belief in spite of evidence but a life in scorn of the consequences.
— Clarence Jordan, The Substance of Faith: And Other Cotton Patch Sermons
If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert
— Peter Watts, Blindsight
The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.
— Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom
Nothing sweeter than to drag oneself along behind events; and nothing more reasonable. But without a strong dose of madness, no initiative, no enterprise, no gesture. Reason: the rust of our vitality. It is the madman in us who forces us to adventure; once he abandons us, we are lost; everything depends on him, even our vegetative life; it is he who invites us, who obliges us to breathe, and it is also he who forces our blood to venture through our veins. Once he withdraws, we are alone indeed! We cannot be normal and alive at the same time.
— Emil M. Cioran
Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.
— Blaise Pascal
This law … defines the limits of competition in the community of life. You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war.
— Daniel Quinn, Ishmael
Wisdom is seeing something in a non-habitual manner.
— William James
Love delayed is lust augmented.
— Louis de Bernières
[People] ask themselves, what is suitable for my position? What is usually done by persons of my station and percuniary circumstances? Or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstances superior to mine? I do not mean that they choose what is customary in preference to what suits their own inclinations. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things that are commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature they have no nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved: they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own.
— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
This is the paradox of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes everything. One of the first measures taken by the new Bolshevik government in 1918 was to make public the entire corpus of tsarist secret diplomacy, all the secret agreements, the secret clauses of public agreements etc. There too the target was the entire functioning of the state apparatuses of power.
— Slavoj Žižek
If the world was made for us, then it BELONGS to us and we can do what we damn well please with it.
— Daniel Quinn, Ishmael
History is a hermaphrodite with many distinguished lovers. We are neither mysteries nor strangers but the living breath of revelation made flesh by the unrestrained desires of a free and universal love. Universal me. Universal you.”--from Past Present and Future are One
— Aberjhani, Elemental: The Power of Illuminated Love
Death is never an excuse to stop living.
— Catherine Johnson, A Nest of Vipers
I am serving the purpose for which I was designed, therefore I am satisfied with my existence.
— Kevin J. Anderson
Every life has a destiny... the trick is to discover it before then end of your life. Otherwise, you will have too many regrets.
— Kevin J. Anderson, A Forest of Stars
We must think beyond ourselves
— Kevin J. Anderson, A Forest of Stars
[N]ow we have a clearer idea what this story is all about: The world was made for man, and man was made to rule it.
— Daniel Quinn, Ishmael
Nat: Maybe you broke something.Midge: I know. Never fall down, never fall down!Nat: Ah, it's nothing. I fall down every morning. I get up, I have a cup of coffee, I fall down. That's the system. Two years old, you stand up and then BOOM! seventy years later, you fall down again.
— Herb Gardner, I'm Not Rappaport
If the moment is everthing, then everything is time.
— Benny Bellamacina, The King of Rhyme
No society can prosper if it aims at making things easier-instead it should aim at making people stronger!!
— Ashoka Jahnavi Prasad
For where is the man that has incontestable evidence of the truth of all that he holds, or of the falsehood of all he condemns; or can say that he has examined to the bottom all his own, or other men's opinions? The necessity of believing without knowledge, nay often upon very slight grounds, in this fleeting state of action and blindness we are in, should make us more busy and careful to inform ourselves than constrain others.
— John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
In so far as the culture industry arouses a feeling of well-being that the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry, the substitute gratification which it prepares for human beings cheats them out of the same happiness which it deceitfully projects.
— Theodor W. Adorno
Rien ne sert de courir il faut partir à point
— Jean de La Fontaine, The Fables of La Fontaine
Imprisoning philosophy within the professionalizations and specializations of an institutionalized curriculum, after the manner of our contemporary European and North American culture, is arguably a good deal more effective in neutralizing its effects than either religious censorship or political terror
— Alasdair MacIntyre, Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913-1922
There is a perennial classical question that asks which part of the motorcycle, which grain of sand in which pile, is the Buddha. Obviously to ask that question is to look in the wrong direction, for the Buddha is everywhere. But just as obviously to ask the question is to look in the right direction, for the Buddha is everwhere.
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
If I could put it into a very few words, dear sir, I should say that our prevalent belief is in moderation. We inculcate the virtue of avoiding excesses of all kinds—even including, if you will pardon the paradox, excess of virtue itself.
— James Hilton, Lost Horizon
I never could read Foucault. I find philosophy tedious. All of my knowledge comes from reading novels and some history. I read Being and Nothingness and realized that I remembered absolutely nothing when I finished it. I used to go to the library every day and read every day for eight hours. I’d dropped out of high school and had to teach myself. I read Sartre without any background. I just forced myself and I learned nothing.
— Michael Gira
Any game where the goal is to build territory has to be beautiful. There may be phases of combat, but they are only means to an end, to allow your territory to survive. One of the most extraordinary aspects of the game of go is that it has been proven that in order to win, you must live, but you must also allow the other player to live. Players who are too greedy will lose: it is a subtle game of equilibrium, where you have to get ahead without crushing the other player. In the end, life and death are only the consequences of how well or how poorly you have made your construction. This is what one of Taniguchi's characters says: you live, you die, these are consequences. It's a proverb for playing go, and for life.
— Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential.
— Ayn Rand
Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value
For a long time now a hint of aversion had lain on everything he did and experienced, a shadow of impotence and loneliness, an all-encompassing distaste for which he could not find the complementary inclination. He felt at times as though he had been born with a talent for which there was at present no objective.
— Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities: Vol. 1
The progress of the world can certainly never come at all save by the modified action of the individual beings who compose the world.
— George Eliot
Business people - Your business - is your greatest prejudice: it ties you to your locality, to the company you keep, to the inclinations you feel. Diligent in business - but indolent in spirit, content with your inadequacy, and with the cloak of duty hung over this contentment: that is how you live, that is how you want your children to live!
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality
When two creatures meet, the one that is able to intimidate its opponent is recognized as socially superior, so that a social decision does not always depend on a fight; an encounter in some circumstances may be enough.
— Hediger
The world is a garden of philosophy. God is its gardener
—  Man is the visitor.And any tree that does not bear fruits of philosophy either does not belong tothat garden or is yet to be grown.
I would rather be an opportunist and float than go to the bottom with my principles around my neck.
— Stanley Baldwin
Would Crazy Horse have spent this much to remodel a kitchen?
— Ian Frazier, On the Rez
What is humor?' one of their professors had posed, and he had answered, ''nondangerous, unexpectedly inappropriate juxtaposition.
— Sena Jeter Naslund, Four Spirits
We are the lucky ones for we shall die, as there is an infinite number of possible forms of DNA all but a few billions of which will never burst into consciousness.
— Frank Close, The Void
Sublime natures are seldom clean!
— Longinus, Longinus on the Sublime: The Greek Text
Perhaps in his loneliness he had acquired the silent conviction that he was 'the last', the one, the only. And, being the last, he ceased to be Benjamin, becoming Israel. And upon his heart had settled the history of five thousand years, no longer remote, but become as the history of his own lifetime. His "I" was the converse of the imperial "We.
— Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz
If we try to measure Now, we find it's always gone, has become part of the past.
— Aidan Chambers, The Toll Bridge
I man is a prisoner of only his own mind.
— Michael Hawkins
If i had it all to do again there would be more bodies.
— Phil Baker
Genius is measured not by static volume but by kinetic vision.
— Rich DiSilvio
He who writes well runs the civilization. Everyone else does the grunt work.
— Kenneth W. Harl
She wondered which was worse—living your whole life staring at yourself or waiting your whole life for someone to stare back at you.
— Angela Lam (Turpin)
Philosophy is one reason which could lead to death.
— Santosh Kalwar
This intriguing 'somewhere else,' where intelligence no longer matters and awareness melts away, commands us to cherish our remains of innocence -- because of all the characteristics of human nature, the richest by far is passion for the perfectly useless.
— Hans W. Silvester, Into the Wind: The Art of the Kite
In philosophy it is always good to put a question instead of an answer to a question. For an answer to the philosophical question may easily be unfair
—  disposing of it by means of another question is not.
Let no one delay the study of philosophy while young nor weary of it when old.
— Epicurus
This world, in which reason is more and more at home, is not habitable. It is hard and cold like those depots in which are piled up goods that cannot satisfy: neither clothe those who are naked, nor feed those who are hungry; it is as impersonal as factory hangars and industrial cities in which manufactured things remain abstract, true with statistical truth and borne on the anonymous circuit of the economy, resulting from skilful planning decisions which cannot prevent, but prepare disasters. There it is, the mind in its masculine essence, living on the outside, exposed to the violent, blinding sun, to the trade winds that beat against it and beat it down, on a land without folds, rootless, solitary and wandering and thus already alienated by the very things which it caused to be produced and which remain untameable and hostile.
— Emmanuel Levinas
Brahman is the ultimate reality
—  it is simultaneously Saguna and Nirguna
We see a lot of feature-driven product design in which the cost of features is not properly accounted. Features can have a negative value to customers because they make the products more difficult to understand and use. We are finding that people like products that just work. It turns out that designs that just work are much harder to produce that designs that assemble long lists of features.
— Douglas Crockford, JavaScript: The Good Parts
We awaken by asking the right questions. We awaken when we see knowledge being spread that goes against our own personal experiences. We awaken when we see popular opinion being wrong but accepted as being right, and what is right being pushed as being wrong. We awaken by seeking answers in corners that are not popular. And we awaken by turning on the light inside when everything outside feels dark.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
We kill, kill, kill. Flesh, spirit, whatever gets in our way. It's like our whole purpose is to extinguish life. And for those who live, there's memory, like a curse. We're such a mixture of frailty and cruelty.
— Douglas Clegg
At the heart of nature’s mystery lies another mystery.
— Ransom Riggs, Hollow City
A true confession: I believe in a soluble fish.
— Charles Simic, The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs
Piety, then, is that which is dear to the gods, and impiety is that which is not dear to them.
— Plato, Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. Phaedrus.
The theological perspective of participation actually saves the appearances by exceeding them. It recognizes that materialism and spiritualism are false alternatives, since if there is only finite matter there is not even that, and that for phenomena really to be there they must be more than there. Hence, by appealing to an eternal source for bodies, their art, language, sexual and political union, one is not ethereally taking leave of their density. On the contrary, one is insisting that behind this density resides an even greater density – beyond all contrasts of density and lightness (as beyond all contrasts of definition and limitlessness). This is to say that all there is only is because it is more than it is. (...)This perspective should in many ways be seen as undercutting some of the contrasts between theological liberals and conservatives. The former tend to validate what they see as the modern embrace of our finitude – as language, and as erotic and aesthetically delighting bodies, and so forth. Conservatives, however, seem still to embrace a sort of nominal ethereal distancing from these realities and a disdain for them. Radical orthodoxy, by contrast, sees the historic root of the celebration of these things in participatory philosophy and incarnational theology, even if it can acknowledge that premodern tradition never took this celebration far enough. The modern apparent embrace of the finite it regards as, on inspection, illusory, since in order to stop the finite vanishing modernity must construe it as a spatial edifice bound by clear laws, rules and lattices. If, on the other hand, following the postmodern options, it embraces the flux of things, this is an empty flux both concealing and revealing an ultimate void. Hence, modernity has oscillated between puritanism (sexual or otherwise) and an entirely perverse eroticism, which is in love with death and therefore wills the death also of the erotic, and does not preserve the erotic as far as an eternal consummation. In a bizarre way, it seems that modernity does not really want what it thinks it wants; but on the other hand, in order to have what it thinks it wants, it would have to recover the theological. Thereby, of course, it would discover also that that which it desires is quite other than it has supposed
— John Milbank, Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology
You need contradictions to make an ideal.
— Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl
True beauty is measured by the number of pearls within you, not those around your neck.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
We all of us complain of the shortness of time, saith Seneca, and yet have much more than we know what to do with. Our lives, says he, are spent either in doing nothing at all, or in doing nothing to the purpose, or in doing nothing that we ought to do: we are always complaining our days are few, and acting as though there would no end of them."- On the Right Use of Time
— Joseph Addison
Because this is another thing your average American man in crisis does: he tries to go home, forgetting, momentarily, that he is the reason he left home in the first place, that the home is not his anymore, and that the crisis is him.
— Brock Clarke, An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England
After a dream like that, you're grateful that it was just a dream, that no matter how bad your actual life, it couldn't be worse than your dream life. 
— Brock Clarke, An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England
Pay attention to me.
— Sally Quinn
As long as there is institutional inequality, hell, naw we can't all get along!
— M.G. Hardie, Everyday Life
To lovers there.Most ladies the reason they are dumped and their relationship doesn't last is they made themselves to become a want than a need in a relationship.
— Kyos Magupe
For in this Case, we are not to give Credit to the Many, who say, that none ought to be educated but the Free; but rather to the Philosophers, who say, that the Well-educated alone are free.
— Epictetus, All the Works of Epictetus
Life is what you portrait it!
— Mohammad Hossein Khosh Bayan
Great losses are great lessons.
— Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words
The satyr, as the Dionysiac chorist, dwells in a reality sanctioned by myth and ritual. That tragedy should begin with him, that the Dionysiac wisdom of tragedy should speak through him, is as puzzling a phenomenon as, more generally, the origin of tragedy from the chorus. Perhaps we can gain a starting point for this inquiry by claiming that the satyr, that fictive nature sprite, stands to cultured man in the same relation as Dionysian music does to civilization. Richard Wagner has said of the latter that it is absorbed by music as lamplight by daylight. In the same manner, I believe, the cultured Greek felt himself absorbed into the satyr chorus, and in the next development of Greek tragedy state and society, in fact everything that separates man from man, gave way before an overwhelming sense of unity that led back into the heart of nature. This metaphysical solace (which, I wish to say at once, all true tragedy sends us away) that, despite every phenomenal change, life is at bottom indestructibly joyful and powerful, was expressed most concretely in the chorus of satyrs, nature beings who dwell behind all civilization and preserve their identity through every change of generations and historical movement.With this chorus the profound Greek, so uniquely susceptible to the subtlest and deepest suffering, who had penetrated the destructive agencies of both nature and history, solaced himself. Though he had been in danger of craving a Buddhistic denial of the will, he was saved through art, and through art life reclaimed him.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
You need mountains, long staircases don't make good hikers.
— Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words
The ultimate goal of humanity is knowledge.
— Abhijit Naskar
And one thing we know is real: horror. It is so real, in fact, that we cannot be sure it could not exist without us. Yes, it needs our imaginations and our consciousness, but it does not ask or require our consent to use them. Indeed, horror operates with complete autonomy. Generating ontological havoc, it is mephitic foam upon which our lives merely float. And, all said, we must face up to it: horror is more real than we are.
— Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer
You don't need to look at the beauty to feel the love.
— Anthony T. Hincks
A birth-date is a reminder to celebrate the life as well as to update the life.
— Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words
Asshole Proximity Disorder
— Stefan Molyneux
I see things in windows and I say to myself that I want them. I want them because I want to belong. I want to be liked by more people, I want to be held in higher regard than others. I want to feel valued, so I say to myself to watch certain shows. I watch certain shows on the television so I can participate in dialogues and conversations and debates with people who want the same things I want. I want to dress a certain way so certain groups of people are forced to be attracted to me. I want to do my hair a certain way with certain styling products and particular combs and methods so that I can fit in with the In-Crowd. I want to spend hours upon hours at the gym, stuffing my body with what scientists are calling 'superfoods', so that I can be loved and envied by everyone around me. I want to become an icon on someone's mantle. I want to work meaningless jobs so that I can fill my wallet and parentally-advised bank accounts with monetary potential. I want to believe what's on the news so that I can feel normal along with the rest of forever. I want to listen to the Top Ten on Q102, and roll my windows down so others can hear it and see that I am listening to it, and enjoying it. I want to go to church every Sunday, and pray every other day. I want to believe that what I do is for the promise of a peaceful afterlife. I want rewards for my 'good' deeds. I want acknowledgment and praise. And I want people to know that I put out that fire. I want people to know that I support the war effort. I want people to know that I volunteer to save lives. I want to be seen and heard and pointed at with love. I want to read my name in the history books during a future full of clones exactly like me. The mirror, I've noticed, is almost always positioned above the sink. Though the sink offers more depth than a mirror, and mirror is only able to reflect, the sink is held in lower regard. Lower still is the toilet, and thought it offers even more depth than the sink, we piss and shit in it. I want these kind of architectural details to be paralleled in my every day life. I want to care more about my reflection, and less about my cleanliness. I want to be seen as someone who lives externally, and never internally, unless I am able to lock the door behind me. I want these things, because if I didn't, I would be dead in the mirrors of those around me. I would be nothing. I would be an example. Sunken, and easily washed away.
— Dave Matthes
Aestheticism and radicalism must lead us to jettison reason, and to replace it by a desperate hope for political miracles. This irrational attitude which springs from intoxication with dreams of a beautiful world is what I call Romanticism. It may seek its heavenly city in the past or in the future; it may preach ‘back to nature’ or ‘forward to a world of love and beauty’; but its appeal is always to our emotions rather than to reason. Even with the best intentions of making heaven on earth it only succeeds in making it a hell – that hell which man alone prepares for his fellow-men.
— Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies
A mother gives you a life, a mother-in-law gives you her life.
— Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words
Ability, experience and books have solution for all the problems.
— Amit Kalantri
Today the aggressor is the shepherd of peace, and the beaten and hunted are the troublemakers of the world. What's more, there are whole races who believe it!
— Erich Maria Remarque, Flotsam
Is it better to work out consciously and critically one's own conception of the world and thus, in connection with the labours of one's own brain, choose one's sphere of activity, take an active part in the creation of the history of the world, be one's own guide, refusing to accept passively and supinely from outside the moulding of one' own personality?
— Antonio Gramsci