Quotes

This is an unordered selection of quotes, not ranked nor pruned, not (really) reflection what I agree or disagree with, simply quotes that I found interesting, insightful, or or made me think. Each author is followed by their quotes. Some entries are duplicated, it’s still a work in progress.

Me #

Life is a restful race to outrun sleep and catch up to your dreams

Mark Siderits #

A true causal law has no exceptions

When we think of a religion as dealing with spiritual matters, it is this concern with attaining salvation, of escaping from an unsatisfactory way of being, that we have in mind. The concerns of religion are, in a word, soteriological. A soteriology is a doctrine of salvation. Now to think of religion as a faith is to suppose that soteriological concerns can only be addressed through a form of emotional commitment. It is to hold that reason and logical investigation are of little or no use in seeking slavation. Many people in our culture believe this. But this was not the view of classical Indian culture, nor was it held by the ancient Greeks, or by the philisophers of medieval Islam. To many people in ancient India, including the Buddha, it made perfectly good sense to use our rational faculties in the pursuit of salvation. Of course this was not the only path that Indians recognized. The Bhagavad Gita, a major Hindu text, teaches that there are four different paths; which path one should take depends on one’s talents and predilections.

They (Buddhists ed.) claim, though, that pleasure and happiness are deceptive i nnature, being in these states leads us to believe that they can be made to endure, when in fact, for the reasons sketched above, they cannot. And in the long run, they claim, those reasons dictate that the happiness one obtains from such pursuits will be outweighed by the suffering. The pursuit of happiness will become a kind of treadmill, and the sense that we are on this treadmill leads to alienation and despair. For anyone who is at all reflective about their life, it is inevitable that the happiness in their life will be outweighed by the suffering.

… he chose to abandon the settled life … and became a wandering renunciant or Śramaṇa, someone whose life is dedicated to finding answers to certain spiritual questions.

… failure to recognize the three characteristics: the facts of impermanence, suffering, and non-self. This failure is exhibited in some fundamental assumptions we make about our lives: that we and the things we want can continue to exist indefinitely, that we can attain happiness by pursuing conventional goals, and there is a true me based on these assumptions, we are constantly in the business of reinforcing them. So even if our philosophical practice tells us they are false, it may not be so easy to uproot them. The situation here is like the case of a smoker. They may know perfectly well that smoking shortens their life. But each cigarette smoked reinforces their addiction, making it harder to act on that knowledge. So, the Buddhist says, meditation is needed in order to break the cycle and bring home the knowledge gained through philosophy.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb #

A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.

The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference

If you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don’t do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason.

Love without sacrifice is like theft

Arthur Schopenhauer #

The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.

It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.

We will gradually become indifferent to what goes on in the minds of other people when we acquire a knowledge of the superficial nature of their thoughts, the narrowness of their views and of the number of their errors. Whoever attaches a lot of value to the opinions of others pays them too much honor.

Compassion is the basis of morality.

When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. In learning to write, the pupil goes over with his pen what the teacher has outlined in pencil: so in reading; the greater part of the work of thought is already done for us. This is why it relieves us to take up a book after being occupied with our own thoughts. And in reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground of another’s thoughts. So it comes about that if anyone spends almost the whole day in reading, and by way of relaxation devotes the intervals to some thoughtless pastime, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking; just as the man who always rides, at last forgets how to walk. This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid.

Der Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will.Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.

A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man

Treat a work of art like a prince: let it speak to you first.

Faith is like love: it does not let itself be forced.

Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.

Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.

The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.

They tell us that Suicide is the greatest piece of Cowardice… That Suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in this world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.

Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.

We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.

It is a wise thing to be polite; consequently, it is a stupid thing to be rude. To make enemies by unnecessary and willful incivility, is just as insane a proceeding as to set your house on fire. For politeness is like a counter–an avowedly false coin, with which it is foolish to be stingy.

The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.

A high degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial.

No rose without a thorn but many a thorn without a rose.

Marrying means to halve one’s rights and double one’s duties

I have not yet spoken my last word about women. I believe that if a woman succeeds in withdrawing from the mass, or rather raising herself from above the mass, she grows ceaselessly and more than a man.

We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.

The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain… Music expresses only the quintessence of life and its events, never these themselves.

Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.

Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.

What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.

Seneca #

All cruelty springs from weakness.

It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable.

He who is brave is free

Non est ad astra mollis e terris via" - “There is no easy way from the earth to the stars

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

There is no man to whom a good mind comes before an evil one. It is the evil mind that gets first hold on all of us. Learning virtue means unlearning vice. We should therefore proceed to the task of freeing ourselves from faults with all the more courage because, when once committed to us, the good is an everlasting possession; virtue is not unlearned.

Nothing is ours, except time.

The difficulty comes from our lack of confidence.

He suffers more than necessary, who suffers before it is necessary.

Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well ordered mind than a man’s ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company.

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not.

Associate with people who are likely to improve you.

The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject… And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them… Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced.

Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.

It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.

The best ideas are common property

If you live according to nature, you will never be poor; if you live according to opinion, you will never be rich.

I have, I hold whatever of mine I have ever had. There is no reason for you to suppose me conquered and yourself my conqueror. It is your fortune which has overcome mine. As for those fleeting possessions which change their owners, I know not where they are; what belongs to myself is with me, and ever will be.

The perfect human, full of human and divine virtues, can lose nothing;… the ramparts protecting the wise are lofty, impregnable, divine.

I know not whether wisdom is not best displayed by calmness in the midst of annoyances, just as the greatest proof of a general’s strength in arms and men consists in his quietness and confidence in the midst of an enemy’s country.

Just as sacred things escape from the hands of men, and no injury is done to the godhead by those who destroy temples and melt down images, so whoever attempts to treat the wise man impertinence, insolence, or scorn, does so in vain.

The invulnerable is not that which is never struck, but that which is never wounded.

The Greeks call this calm steadiness of mind euthymia, … What we seek then is how the mind may always pursue a steady, unruffled course, may be pleased with itself, and look with pleasure upon its surroundings, and experience no interruption of this joy, but abide in a peaceful condition without being ever elated or depressed: this will be “peace of mind”, euthymia.

Winston S. Churchill #

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

Tact is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip.

It is not enough that we do our best; sometimes we must do what is required.

Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.

A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.

When there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you.

A small lie needs a bodyguard of bigger lies to protect it.

A good speech should be like a woman’s skirt; long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest.

Friedrich Nietzsche #

When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.

Belief means not wanting to know what is true.

Most people are far too much occupied with themselves to be malicious.

I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.

There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe.

The life of the enemy . Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy’s staying alive.

Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not.

A thought comes when it will, not when I will.

Whoever, at any time, has undertaken to build a new heaven has found the strength for it in his own hell…

Nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.

All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.

In truth,there was only one christian and he died on the cross.

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier and simpler.

Love is blind. Friendship closes its eyes.

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster . . . when you gaze long into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you

The overman…Who has organized the chaos of his passions, given style to his character, and become creative. Aware of life’s terrors, he affirms life without resentment.

As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.

He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.

Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves.

I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.

Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.

Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.

If you know the why, you can live any how.

But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

What is the seal of liberation? Not to be ashamed in front of oneself.

The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. Knowledge–a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest.

A moral system valid for all is basically immoral.

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

One ought to hold on to one’s heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.

The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.

There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.

Paulo Coelho #

There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.

Frank Herbert #

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.

Mark Twain #

The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.

If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.

It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.

The most interesting information come from children, for they tell all they know and then stop.

Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.

Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

What would men be without women? Scarce, sir…mighty scarce.

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other.

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

The trouble is not in dying for a friend, but in finding a friend worth dying for.

The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself.

Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them have never happened.

You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?

Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.

Truman Capote #

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

You call yourself a free spirit, a “wild thing,” and you’re terrified somebody’s gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you’re already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it’s not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It’s wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.

The answer is good things only happen to you if you’re good. Good? Honest is more what I mean… Be anything but a coward, a pretender, an emotional crook, a whore: I’d rather have cancer than a dishonest heart.

Albert Dietrich #

There are perhaps many causes worth dying for, but to me, certainly, there are none worth killing for.

George Orwell #

In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

W.C. Fields #

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.

I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally.

It ain’t what they call you, it’s what you answer to.

I never hold a grudge. As soon as I get even with the son-of-a bitch, I forget it.

If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.

Joseph Conrad #

Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.

Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists principally of dealings with men.

Your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.

Even extreme grief may ultimately ventitself in violence–but more generally takes the form of apathy

We live as we dream–alone….

His very existence was improbable, inexplicable, and altogether bewildering. He was an insoluble problem. It was inconceivable how he had existed, how he had succeeded in getting so far, how he had managed to remain – why he did not instantly disappear.

You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends.

No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work – no man does – but I like what is in the work, - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself, not for others – what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.

Madness alone is truly terrifying, inasmuch as you cannot placate it by threats, persuasion, or bribes.

Let them think what they liked, but I didn’t mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank – but that’s not the same thing.

No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs, and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze. Don’t you know the devilry of lingering starvation, its exasperating torment, its black thoughts, its sombre and brooding ferocity? Well, I do. It takes a man all is inborn strength to fight hunger properly. It’s really easier to face bereavement, dishonour, and the perdition of one’s soul - than this kind of prolonged hunger. Sad, but true. And these chaps, too, had no earthly reason for any kind of scruple. Restraint! I would just as soon have expected restraint from a hyena prowling amongst the corpses of a battlefield.

The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.

Plato #

Never discourage anyone…who continually makes progress, no matter how slow.

One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.

Ignorance, the root and stem of every evil.

Courage is knowing what not to fear.

Excellence” is not a gift, but a skill that takes practice.We do not act “rightly” because we are “excellent”,in fact we achieve “excellence” by acting “rightly”.

Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.

There are two things a person should never be angry at, what they can help, and what they cannot.

In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill… we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one.

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.

Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.

…and when one of them meets the other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy and one will not be out of the other’s sight, as I may say, even for a moment…

Voltaire #

‎Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.

I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?

Now, now my good man, this is no time to be making enemies."(Voltaire on his deathbed in response to a priest asking him that he renounce Satan.)

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

The most important decision you make is to be in a good mood.

It is better to risk saving a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.

It is not enough to conquer; one must learn to seduce.

The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.

Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.

May God defend me from my friends: I can defend myself from my enemies.

The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us

To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid - one must also be polite.

Opinions have caused more ills than the plague or earthquakes on this little globe of ours.

If you have two religions in your land, the two will cut each other’s throats; but if you have thirty religions, they will dwell in peace

When a man is in love, jealous, and just whipped by the Inquisition, he is no longer himself.

I’ve decided to be happy because it’s good for my health.

The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.

Verses which do not teach men new and moving truths do not deserve to be read.

I have been studying for forty years, which is to say forty wasted years; I teach others yet am ignorant of everything; this state of affairs fills my soul with so much humiliation and disgust that my life is intolerable. I was born in Time, I live in Time, and do not know what Time is. I find myself at a point between two eternities, as our wise men say, yet I have no conception of eternity. I am composed of matter, I think, but have never been able to discover what produces thought. I do not know whether or not I think with my head the same way that I hold things with my hands. Not only is the origin of my thought unknown to me, but the origin of my movements is equally hidden: I do not know why I exist. Yet every day people ask me questions on all these issues. I must give answers, yet have nothing worth saying, so I talk a great deal, and am confused and ashamed of myself afterwards for having spoken.

Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.

Love truth, but pardon error.

God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.

Dare to think for yourself.

Herbert Hoover #

My country owes me nothing. It gave me, as it gives every boy and girl, a chance. It gave me schooling, independence of action, opportunity for service and honor.

No one ever listened themselves out of a job.

Wisdom consists not so much in knowing what to do in the ultimate as knowing what to do next.

Epictetus #

First say to yourself what you would be;and then do what you have to do.

How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself and in no instance bypass the discriminations of reason? You have been given the principles that you ought to endorse, and you have endorsed them. What kind of teacher, then, are you still waiting for in order to refer your self-improvement to him? You are no longer a boy, but a full-grown man. If you are careless and lazy now and keep putting things off and always deferring the day after which you will attend to yourself, you will not notice that you are making no progress, but you will live and die as someone quite ordinary. From now on, then, resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside. And whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable, or highly or lowly regarded, remember that the contest is now: you are at the Olympic Games, you cannot wait any longer, and that your progress is wrecked or preserved by a single day and a single event. That is how Socrates fulfilled himself by attending to nothing except reason in everything he encountered. And you, although you are not yet a Socrates, should live as someone who at least wants to be a Socrates.

If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you but answer, “He was ignorant of my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone.

He who laughs at himself never runs out of things to laugh at.

There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power or our will.

It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.

Any person capable of angering you becomes your master;he can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by him.

He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.

Seek not the good in external things;seek it in yourselves.

You know yourself what you are worth in your own eyes; and at what price you will sell yourself. For men sell themselves at various prices. This is why, when Florus was deliberating whether he should appear at Nero’s shows, taking part in the performance himself, Agrippinus replied, ‘Appear by all means.’ And when Florus inquired, ‘But why do not you appear?’ he answered, ‘Because I do not even consider the question.’ For the man who has once stooped to consider such questions, and to reckon up the value of external things, is not far from forgetting what manner of man he is.

Circumstances don’t make the man, they only reveal him to himself.

It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.

The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best.

Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.

Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.

Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems

Freedom is the only worthy goal in life. It is won by disregarding things that lie beyond our control.

Only the educated are free.

Caretake this moment. Immerse yourself in its particulars. Respond to this person, this challenge, this deed. Quit evasions. Stop giving yourself needless trouble. It is time to really live; to fully inhabit the situation you happen to be in now.

A ship should not ride on a single anchor, nor life on a singlehope

To accuse others for one’s own misfortune is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one’s education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one’s education is complete.

Remember, it is not enough to be hit or insulted to be harmed, you must believe that you are being harmed. If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation. Which is why it is essential that we not respond impulsively to impressions; take a moment before reacting, and you will find it easier to maintain control.

Difficulty shows what men are. Therefore when a difficulty falls upon you, remember that God, like a trainer of wrestlers, has matched you with a rough young man. Why? So that you may become an Olympic conqueror; but it is not accomplished without sweat.

If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to external things. Don’t wish to be thought to know anything; and even if you appear to be somebody important to others, distrust yourself. For, it is difficult to both keep your faculty of choice in a state conformable to nature, and at the same time acquire external things. But while you are careful about the one, you must of necessity neglect the other

Know you not that a good man does nothing for appearance sake, but for the sake of having done right?

It is better to die of hunger having lived without grief and fear, than to live with a troubled spirit, amid abundance

Even as the Sun doth not wait for prayers and incantations torise, but shines forth and is welcomed by all: so thou also waitnot for clapping of hands and shouts and praise to do thy duty;nay, do good of thine own accord, and thou wilt be loved like theSun.

Appearances to the mind are of four kinds. Things either are what they appear to be; or they neither are, nor appear to be; or they are, and do not appear to be; or they are not, and yet appear to be. Rightly to aim in all these cases is the wise man’s task.

Never depend on the admiration of others. There is no strength in it. Personal merit cannot be derived from an external source. It is not to be found in your personal associations, nor can it be found in the regard of other people. It is a fact of life that other people, even people who love you, will not necessarily agree with your ideas, understand you, or share your enthusiasms. Grow up! Who cares what other people think about you!

You may fetter my leg, but Zeus himself cannot get the better of my free will.

If you want to make progress, put up with being perceived as ignorant or naive in worldly matters, don’t aspire to a reputation for sagacity. If you do impress others as somebody, don’t altogether believe it. You have to realize, it isn’t easy to keep your will in agreement with nature, as well as externals. Caring about the one inevitably means you are going to shortchange the other.

If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to external things. Don’t wish to be thought to know anything; and even if you appear to be somebody important to others, distrust yourself.

-….when things seem to have reached that stage, merely say “I won’t play any longer”, and take your departure; but if you stay, stop lamenting.

Your happiness depends on three things, all of which are within your power: your will, your ideas concerning the events in which you are involved, and the use you make of your ideas.

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.”….

There is but one way to tranquility of mind and happiness, and that is to account no external things thine own, but to commit all to God.

Do not afflict others with anything that you yourself would not wish to suffer. if you would not like to be a slave, make sure no one is your slave. If you have slaves, you yourself are the greatest slave, for just as freedom is incompatible with slavery, so goodness is incompatible with hypocrisy.

It is unrealistc to expect people to see you as you see yourself.

The first and most important field of philosophy is the application of principles such as “Do not lie.” Next come the proofs, such as why we should not lie. The third field supports and articulates the proofs, by asking, for example, “How does this prove it? What exactly is a proof, what is logical inference, what is contradiction, what is truth, what is falsehood?” Thus, the third field is necessary because of the second, and the second because of the first. The most important, though, the one that should occupy most of our time, is the first. But we do just the opposite. We are preoccupied with the third field and give that all our attention, passing the first by altogether. The result is that we lie – but have no difficulty proving why we shouldn’t.

Most of what passes for legitimate entertainment is inferior or foolish and only caters to or exploits people’s weaknesses. Avoid being one of the mob who indulges in such pastimes. Your life is too short and you have important things to do. Be discriminating about what images and ideas you permit into your mind. If you yourself don’t choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will, and their motives may not be the highest. It is the easiest thing in the world to slide imperceptibly into vulgarity. But there’s no need for that to happen if you determine not to waste your time and attention on mindless pap.

I must die. Must I then die lamenting? I must be put in chains. Must I then also lament? I must go into exile. Does any man then hinder me from going with smiles and cheerfulness and contentment?

You become what you give your attention to.

If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.

The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it. Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests.

Small-minded people blame others. Average people blame themselves. The wise see all blame as foolishness

I laugh at those who think they can damage me. They do not know who I am, they do not know what I think, they cannot even touch the things which are really mine and with which I live.

Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our actions. The things in our control are by nature free, unrestrained, unhindered; but those not in our control are weak, slavish, restrained, belonging to others. Remember, then, that if you suppose that things which are slavish by nature are also free, and that what belongs to others is your own, then you will be hindered. You will lament, you will be disturbed, and you will find fault both with gods and men. But if you suppose that only to be your own which is your own, and what belongs to others such as it really is, then no one will ever compel you or restrain you. Further, you will find fault with no one or accuse no one. You will do nothing against your will. No one will hurt you, you will have no enemies, and you not be harmed.

Rudyard Kipling #

He wrapped himself in quotations - as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.

We’re all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.

A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition

If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,But make allowance for their doubting too;If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wiseIf you can dream - and not make dreams your master;If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;If you can meet with Triumph and DisasterAnd treat those two impostors just the same;If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spokenTwisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out toolsIf you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,And lose, and start again at your beginningsAnd never breathe a word about your loss;If you can force your heart and nerve and sinewTo serve your turn long after they are gone,And so hold on when there is nothing in youExcept the will which says to them: ‘Hold on!‘If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,If all men count with you, but none too much;If you can fill the unforgiving minuteWith sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,And - which is more - you’ll be a Man, my son!

I keep six honest serving men (they taught me all i knew); Theirs names are What and Why and When And How And Where and Who.

I always prefer to believe the best of everybody; it saves so much trouble

The world is very lovely, and it’s very horrible–and it doesn’t care about your life or mine or anything else.

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is hard business. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

Markus Herz #

Be careful about reading health books. Some fine day you’ll die of a misprint.

Leo Tolstoy #

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.

Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.

Aristotle #

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

A friend to all is a friend to none.

I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies, for the hardest victory is over self.

Happiness depends upon ourselves.

Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.

Socrates #

I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think

By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.

If you don’t get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don’t want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can’t hold on to it forever. Your mind is your predicament. It wants to be free of change. Free of pain, free of the obligations of life and death. But change is law and no amount of pretending will alter that reality.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Do not do to others what angers you if done to you by others.

Be nicer than necessary to everyone you meet. Everyone is fighting some kind of battle.

My friend…care for your psyche…know thyself, for once we know ourselves, we may learn how to care for ourselves” -Socrates

Children nowadays are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannise their teachers.

To find yourself, think for yourself.

He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.

No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.

Strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people.

Prefer knowledge to wealth, for the one is transitory, the other perpetual.

The greatest way to live with honour in this world is to be what we pretend to be.

True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.

The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our separate ways, I to die, and you to live. Which of these two is better only God knows.

Oliver Goldsmith #

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

Confucius #

If you make a mistake and do not correct it, this is called a mistake.

It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.

He who knows all the answers has not been asked all the questions.

The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials.

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.

To be wronged is nothing, unless you continue to remember it.

The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life.

It is more shameful to distrust our friends than to be deceived by them.

Forget injuries, never forget kindnesses.

To be wealthy and honored in an unjust society is a disgrace.

Education breeds confidence. Confidence breeds hope. Hope breeds peace.

Oscar Wilde #

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

I don’t want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.

Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

The very essence of romance is uncertainty.

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious

There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor.

I beg your pardon I didn’t recognise you - I’ve changed a lot.

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.

Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.

The nicest feeling in the world is to do a good deed anonymously-and have somebody find out.

Life is too short to learn German

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

Ah! The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analyzed, women…merely adored.

I really don’t see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I’ll certainly try to forget the fact.

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.

I have no objection to anyone’s sex life as long as they don’t practice it in the street and frighten the horses.

Popularity is the one insult I have never suffered.

It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.

Conformity is the last refuge of the unimaginitive

A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone’s feelings unintentionally.

Every woman is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

Eckhart Tolle #

The past has no power over the present moment.

The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.

Some changes look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge.

Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.

Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you.

Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.

Life isn’t as serious as the mind makes it out to be.

You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are.

You don’t love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.

Stephen King #

When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, “Why god? Why me?” and the thundering voice of God answered, There’s just something about you that pisses me off.

Christopher Hitchens #

Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.

Vikram Seth #

God save us from people who mean well.

Patrick E. McLean #

Edwin is prepared to believe that a glass exists. And further, that this glass holds liquid.

Topper had once heard a saying, “If you set out on the path to revenge, first dig two graves.” But things worked a little differently in the savage dwarf’s head. So, he had remembered it like this, “If you set out on the path to revenge, first pour two glasses.” And that’s exactly what he did.

You hunt and catch your own food. Am I correct?““We are fierce predators of the night,” DeChevue said proudly.Edwin tried again, “You hunt and gather your own food?“DeChevue still didn’t get it. “Yes, M’sieur. We hunt, proudly.““You know, there is a special name for people who have to catch and kill everything they eat.““And that name has been the terror of the night from the dawn of man. Which name would you like? I can supply many. Nosferatu? Das Vampire?““Peasant,” Edwin said. “A person who has to provide all his own food is a peasant. How is it that you have lived all this time and are still ignorant of the division of labor?“DeChevue’s mouth opened and closed several times. Each time he seemed on the verge of saying something, yet each time words failed him.

Robert Greene #

A heckler once interrupted Nikita Khrushchev in the middle of a speech in which he was denouncing the crimes of Stalin. “You were a colleague of Stalin’s,” the heckler yelled, “why didn’t you stop him then?” Khrushschev apparently could not see the heckler and barked out, “Who said that?” No hand went up. No one moved a muscle. After a few seconds of tense silence, Khrushchev finally said in a quiet voice, “Now you know why I didn’t stop him.” Instead of just arguing that anyone facing Stalin was afraid, knowing that the slightest sign of rebellion would mean certain death, he had made them feel what it was like to face Stalin—had made them feel the paranoia, the fear of speaking up, the terror of confronting the leader, in this case Khrushchev. The demonstration was visceral and no more argument was necessary.

Noam Chomsky #

Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.

Aldous Huxley #

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.

Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling…

The Savage interrupted him. “But isn’t it natural to feel there’s a God?” “You might as well ask if it’s natural to do up one’s trousers with zippers,” said the Controller sarcastically. “You remind me of another of those old fellows called Bradley. He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons–that’s philosophy. People believe in God because they’ve been conditioned to.

One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.

Orison Swett Marden #

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education,” it was said by Professor Huxley, “is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson which ought to be learned, and, however early a man’s training begins, it is probably the last lesson which he learns thoroughly.

Joseph Stalin #

We don’t let them have ideas. Why would we let them have guns?

It doesnt matter how many people vote, only who counts them.

Anatoly Rybakov #

You could kill a man, but you could never break him.

Abraham Joshua Heschel #

Self-respect is the root of discipline: The sense of dignity growswith the ability to say no to oneself.

Thucydides #

Self-control is the chief element in self-respect, and self-respect is the chief element in courage.

Steven Pressfield #

We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.

Are you paralyzed with fear? That’s a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember one rule of thumb: the more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.

Sigmund Freud #

Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.

Elbert Hubbard #

A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.

Andre Gide #

It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.

William Shakespeare #

Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.

John Green #

I’m in love with you,” he said quietly.“Augustus,” I said.“I am,” he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. “I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.

The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.

Lao Tzu #

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.

Knowing others is intelligence;knowing yourself is true wisdom.Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.

A man with outward courage dares to die; a man with inner courage dares to live.

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

Elizabeth Gilbert #

People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave. A soul mates purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master…

Max Brooks #

Lies are neither bad nor good. Like a fire they can either keep you warm or burn you to death, depending on how they’re used.

Most people don’t believe something can happen until it already has. That’s not stupidity or weakness, that’s just human nature.

The only rule that ever made sense to me I learned from a history, not an economics, professor at Wharton. “Fear,” he used to say, “fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe.” That blew me away. “Turn on the TV,” he’d say. “What are you seeing? People selling their products? No. People selling the fear of you having to live without their products.” Fuckin’ A, was he right. Fear of aging, fear of loneliness, fear of poverty, fear of failure. Fear is the most basic emotion we have. Fear is primal. Fear sells.

Imagine what could be accomplished if only the human race would shed its humanity.

…you don’t have to be Sun freakin Tzu to know that real fighting isn’t about killing or even hurting the other guy, it’s about scaring him enough to call it a day.

They didn’t break me. I broke myself.

If your Soviet neighbor is trying to set fire to your house, you can’t be worrying about the Arab down the block. If suddenly it’s the Arab in your backyard , you can’t be worrying about the People’s Republic of China and if one day the ChiComs show up at your front door with an eviction notice in one hand and a Molotov cocktail in the other, then the last thing you’re going do is look over his shoulder for a walking corpse.

Albert Einstein #

If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.

Stephen Chbosky #

It was the kind of kiss that made me know that I was never so happy in my whole life.

Ralph Waldo Emerson #

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

Always do what you are afraid to do.

When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

Cormac McCarthy #

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.

Gautama Buddha #

No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.

Fernando Pessoa #

My past is everything I failed to be.

Alan Moore #

The past can’t hurt you anymore, not unless you let it.

Happiness is the most insidious prison of all.

Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn’t there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who’s to blame? Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you’re looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn’t be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense.

Lyndon B. Johnson #

We can draw lessons from the past, but we cannot live in it.

If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read “President Can’t Swim.

You know, doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what is right.

Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.

A man without a vote is a man without protection.

While you’re saving your face, you’re losing your ass.

President Lyndon Johnson’s 10 point formula for success: 1. Learn to remember names. Inefficiency at this point may indicate that your interest is not sufficiently outgoing. 2. Be a comfortable person so there is no strain in being with you. Be an old-shoe, old-hat kind of individual. 3. Acquire the quality of relaxed easy-going so that things do not ruffle you.4. Don’t be egotistical. Guard against the impression that you know it all. 5. Cultivate the quality of being interesting so people will get something of value from their association with you. 6. Study to get the “scratchy” elements out of your personality, even those of which you may be unconscious. 7. Sincerely attempt to heal, on an honest Christian basis, every msiunderstanding you have had or now have. Drain off your grievances. 8. Practice liking people until you learn to do so genuinely. 9. Never miss an opportunity to say a word of congratulation upon anyone’s achievement, or express sympathy in sorrow or disappointment. 10. Give spiritual strength to people, and they will give genuine affection to you.

If we stand passively by while the centre of each city becomes a hive of depravation, crime and hopelessness…if we become two people, the suburban affluent and the urban poor, each filled with mistrust and fear for the other…then we shall effectively cripple each generation to come.

We did not choose to be the guardians of the gate, but there is no one else.

Guns and bombs, rockets and warships, are all symbols of human failure.

Sun Tzu #

It is the rule in war, if our forces are ten to the enemy’s one,to surround him; if five to one, to attack him; if twice as numerous,to divide our army into two.

Confront them with annihilation, and they will then survive; plunge them into a deadly situation, and they will then live. When people fall into danger, they are then able to strive for victory.

Order or disorder depends on organisation; courage or cowardice on circumstances; strength or weakness on dispositions.

The general who advances without coveting fame and retreats without fearing disgrace, whose only thought is to protect his country and do good service for his sovereign, is the jewel of the kingdom. Regard your soldiers as your children, and they will follow you into the deepest valleys; look upon them as your own beloved sons, and they will stand by you even unto death.

Robert Harris #

Power brings a man many luxuries, but a clean pair of hands is seldom among them.

A police state is a country run by criminals

Cicero smiled at us. ‘The art of life is to deal with problems as they arise, rather than destory one’s spirit by worrying about them too far in advance. Especially tonight.

Of all human activities, writing is the one for which it is easiest to find excuses not to begin – the desk’s too big, the desk’s too small, there’s too much noise, there’s too much quiet, it’s too hot, too cold, too early, too late. I had learned over the years to ignore them all, and simply to start.

But clever people all make one mistake. They all think everyone else is stupid. And everyone isn’t stupid. They just take a bit more time, that’s all.

Travel is sold as freedom, but we were about as free as lab rats. This is how they’ll manage the next Holocaust, I thought, as I shuffled forward in my stockinged feet: they’ll simply issue us with air tickets and we’ll do whatever we’re told

Civilization was a relentless war that man was doomed to lose eventually. - Pg. 195

Right, you see that girl over there, the one in that group that keeps looking right at you?’…‘Right, let’s say I’m convinced she’s wearing black knickers - she looks like a black knickers kind of gal to me - and I’m so sure that’s what she’s wearing, so positive of that sartorial fact, I want to bet a million dollars on it. The trouble is, if I’m wrong, I’m wiped out. So I also bet she’s wearing knickers that aren’t black, but are any one of a whole basket of colours - let’s say I put nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars on that possibility: that’s the rest of the market; that’s the hedge. This is a crude example, okay, in every sense, but hear me out. Now if I’m right, I make fifty K, but even if I’m wrong I’m going to lose fifty K, because I’m hedged. And because ninety-five per cent of my million dollars is not in use - I’m never going to be called on to show it: the only risk is in the spread - I can make similar bets with other people. Or I can bet it on something else entirely. And the beauty of it is I don’t have to be right all the time - if I can just get the colour of her underwear right fifty-five per cent of the time I’m going to wind up very rich…

Dan Simmons #

There is a fullness and calmness there which can come only from knowing pain.

It occurs to me that our survival may depend upon our talking to one another.

Pain is an interesting and off-putting thing. Few if any things in life concentrate our attention so completely and terribly, and few things are more boring to listen to or read about.

After fifty-five years of dedicating his life and work to the story of ethical systems, Sol Weintraub had come to a single, unshakable conclusion: any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principal which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being was evil.

Once Ummon asked a lesser light Are you a gardener> Yes it replied Why have turnips no roots> Ummon asked the gardener who could not reply Because said Ummon rainwater is plentiful I think about this for a moment. Ummon’s koan is not difficult now that I am regaining the knack of listening for the shadow of substance beneath the words. The little Zen parable is Ummon’s way of saying, with some sarcasm, that the answer lies within science and within the antilogic which scientific answers so often provide. The rainwater comment answers everything and nothing, as so much of science has for so long. As Ummon and the other Masters teach, it explains why the giraffe evolved a long neck but never why the other animals did not. It explains why humankind evolved to intelligence, but not why the tree near the front gate refused to.

Who are you, Hockenberry, to thwart Fate and defy the Will of the Gods?I am me, Thomas Hockenberry. I am fed up with these power-addled thugs who call themselves gods.

Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.

The shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance.

In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.

Like your kind/ we usually destroy what we cannot understand

Humanity had become as blasé about sharing their lives with potential AI monitoring as pre-Civil War Old Earth USA-southern families had been about speaking in front of their human slaves. Nothing could be done about it—every human above the lowest Dregs’ Hive poverty class had a comlog with biomonitor, many had implants, and each of these was tuned to the music of the datasphere, monitored by elements of the datasphere, dependent upon functions of the datasphere—so humans accepted their lack of privacy.

In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.

And above it all the butterfly effect. The sure knowledge that the entire life of a human being is like a single day in that human’s life: unplannable, unpredictable, governed by the hidden tides of chaotic factors and buffered by butterfly wings…

THERE WILL BE NO FURTHER MISUSE OF THIS CHANNEL. YOU ARE DISTURBING OTHERS WHO ARE USING IT TO SERIOUS PURPOSE. ACCESS WILL BE RESTORED WHEN YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT IT IS FOR. GOODBYE

I discovered what a mental stimulant physical labor could be; not mere physical labor, I should add, but absolutely spine-bending, lung-racking, gut-ripping, ligament-tearing, and ball-breaking physical labor. But as long as the task is both onerous and repetitive, I discovered, the mind is not only free to wander to more imaginative climes, it actually flees to higher planes.

He enjoyed the soft sound of night wind and the knowledge that he was the only boy — perhaps the only human being — out there in the dark on the windy, frozen-grass meadows on this night that smelled of coming snow, alienated from the lighted windows and the warm hearths, very aware that he was of the village but not part of it at that moment. It was a thrilling, almost erotic feeling — an illicit discovery of self separated from everyone and everything else in the cold and dark

Tsunetomo Yamamoto #

Respect, Honesty, Courage, Rectitude, Loyalty, Honour, Benevolence

There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A man’s whole life is a succession of moment after moment. There will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue. Live being true to the single purpose of the moment.

It is a wretched thing that the young men of today are so contriving and so proud of their material posessions. Men with contriving hearts are lacking in duty. Lacking in duty, they will have no self-respect.

Even if it seems certain that you will lose, retaliate. Neither wisdom nor technique has a place in this. A real man does not think of victory or defeat. He plunges recklessly towards an irrational death. By doing this, you will awaken from your dreams.

Matters of great concern should be treated lightly.” Master Ittei commented, “Matters of small concern should be treated seriously.

To give a person an opinion one must first judge well whether that person is of the disposition to receive it or not.

There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to all things.

Sincerity does not only complete the self; it is the means by which all things are completed. As the self is completed, there is human-heartedness; as things are completed, there is wisdom. This is the virtue of one’s character, and the Way of joining the internal and external. Thus, when we use this, everything is correct.

If one is but secure at the foundation, he will not be pained by departure from minor details or affairs that are contrary to expectation. But in the end, the details of a matter are important. The right and wrong of one’s way of doing things are found in trivial matters.

If by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way.

This is the substance of the Way of the Samurai: if by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way. his whole life will be without blame, and he will succeed in his calling.

Bushido is realized in the presence of death. This means choosing death whenever there is a choice between life and death. There is no other reasoning.

If a warrior is not unattached to life and death, he will be of no use whatsoever. The saying that “All abilities come from one mind” sounds as though it has to do with sentient matters, but it is in fact a matter of being unattached to life and death. With such non-attachment one can accomplish any feat.

Tether even a roasted chicken.

When someone is giving you his opinion, you should receive it with deep gratitude even though it is worthless. If you don’t, he will not tell you the things that he has seen and heard about you again. It is best to both give and receive opinions in a friendly way.

All that matters is having single-minded purpose ( ichinen), in the here and now. Life is an ongoing succession of ‘one will’ at a time, each and every moment. A man who realizes this truth need not hurry to do, or seek, anything else anymore. Just live in the present with single-minded purpose. People forget this important truth, and keep seeking other things to accomplish.

Being superior to others is nothing other than having people talk about your affairs and listening to their opinions. The general run of people settle for their own opinions and thus never excel. Having a discussion with a person is one step in xcelling him (…)

With regards to the way of death, if you are prepared to die at any time, you will be able to meet your release from life with equanimity. As calamities are usually not as bad as anticipated beforehand, it is foolhardy to feel anxiety about tribulations not yet endured. Just accept that the worst possible fate for a man in service is to become a rōnin, or death by seppuku. Then nothing will faze you.

One of Matsudaira Sagami no kami’s retainers went to Kyoto on a matter of debt collection and took up lodgings by renting living quarters in a townhouse. One day while standing out front watching the people go by, he heard a passerby say, “They say that Lord Matsudaira’s men are involved in a fight right now.” The retainer thought, “How worrisome that some of my companions are involved in a fight. There are some men to relieve those at Edo staying here. Perhaps these are the men involved.” He asked the passerby of the location, but when he arrived out of breath, his companions had already been cut down and their adversaries were at the point of delivering the coup de grace. He quickly let out a yell, cut the two men down, and returned to his lodgings. This matter was made known to an official of the shogunate, and the man was called up before him and questioned. “You gave assistance in your companions’ fight and thus disregarded the government’s ordinance. This is true beyond a doubt, isn’t it?” The man replied, “I am from the country, and it is difficult for me to understand everything that Your Honor is saying. Would you please repeat that?” The official got angry and said, “Is there something wrong with your ears? Didn’t you abet a fight, commit bloodshed, disregard the government’s ordinance, and break the law?” The man then replied, “I have at length understood what you are saying. Although you say that I have broken the law and disregarded the government’s ordinance, I have by no means done so. The reason for this is that all living things value their lives, and this goes without saying for human beings. I, especially, value my life. However, I thought that to hear a rumor that one’s friends are involved in a fight and to pretend not to hear this is not to preserve the Way of the Samurai, so I ran to the place of action. To shamelessly return home after seeing my friends struck down would surely have lengthened my life, but this too would be disregarding the Way. In preserving the Way, one will throw away his own precious life. Thus, in order to preserve the Way of the Samurai and not to disregard the Samurai Ordinances, I quickly threw away my life at that place. I beg that you execute me immediately.” The official was very impressed and later dismissed the matter, communicating to Lord Matsudaira, “You have a very able samurai in your service. Please treasure him.

To think that being righteous is the best one can do and to do one’s utmost to be righteous will, on the contrary, bring many mistakes. The Way is in a higher place than righteousness. This is very difficult to discover, but it is the highest wisdom. When seen from this standpoint, things like righteousness are rather shallow. If one does not understand this on his own, it cannot be known.

Learning is a good thing, but more often it leads to mistakes. It is like the admonition of the priest Konan. It is worthwhile just looking at the deeds of accomplished persons for the purpose of knowing our own insufficiencies. But often this does not happen. For the most part, we admire our own opinions and become fond of arguing.

To think that being righteous is the best one can do and to do one’s utmost to be righteous will, on the contrary, bring many mistakes. The way is in a higher place than righteousness.

I do not know how to defeat others. All I know is the path to defeat myself. Today one must be better than yesterday, and tomorrow better than today. The pursuit of perfection is a lifelong quest that has no end.

Knowing the Way is to know your own faults. Discovering your imperfections with endless introspection and to remedy them by spending your life training body and mind (shugyō), that is the Way.

It is spiritless to think that you cannot attain to that which you have seen and heard the masters attain. The masters are men. You are also a man. If you think that you will be inferior in doing something, you will be on that road very soon.

There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you will still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything.

Be true to the thought of the moment and avoid distraction. Other than continuing to exert yourself, enter into nothing else, but go to the extent of living single thought by single thought.

A real man does not think of victory or defeat. He plunges recklessly towards an irrational death. By doing this, you will awaken from your dreams.

No matter if the enemy has thousands of men, there is fulfillment in simply standing them off and being determined to cut them all down, starting from one end.

Imitating another style is simply a sham.

In the highest level a man has the look of knowing nothing .

Purity is something that cannot be attained except by piling effort upon effort.

Do not rely on following the degree of understanding that you have discovered, but simply think, “This is not enough.

Human life is truly a short affair. It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.

Although this may be a most difficult thing, if one will do it, it can be done. There is nothing that one should suppose cannot be done.

Victory and defeat are matters of the temporary force of circumstances. The way of avoiding shame is different. It is simply in death.

In offering one’s opinion, one must first ascertain whether or not the recipient is in the right frame of mind to receive counsel.

There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you still get the same soaking. This

Only when you constantly live as though already a corpse (jōjū shinimi) will you be able to find freedom in the martial Way, and fulfill your duties without fault throughout your life.” (1-2) In other words, adherents of bushido should seek to nurture an indomitable fighting spirit free from concerns of life and death.

Alastair Reynolds #

Can we drop the ‘artificial intelligence’? It’s a bit like me calling you a meat-based processing system.

A city’s only ever three hot meals away from anarchy.

It’s the people who don’t worry—those who never have any doubts that what they’re doing is good and right—they’re the ones that cause the problems.

As the old saying went, the Manhattan Project wasn’t built in a day. Or was that Rome? Something to do with Earth, anyway.

How did you . . . pass the time?’ Sunday asked. ‘You couldn’t just ching out of it, could you?’‘We had a different form of chinging,’ Eunice said. ‘An earlier type of virtual-reality technology, much more robust and completely unaffected by time lag. You may have heard of it. We called it “reading”.

It’s an ancient technique known as lying, Khouri.

Life is precious. Infinitely so. Perhaps it takes a machine intelligence to appreciate that."~“Understanding Space & Time

…the next time you need a piece of apparently obscure information, try asking a science fiction writer. You might be surprised.

I don’t know.” That was typical Sajaki; like all the genuinely clever people Sylveste had met he knew better than to feign understanding where none existed.

I thought we were better then this.““We’re human. Be thankful we’ve moved on from clubbing each other’s brains out every five minutes.

Even monsters are beautiful.

Victory loses its meaning without the memory of what you’ve vanquished.

First rule of complex systems,” I said. “You can’t tell friends from enemies.

Khouri had never really given much thought to the slowness of light. There was nothing in the universe that moved faster . . . but, as she now saw, it was glacial compared to the speed that would be needed to keep their love alive.

I think I’ve reduced the amount of blood in my caffeine system to an acceptable level, if that’s what you mean.

…’ I want to make sense of the world, Doctor. I want to undo the screws, take off its elegant face, glimpse the glittering movement, poke around in the gears and then decide if it’s broken or not. Then I want to know if there is anything we can do to put it back together again. There may not be, but at least we’d have the satisfaction of knowing.’’ We’d be satisfied by our own impotence?’’ We won’t know until we try

What you encountered was an abomination, a military intelligence. It was designed to be insidious and spiteful and inimical to life, and it wasn’t smart enough to have a conscience.

There was something heartbreakingly beautiful about the lights of distant ships, I thought. It was something that touched both on human achievement and the vastness against which those achievements seemed so frail. It was the same thing whether the lights belonged to a caravel battling the swell on a stormy horizon or a diamond-hulled starship which had just sliced its way through interstellar space.

Mathematics is a terrible calling. It’s as merciless as gravity. It swallows the soul. There’s a point near a black hole called the last stable orbit. Once you drop below that radius, no force in the universe can stop you falling all the way in. That’s what happened to your mother – she swam too close to theory, fell below the last stable orbit.

if human beings really grasped how synthetic their world was - how much of it was stitched together not from direct perception, but from interpolation, memory, educated guesswork - they would go quietly mad.

History is what we write, not what we remember. Why should we tarnish the memory of our planet by enshrining our less then noble deeds?

That’s what happens when you’ve had great success in life—when you’ve achieved the one goal you always desired. You lose a sense of purpose. Your smallest anxieties fester and magnify. Your fears turn inward, and attach themselves to irrational concerns.

Sooner or later everything boils down to trust. You just have to make that leap of faith.

The Melding Plague attacked our society at the core. It was not quite a biological virus, not quite a software virus, but a strange and shifting chimera of the two. No pure strain of the plague has ever been isolated, but in its pure form it must resemble a kind of nano-machinery, analogous to the molecular-scale assemblers of our own medichine technology. That it must be of alien origin seems beyond doubt. Equally clear is the fact that nothing we have thrown against the plague has done more than slow it. More often than not, our interventions have only made things worse. The plague adapts to our attacks; it perverts our weapons and turns them against us. Some kind of buried intelligence seems to guide it. We don’t know whether the plague was directed toward humanity—or whether we have just been terribly unlucky.

We stabilised the Wall’s degradation with software running on dumb machines,” she said. “But when Felka was born we found that she managed the task just as efficiently as the computers; in some ways better than they ever did. In fact, she seemed to thrive on it. It was as if in the Wall she found…” Galiana trailed off. “I was going to say a friend.” “Why don’t you?” “Because the Wall’s just a machine. Which means if Felka recognised kinship…what would that make her?

Cowards were exactly the kind of people you wanted around nuclear technology.

Douglas Preston #

Dr. Albert Frock: Well, how goes the gradual extinction of the human race, Lieutenant? Lt. Vincent D’Agosta: I’m doing what I can to keep it orderly.

Miyamoto Musashi #

If you are not progressing along the true way, a slight twist in the mind can become a major twist. This must be pondered well.

1. Accept everything just the way it is.2. Do not seek pleasure for its own sake.3. Do not, under any circumstances, depend on a partial feeling.4. Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.5. Be detached from desire your whole life long.6. Do not regret what you have done.7. Never be jealous.8. Never let yourself be saddened by a separation.9. Resentment and complaint are appropriate neither for oneself nor others.10. Do not let yourself be guided by the feeling of lust or love.11. In all things have no preferences.12. Be indifferent to where you live.13. Do not pursue the taste of good food.14. Do not hold on to possessions you no longer need.15. Do not act following customary beliefs.16. Do not collect weapons or practice with weapons beyond what is useful.17. Do not fear death.18. Do not seek to possess either goods or fiefs for your old age.19. Respect Buddha and the gods without counting on their help.20. You may abandon your own body but you must preserve your honour.21. Never stray from the Way.

there is nothing outside of yourself that can ever enable you to get better, stronger, richer, quicker, or smarter. Everything is within. Everything exists. Seek nothing outside of yourself.

Do not sleep under a roof. Carry no money or food. Go alone to places frightening to the common brand of men. Become a criminal of purpose. Be put in jail, and extricate yourself by your own wisdom.

Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world

Do not regret what you have done

All man are the same except for their belief in their own selves, regardless of what others may think of them

The important thing in strategy is to suppress the enemy’s useful actions but allow his useless actions

To become the enemy, see yourself as the enemy of the enemy

I dreamt of worldly success once.

A man cannot understand the art he is studying if he only looks for the end result without taking the time to delve deeply into the reasoning of the study.

The ultimate aim of martial arts is not having to use them

Today is victory over yourself of yesterday; tomorrow is your victory over lesser men.

When in a fight to the death, one wants to employ all one’s weapons to the utmost. I must say that to die with one’s sword still sheathed is most regrettable.

Do nothing which is of no use

A bullet from a gun does not make a distinction between practice and combat. You are training to be one and the same way in your life

You should not have any special fondness for a particular weapon, or anything else, for that matter. Too much is the same as not enough. Without imitating anyone else, you should have as much weaponry as suits you.

Respect Buddha and the gods without counting on their help

You may abandon your own body but you must preserve your honour.

Bertrand Russell #

It’s easy to fall in love. The hard part is finding someone to catch you.

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.

The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence

That is the idea – that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with all its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.You may think that I am going too far when I say that that is still so. I do not think that I am. Take one fact. You will bear with me if I mention it. It is not a pleasant fact, but the churches compel one to mention facts that are not pleasant. Supposing that in this world that we live in today an inexperienced girl is married to a syphilitic man; in that case the Catholic Church says, ‘This is an indissoluble sacrament. You must endure celibacy or stay together. And if you stay together, you must not use birth control to prevent the birth of syphilitic children.’ Nobody whose natural sympathies have not been warped by dogma, or whose moral nature was not absolutely dead to all sense of suffering, could maintain that it is right and proper that that state of things should continue.That is only an example. There are a great many ways in which, at the present moment, the church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of progress and improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. ‘What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy.

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

I do not like mystical language, and yet I hardly know how to express what I mean without employing phrases that sound poetic rather than scientific.

Socrates could enjoy a banquet now and again, and must have derived considerable satisfaction from his conversations while the hemlock was taking effect, but most of his life he lived quietly with Xanthippe, taking a constitutional in the afternoon, and perhaps meeting with a few friends by the way. Kant is said never to have been more than ten miles from Konigsberg in all his life. Darwin, after going round the world, spent the whole rest of his life in his own house. Marx, after stirring up a few revolutions, decided to spend the remainder of his days in the British Museum. Altogether it will be found that a quiet life is characteristic of great men, and that their pleasures have not been of the sort that would look exciting to the outward eye. No great achievement is possible without persistent work, so absorbing and so difficult that little energy is left over for the more strenuous kinds of amusement, except such as serve to recuperate physical energy during holidays, of which Alpine climbing may serve as the best example.

The word conscience covers as a matter of fact several different feelings; the simplest of these is the fear of being found out. You, reader, have, I am sure, lived a completely blameless life, but if you will ask some one who has at some time acted in a manner for which he would be punished if it became known, you will find that when discovery seemed imminent, the person in question repented of his crime.

But even when a man has offended against his own rational code, I doubt whether a sense of sin is the best method of arriving at a better way of life. There is in the sense of sin something abject, something lacking in self-respect. No good was ever done to any one by the loss of self-respect. The rational man will regard his own undesirable acts, as he regards those of others, as acts produced by certain circumstances, and to be avoided either by a fuller realization that they are undesirable, or, where this is possible, by avoidance of the circumstances that caused them.

The trouble, in fact, is a difficult one to deal with, since it is inflamed alike by sympathy and by lack of sympathy. The person inclined to persecution mania, when he finds a hard-luck story believed, will embellish it until he reaches the frontier of credibility; when, on the other hand, he finds it disbelieved, he has merely another example of the peculiar hard-heartedness of mankind towards himself.

The immense majority of even the noblest persons’ actions have self-regarding motives, nor is this to be regretted, since if it were otherwise, the human race could not survive. A man who spent his time seeing that others were fed and forgot to feed himself would perish.

Do not expect too much of others. … . This is to expect of another a degree of altruism which is contrary to reason, since the loss to the altruist is greater than the gain to the egoist. In all your dealings with other people, especially with those who are nearest and dearest, it is important and not always easy to remember that they see life from their own angle and as it touches their own ego, not from your angle and as it touches yours. No person should be expected to distort the main lines of his life for the sake of another individual. On occasion there may exist such a strong affection that even the greatest sacrifices become natural, but if they are not natural they should not be made, and no person should be held blameworthy for not making them.

But self-deception of this kind (ed persecution) cannot lead to any solid happiness. In the back of your mind you will know that the facts are otherwise, and in order to conceal this from yourself as far as possible, you will have to invent more and more fantastic hypotheses. The strain of trying to believe these will, in the end, become very great. And since, moreover, they involve the belief that you are the object of widespread hostility, they will only safeguard your self-esteem by inflicting the very painful feeling that you are at odds with the world. No satisfaction based upon self-deception is solid, and however unpleasant the truth may be, it is better to face it once for all, to get used to it, and to proceed to build your life in accordance with it.

…suggest four general maxims, which will prove an adequate preventive of persecution mania if their truth is sufficiently realized. The first is: remember that your motives are not always as altruistic as they seem to yourself. The second is: don’t overestimate your own merits. The third is: don’t expect others to take as much interest in you as you do yourself. And the fourth is: don’t imagine that most people give enough thought to you to have any desire to persecute you.

It is in the moments when the mind is most active and the fewest things are forgotten that the most intense joys are experienced. This indeed is one of the best touchstones of happiness. The happiness that requires intoxication of no matter what sort is a spurious and unsatisfying kind. The happiness that is genuinely satisfying is accompanied by the fullest exercise of our faculties, and the fullest realization of the world in which we live.

No man need fear that by making himself rational he will make his life dull. On the contrary, since rationality consists in the main of internal harmony, the man who achieves it is freer in his contemplation of the world and in the use of his energies to achieve external purposes that is the man who is perpetually hampered by inward conflicts. Nothing is so dull as to be encased in self, nothing so exhilarating as to have attention and energy directed outwards.

It is in the moments when the mind is most active and the fewest things are forgotten that the most intense joys are experienced.

Sin makes a man unhappy and makes him feel inferior. Being unhappy, he is likely to make claims upon other people which are excessive and which prevent him from enjoying happiness in personal relations. Feeling inferior, he will have a grudge against those who seem superior. He will find admiration difficult and envy easy.

Anything you’re good at contributes to happiness.

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

When considering marriage one should ask oneself this question; ‘will I be able to talk with this person into old age?’ Everything else is transitory, the most time is spent in conversation.

Every isolated passion, is, in isolation, insane; sanity may be defined as synthesis of insanities. Every dominant passion generates a dominant fear, the fear of its non-fulfillment. Every dominant fear generates a nightmare, sometimes in form of explicit and conscious fanaticism, sometimes in paralyzing timidity, sometimes in an unconscious or subconscious terror which finds expression only in dreams. The man who wishes to preserve sanity in a dangerous world should summon in his own mind a parliament of fears, in which each in turn is voted absurd by all the others.

A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.

Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who usually feeds them. We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be misleading. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.

One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways.

These illustrations suggest four general maxims…. The first is: remember that your motives are not always as altruistic as they seem to yourself. The second is: don’t over-estimate your own merits. The third is: don’t expect others to take as much interest in you as you do yourself. And the fourth is: don’t imagine that most people give enough thought to you to have any special desire to persecute you.

Anonymous #

War does not determine who is right — only who is left.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection.

When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser.

Evelyn Beatrice Hall #

I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write.

Joseph Fink #

It was a fair question, although the problem with fair questions is that they are asked about an unfair world.

Pedro Calderon de la Barca #

When love is not madness it is not love.

Gabriel García Márquez #

You can’t eat hope,’ the woman said.You can’t eat it, but it sustains you,’ the colonel replied.

A true friend is the one who holds your hand and touches your heart

It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.

He dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of living each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs.

Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry.

All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.

wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.

The world must be all fucked up,” he said then, “when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice…

sex is the consolation you have when you can’t have love

It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.

Tell him yes. Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no.

But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.

The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.

He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.

Marcus Aurelius #

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

Misfortune nobly born is good fortune.

Remember two things: i. that everything has always been the same, and keeps recurring, and it makes no difference whether you see the same things recur in a hundred years or two hundred, or in an infinite period; ii. that the longest-lived and those who will die soonest lose the same thing. The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have you cannot lose.

Think of your many years of procrastination; how the gods have repeatedly granted you further periods of grace, of which you have taken no advantage. It is time now to realise the nature of the universe to which you belong, and of that controlling Power whose offspring you are; and to understand that your time has a limit set to it. Use it, then, to advance your enlightenment; or it will be gone, and never in your power again.

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.

The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.

How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.

Here is a rule to remember in future, when anything tempts you to feel bitter: not “This is misfortune,” but “To bear this worthily is good fortune.

If you work at that which is before you, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing anything else to distract you, but keeping your divine part pure, as if you should be bound to give it back immediately; if you hold to this, expecting nothing, fearing nothing, but satisfied with your present activity according to nature, and with heroic truth in every word and sound which you utter, you will live happy. And there is no-one who is able to prevent this.

You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.

When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love …

If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.

Whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.

When another blames you or hates you, or people voice similar criticisms, go to their souls, penetrate inside and see what sort of people they are. You will realize that there is no need to be racked with anxiety that they should hold any particular opinion about you.

How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbour says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy.

Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.

Do not indulge in dreams of having what you have not, but reckon up the chief of the blessings you do possess, and then thankfully remember how you would crave for them if they were not yours.

Robert Louis Stevenson #

Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.

Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.

She had an evil face, smoothed by hypocrisy; but her manners were excellent.

An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.

To be feared of a thing and yet to do it, is what makes the prettiest kind of a man.

The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.

An imperturbable demeanour comes from perfect patience. Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.

Neal Stephenson #

See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places,

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

She’s a woman, you’re a dude. You’re not supposed to understand her. That’s not what she’s after…. She doesn’t want you to understand her. She knows that’s impossible. She just wants you to understand yourself. Everything else is negotiable.

Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.

Did you win your sword fight?““Of course I won the fucking sword fight,” Hiro says. “I’m the greatest sword fighter in the world.““And you wrote the software.““Yeah. That, too,” Hiro says.

Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was.

This “sir, yes sir” business, which would probably sound like horseshit to any civilian in his right mind, makes sense to Shaftoe and to the officers in a deep and important way. Like a lot of others, Shaftoe had trouble with military etiquette at first. He soaked up quite a bit of it growing up in a military family, but living the life was a different matter. Having now experienced all the phases of military existence except for the terminal ones (violent death, court-martial, retirement), he has come to understand the culture for what it is: a system of etiquette within which it becomes possible for groups of men to live together for years, travel to the ends of the earth, and do all kinds of incredibly weird shit without killing each other or completely losing their minds in the process. The extreme formality with which he addresses these officers carries an important subtext: your problem, sir, is deciding what you want me to do, and my problem, sir, is doing it. My gung-ho posture says that once you give the order I’m not going to bother you with any of the details–and your half of the bargain is you had better stay on your side of the line, sir, and not bother me with any of the chickenshit politics that you have to deal with for a living. The implied responsibility placed upon the officer’s shoulders by the subordinate’s unhesitating willingness to follow orders is a withering burden to any officer with half a brain, and Shaftoe has more than once seen seasoned noncoms reduce green lieutenants to quivering blobs simply by standing before them and agreeing, cheerfully, to carry out their orders.

Because, Jack, you volunteered to be taken down into eternal torment in place of her. This is the absolute minimum (unless I’m mistaken) that any female requires from her man.

A few dud universes can really clutter up your basement.

Software development, like professional sports, has a way of making thirty-year-old men feel decrepit.

What would the engineer say, after you had explained your problem and enumerated all of the dissastisfactions in your life? He would probably tell you that life is a very hard and complicated thing; that no interface can change that; that anyone who believes otherwise is a sucker; and that if you don’t like having choices made for you, you should start making your own.

Hacker with Bullhorn: “Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!“Prospective Station Wagon Buyer: “I know what you say is true…but…er…I don’t know how to maintain a tank!“Bullhorn: “You don’t know how to maintain a station wagon either!“Buyer: “But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music.“Bullhorn: “But if you accept one of our free tanks, we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!“Buyer: “Stay away from my house, you freak!

They made data a controlled substance.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry #

True love begins when nothing is looked for in return.

Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.

It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.

If a composer suffers from loss of sleep and his sleeplessness induces him to turn out masterpieces, what a profitable loss it is!

No destiny attacks us from outside. But, within him, man bears his fate and there comes a moment when he knows himself vulnerable; and then, as in a vertigo, blunder upon blunder lures him.

She knew this man’s smile, his gentle ways of love, but not his godlike fury in the storm. She might snare him in a fragile net of music, love and flowers, but, at each departure, he would break forth without, it seemed to her, the least regret.

Even though human life may be the most precious thing on earth, we always behave as if there were something of higher value than human life.

I am looking for friends. What does that mean – tame?““It is an act too often neglected,” said the fox. “It means to establish ties.” “To establish ties?” “Just that,” said the fox. “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world….

People have forgotten this truth,” the fox said. “But you mustn’t forget it. You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed. You’re responsible for your rose.

If you want to build a shipdon’t herd people together to collect woodand don’t assign them tasks and work,but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

In every crowd are certain persons who seem just like the rest, yet they bear amazing messages.

It is such a mysterious place, the land of tears.

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

Supposing I know of a flower that is absolutely unique, that is nowhere to be found except on my planet, and any minute that flower could accidentally be eaten up by a little lamb, isn’t that important? If a person loves a flower that is the only one of its kind on all the millions and millions of stars, then gazing at the night sky is enough to make him happy. He says to himself “My flower is out there somewhere.” But if the lamb eats the flower, then suddenly it’s as if all the stars had stopped shining. Isn’t that important?

One only understands the things that one tames,” said the fox. “Men haveno more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at theshops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and somen have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me. . .

And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure . . . And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, ‘Yes, the stars always make me laugh!’ And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you…

Robert Frost #

Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

These woods are lovely, dark and deep,But I have promises to keep,And miles to go before I sleep,And miles to go before I sleep.

Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.

A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age.

A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.

How many things would you attemptIf you knew you could not fail

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out.

Families break up when they get hints you don’t intend and miss hints that you do.

Kahlil Gibran #

If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. If they don’t, they never were.

You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.

I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.

Tenderness and kindness are not signs of weakness and despair, but manifestations of strength and resolution.

You may forget with whom you laughed, but you will never forget with whom you wept.

Trust in dreams, for in them is the hidden gate to eternity.

Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.

Votre joie est votre tristesse sans masque.

The lights of stars that were extinguished ages ago still reaches us. So it is with great men who died centuries ago, but still reach us with the radiations of their personalities.

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potters oven?And is not the lute that soothes your spirits the very wood that was hollowed with knives?

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being,the more joy you can contain.Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

Your children are not your children.They are sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you.And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.You may give them your love but not your thoughts,For they have their own thoughts.You may house their bodies but not their souls,For thir souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.The archer sees the make upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness.For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He also loves the bow that is stable.

For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

No human relation gives one possession in another—every two souls are absolutely different. In friendship or in love, the two side by side raise hands together to find what one cannot reach alone.

Solitude has soft, silky hands, but with strong fingers it grasps the heart and makes it ache with sorrow.

An eye for an eye, and the whole world would be blind.

For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?

Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper,That we may record our emptiness.

Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

It takes a minute to have a crush on someone, an hour to like someone, and a day to love someone… but it takes a lifetime to forget someone.

If the other person injures you, you may forget the injury; but if you injure him you will always remember

Men who do not forgive women their little faults will never enjoy their great virtues.

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.Much of your pain is self-chosen.It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquillity:For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen,And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.

Let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit.

When you part from your friend, you grieve not;For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, asthe mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.

For what is your friend that you should seek him with hours to kill? Seek him always with hours to live.For it is his to fill your need, but not your emptiness.And in th sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures.For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.

These things he said in words. But much in his heart remained unsaid.For he himself could not speak his deeper secret.

The real test of good manners is to be able to put up with bad manners pleasantly.

Love one another, but make not a bond of love:Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.

You shall be free indeed when your days are not without a care, nor your nights without a want and a grief, but rather when these things girdle your life and yet you rise above them naked and unbound.

Fyodor Dostoevsky #

What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.

Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.

Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn’t calculate his happiness.

The soul is healed by being with children.

The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.

Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.

Yann Martel #

When you’ve suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.

Graham Greene #

Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel.

Hate is a lack of imagination.

I don’t care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations…I don’t think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren’t there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?

I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist.

Most things disappoint till you look deeper.

People who like quotes love meaningless generalizations

Pain is easy to write. In pain we’re all happily individual. But what can one write about happiness?

When we are not sure, we are alive.

We’d forgive most things if we knew the facts.

A man kept his character even when he was insane.

Pity is cruel. Pity destroys.

We are all resigned to death: it’s life we aren’t resigned to.

It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable.

One has no talent. I have no talent. It’s just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.

As long as nothing happens anything is possible…

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector.

The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.

I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can’t love and do nothing.

If only it were possible to love without injury – fidelity isn’t enough: I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her. The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation. In a way I was glad that my wife had struck out at me again – I had forgotten her pain for too long, and this was the only kind of recompense I could give her. Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower.

But it is impossible to go through life without trust; that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done. It isn’t being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love–it’s being unhappy together.

Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel; sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.

I can never think of you as a friend. You can do without a friend.

Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.

I want men to admire me, but that’s a trick you learn at school–a movement of the eyes, a tone of voice, a touch of the hand on the shoulder or the head. If they think you admire them, they will admire you because of your good taste, and when they admire you, you have an illusion for a moment that there’s something to admire.

My passion for Sarah had killed simple lust forever. Never again would I be able to enjoy a woman without love.

You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Beauty is like success: we can’t love it for long.

Robert A. Heinlein #

Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.

Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.

Eleanor Roosevelt #

It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death.

Sophocles #

All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride.

The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.

One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.

If you try to cure evil with evilyou will add more pain to your fate.

There’s nothing in the world so demoralizing as money.

The happiest life is to be without thought

There is no greater evil than men’s failure to consult and to consider.

Unwanted favours gain no gratitude.

Edgar Allan Poe #

Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.

Red Haircrow #

You don’t have to disrespect and insult others simply to hold your own ground. If you do, that shows how shaky your own position is.

Whatever your difficulty, whatever your hardship in life: Dance and make the song you sing your prayer. Sing it courageously, and with each step strengthen yourself with the knowledge and wisdom of your elders, so that whatever next happens, you can survive and not lose your rhythm.

Aesop #

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Ernest Hemingway #

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.

But man is not made for defeat,” he said. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

Write hard and clear about what hurts.

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

Maybe…you’ll fall in love with me all over again.““Hell,” I said, “I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?““Yes. I want to ruin you.““Good,” I said. “That’s what I want too.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

Benjamin Franklin #

Security without liberty is called prison.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Many people die at twenty five and aren’t buried until they are seventy five.

Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.

By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.

How many observe Christ’s birthday! How few, His precepts!

Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

Tis a great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults; greater to tell him his.

Write to Please Yourself.When You write to Please OthersYou end up Pleasing No one.

Critics are our friends, they show us our faults.

He that speaks much, is much mistaken.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.

Instead of cursing the darkness, light a candle.

The securest place is a prison cell, but there is no liberty

Brian Kernighan #

Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

Don’t comment bad code—rewrite it.

C is not a big language, and it is not well served by a big book.

Tom Holt #

Telling lies is a bit like tiling bathrooms - if you don’t know how to do it properly, it’s best not to try.

Just when you’ve squared up to the solemn realisation that life is a bitch, it turns round and does something nice, just to confuse you. - Emily Spitzer, The Better Mousetrap

Not only had he lost the only girl he’d ever loved, he’d lost her in duplicate, like some heartbroken but highly efficient civil servant.

Among the gods, there is a dispute as to which one of them originally thought of Christianity; or, as they call it, the Great Leg Pull. Apollo has the best claim, but a sizeable minority support Pluto, ex-God of the Dead, on the grounds that he has a really sick sense of humour.How would it be, suggested the unidentified god, if first we tell them all to love their neighbour, pack in the killing and thieving, and be nice to each other. Then we let them start burning heretics.

The conscientious arsonist doesn’t just set the building on fire; first he fills the fire extinguishers with petrol.

A romantic, I think the word is. Latin for idiot.

In spite of really intense competition for the job, I’m still my own worst enemy.

All computers expect to be yelled at. There’s not a single computer in the whole world that hasn’t been sworn at. Even the discreet little VDU with the crossed keys monogram on the keyboard that sits on the Pope’s desk in his office in the Vatican has in its time heard language that’d make a Marine blush.

It was worth repeating, because it constituted the First Law of Sentient Ordnance: Thou shalt not blow up the wrong planet. On that point the programmers had been insistent to the point of fussiness. Accordingly,

There’s an old goblin saying; there is nothing to fear but fear itself and scary things.

. . . Birmingham City Council was playing third time lucky with the design of the city’s celebrated Victoria Square . . .

a problem’s nothing but an opportunity wearing a funny hat, and inside every disaster there’s a triumph struggling to get out.

He made a conscious decision not to think about it, and accordingly spent the rest of his shift thinking about nothing else.

We don’t ask that question.Why not?If I tell you the truth, you would not believe me. If I lie, you would believe me.

After all, what else is scientific enquiry of any sort other than a controlled version of banging one’s head against the universe until something gives?

Ludwig Wittgenstein #

Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep.

The limits of my language means the limits of my world.

Only describe, don’t explain.

If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do.

I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

Theodore Roosevelt #

Never throughout history has a man who lived a life of ease left a name worth remembering.

A man who has never gone to school may steal a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.

The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it.

I have only a second rate brain, but I think I have a capacity for action.

I don’t pity any man who does hard work worth doing. I admire him. I pity the creature who does not work, at whichever end of the social scale he may regard himself as being.

Courage isn’t the absence of fear, it’s the choice that something else is greater than that fear.

Randy Pausch #

Complaining does not work as a strategy. We all have finite time and energy. Any time we spend whining is unlikely to help us achieve our goals. And it won’t make us happier.

Salman Rushdie #

How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.

Marcus Tullius Cicero #

Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century:Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others;Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected;Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it;Refusing to set aside trivial preferences;Neglecting development and refinement of the mind;Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.

Zoals de dwaasheid nooit tevreden is, zelfs niet als haar wensen worden vervuld, zo is de wijsheid steeds tevreden met wat voorhanden is, en heeft nooit onvrede met zichzelf.

Neil Gaiman #

That which is dreamed can never be lost, can never be undreamed.

Edward Abbey #

Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.

Charles Stross #

Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again.

Back before the internet we had a name for people who bought a single copy of our books and lent them to all their friends without charging: we called them “librarians”.

John Keegan #

Of whatever class or nation, however, all successful participants in the repetitive and unrelenting stress of aerial fighting came eventually to display its characteristic physiognomy: skeletal hands, sharpened noses, tight-drawn cheek bones, the bared teeth of a rictus smile and the fixed, narrowed gaze of men in a state of controlled fear.

C.S. Lewis #

We meet no ordinary people in our lives.

I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.

Friendship … is born at the moment when one man says to another “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art…. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.

Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning…

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.

No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.

If you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you - you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing was ever going to happen again.

For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness — they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means — the only complete realist.

You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.

I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.

Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.

To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.

We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.

You can make anything by writing.

Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.

When you argue against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on.

There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.

Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.

A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.

If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.

The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.

Dean Koontz #

Grief can destroy you –or focus you. You can decide a relationship was all for nothing if it had to end in death, and you alone. OR you can realize that every moment of it had more meaning than you dared to recognize at the time, so much meaning it scared you, so you just lived, just took for granted the love and laughter of each day, and didn’t allow yourself to consider the sacredness of it. But when it’s over and you’re alone, you begin to see that it wasn’t just a movie and a dinner together, not just watching sunsets together, not just scrubbing a floor or washing dishes together or worrying over a high electric bill. It was everything, it was the why of life, every event and precious moment of it. The answer to the mystery of existence is the love you shared sometimes so imperfectly, and when the loss wakes you to the deeper beauty of it, to the sanctity of it, you can’t get off your knees for a long time, you’re driven to your knees not by the weight of the loss but by gratitude for what preceded the loss. And the ache is always there, but one day not the emptiness, because to nurture the emptiness, to take solace in it, is to disrespect the gift of life.

Donald E. Knuth #

Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer; art is everything else.

The best programs are written so that computing machines can perform them quickly and so that human beings can understand them clearly. A programmer is ideally an essayist who works with traditional aesthetic and literary forms as well as mathematical concepts, to communicate the way that an algorithm works and to convince a reader that the results will be correct.

An algorithm must be seen to be believed.

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

People think that computer science is the art of geniuses but the actual reality is the opposite, just many people doing things that build on each other, like a wall of mini stones.

The language in which we express our ideas has a strong influence on our thought processes.

Nearly every example of faulty reasoning that has been published is accompanied by the phrase “of course” or its equivalent.

Steve McConnell #

A brute-force solution that works is better than an elegant solution that doesn’t work. It can take a long time to get an elegant solution to work. In describing the history of searching algorithms, for example, Donald Knuth pointed out that even though the first description of a binary search algorithm was published in 1946, it took another 16 years for someone to publish an algorithm that correctly searched lists of all sizes (Knuth 1998). A binary search is more elegant, but a brute-force, sequential search is often sufficient. When in doubt, use brute force. — Butler Lampson

Bill Watterson #

Reality continues to ruin my life.

Sometimes when I’m talking, my words can’t keep up with my thoughts. I wonder why we think faster than we speak. Probably so we can think twice.

You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocket ship underpants don’t help.

I’m killing time while I wait for life to shower me with meaning and happiness.

You can’t just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood. What mood is that? Last-minute panic.

I wish I had more friends, but people are such jerks. If you can just get most people to leave you alone, you’re doing good. If you can find even one person you really like, you’re lucky. And if that person can also stand you, you’re really lucky.

Calvin: I used to hate writing assignments, but now I enjoy them. I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog! Want to see my book report? Hobbes: (Reading Calvin’s paper) “The Dynamics of Interbeing and Monological Imperatives in Dick and Jane: A Study in Psychic Transrelational Gender modes.” Calvin: Academia, here I come!

God put me on earth to accomplish certain things. Right now, I’m so far behind, I’ll never die.

I think we dream so we don’t have to be apart so long. If we’re in each other’s dreams, we can play together all night.

Calvin : There’s no problem so awful, that you can’t add some guilt to it and make it even worse.

Calvin: Why are you crying mom?Mom: I’m cutting up an onion.Calvin: It must be hard to cook if you anthrpomorphisize your vegetables.

A little rudeness and disrespect can elevate a meaningless interaction to a battle of wills and add drama to an otherwise dull day.

Reading goes faster if you don’t sweat comprehension.

As far as I’m concerned, if something is so complicated that you can’t explain it in 10 seconds, then it’s probably not worth knowing anyway.

Weekends don’t count unless you spend them doing something completely pointless.

Did you ever wonder if the person in the puddle is real, and you’re just a reflection of him?

Wow, it really snowed last night! Isn’t it wonderful? Everything familiar has disappeared! The world looks brand new!A new year … a fresh, clean start! It’s like having a big white sheet of paper to draw on! A day full of possibilities! It’s a magical world, Hobbes, ol’ buddy … let’s go exploring!

Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book.

I try to make everyone’s day a little more surreal.

What fun is it being cool if you can’t wear a sombrero?

Now what state do you live in?‘‘Denial.

People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don’t realize how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world.

We’re so busy watching out for what’s just ahead of us that we don’t take time to enjoy where we are.

CALVIN:Isn’t it strange that evolution would give us a sense of humor?When you think about it, it’s weird that we have a physiological response to absurdity. We laugh at nonsense. We like it. We think it’s funny.Don’t you think it’s odd that we appreciate absurdity? Why would we develop that way? How does it benefit us?HOBBES:I suppose if we couldn’t laugh at the things that don’t make sense, we couldn’t react to a lot of life.

I’ve been thinking Hobbes"“On a weekend?““Well, it wasn’t on purpose

I’m not a vegetarian! I’m a dessertarian!

In the short term, it would make me happy to go play outside. In the long term, it would make me happier to do well at school and become successful. But in the VERY long term, I know which will make better memories.

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential — as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.

I’m only civil because I don’t know any swear words.

There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want.

Happiness isn’t good enough for me! I demand euphoria!

I’m learning skills I will use for the rest of my life by doing homework…procrastinating and negotiation.

Pete Wentz #

The hardest thing about depression is that it is addictive. It begins to feel uncomfortable not to be depressed. You feel guilty for feeling happy.

John Lennon #

Count your age by friends, not years. Count your life by smiles, not tears.

Abigail Van Buren #

The best index to a person’s character is how he treats people who can’t do him any good, and how he treats people who can’t fight back.

John O’Donohue #

The ego is the false self-born out of fear and defensiveness.

Deepak Chopra #

The ego relies on the familiar. It is reluctant to experience the unknown, which is they very essence of life.

In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you.

The Ego, however, is not who you really are. The ego is your self-image; it is your social mask; it is the role you are playing. Your social mask thrives on approval. It wants control, and it is sustained by power, because it lives in fear.

You accept things as they are, not as you wish they were in this moment. This is important to understand. You can wish for things in the future to be different, but in this moment you have to accept things as they are. When you feel frustrated or upset by a person or a situation, remember that you are not reacting to the person or the situation, but to your feelings about the person or the situation. These are your feelings, and your feelings are not someone else’s fault. When you recognize and understand this completely, you are ready to take responsibility for how you feel and to change it. And if you can accept things as they are, you are ready to take responsibility for your situation and for all the events you see as problems.

Completely desist from defending your point of view. When you have no point to defend, you do not allow the birth of an argument.

Walk with those seeking truth… RUN FROM THOSE WHO THINK THEY’VE FOUND IT.

You will be transformed by what you read.

Pablo Neruda #

Tonight I can write the saddest linesI loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Albert Camus #

…the habit of despair is worse than despair itself.

Aeschylus #

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forgetfalls drop by drop upon the heartuntil, in our own despair, against our will,comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams

Juliette Lewis #

The bravest thing I ever did was continuing my life when I wanted to die.

John Steinbeck #

And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.

I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.

My imagination will get me a passport to hell one day.

Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic? …Well, think about it. Maybe you’re playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.

Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.

Marilyn Monroe #

Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.

A wise girl kisses but doesn’t love, listens but doesn’t believe, and leaves before she is left.

If you’re gonna be two-faced at least make one of them pretty.

Ekhart Tolle #

If you are in a state of intense presence you are free of thought, yethighly alert. If your conscious attention sinks below a certain level, thought rushes in, the mental noise returns, stillness is lost, you’re back in time.

Sophocles #

Trust dies but mistrust blossoms.

Charles Baudelaire #

Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.

La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu’il n’existe pas.”(“The devil’s finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.")

The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance;We find delight in the most loathsome things;Some furtherance of Hell each new day brings,And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance.

He who looks through an open window sees fewer things than he who looks through a closed window.

Charles Baudelaire #

Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.

Buddha #

Greater in battlethan the man who would conquera thousand-thousand men,is he who would conquerjust one —himself.Better to conquer yourselfthan others.When you’ve trained yourself,living in constant self-control,neither a deva nor gandhabba,nor a Mara banded with Brahmas,could turn that triumphback into defeat.

Socrates #

Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart’s desire; the other is to get it.

Eiji Yoshikawa #

Fighting isn’t all there is to the Art of War. The men who think that way, and are satisfied to have food to eat and a place to sleep, are mere vagabonds. A serious student is much more concerned with training his mind and disciplining his spirit than with developing martial skills.

Sean Covey #

We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The difference is discipline weighs ounces while regret weighs tons.

Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi #

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field.I’ll meet you there.When the soul lies down in that grassthe world is too full to talk about.

If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?

I know you’re tired but come, this is the way.

Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.

Forget safety.Live where you fear to live.Destroy your reputation.Be notorious.

silence is the language of god, all else is poor translation.

The wound is the place where the Light enters you.

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.

When I am with you, we stay up all night.When you’re not here, I can’t go to sleep.Praise God for those two insomnias!And the difference between them.

Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.

Either give me more wine or leave me alone.

When you go through a hard period,When everything seems to oppose you,… When you feel you cannot even bear one more minute,NEVER GIVE UP!Because it is the time and place that the course will divert!

Start a huge, foolish project, like Noah…it makes absolutely no difference what people think of you.

Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.

That which God said to the rose, and caused it to laugh in full-blown beauty, He said to my heart, and made it a hundred times more beautiful.

Study me as much as you like, you will not know me, for I differ in a hundred ways from what you see me to be. Put yourself behind my eyes and see me as I see myself, for I have chosen to dwell in a place you cannot see.

The moon stays bright when it doesn’t avoid the night.

Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.

You were born with wings, why prefer to crawl through life?

Suffering is a gift. In it is hidden mercy.

Dance, when you’re broken open. Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you’re perfectly free.

Ignore those that make you fearful and sad, that degrade you back towards disease and death.

I want to see you.Know your voice.Recognize you when youfirst come ‘round the corner.Sense your scent when I come into a room you’ve just left.Know the lift of your heel,the glide of your foot.Become familiar with the way you purse your lipsthen let them part, just the slightest bit,when I lean in to your spaceand kiss you.I want to know the joy of how you whisper “more

What you seek is seeking you.

Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn’t matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again , come , come.

You try to be faithfulAnd sometimes you’re cruel.You are mine. Then, you leave.Without you, I can’t cope.And when you take the lead,I become your footstep.Your absence leaves a void.Without you, I can’t cope.You have disturbed my sleep,You have wrecked my image.You have set me apart.Without you, I can’t cope.

The minute I heard my first love story,I started looking for you, not knowinghow blind that was.Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.They’re in each other all along.

Everything in the universe is within you. Ask all from yourself.

Hermann Hesse #

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.

Tarryn Fisher #

What’s the difference?” I asked him. “Between the love of your life, and your soulmate?”“One is a choice, and one is not.

James Kennedy #

More importantly, it is difficult to study minds because we are mental beings. We have our own minds to maintain and protect, and may not wish to discover facts that force us to change, or make us question our own being in the world, or conflict with our sense of right and wrong. We have not discussed belief systems known as religions to any extent in this book. However, particularly threatening are facts that run counter to ourreligious beliefs, especially if those beliefs are strongly held. Further, scientists have hopes, standards, and ethical beliefs, and they—like anybody—are not eager to find that their beliefs are invalid.

Barry Schlenker’s self-identity theory (1982) asserts that self-presentation is an attempt to control information about your identity before real or imagined audiences—including yourself. People try to provide explanations of their own conduct; they try to construct an identity that is satisfying to themselves and that explains their behavior in a favorable light. One of the criteria of a good explanation is believability; that is, explanations must fit with existing knowledge. Schlenker argues that people are not motivated to attain cognitive consistency as an end in itself; rather, they need to provide a believable and self -beneficial account of their conduct, and consistency is a by-product of that. The need to provide explanations for your conduct results in the construction of an internally consistent view of reality.

People will put up with being terrified but no one will tolerate being bored.

Sam L. Savage #

The five stages of model development. —Donald Knuth, Stanford computer scientist Knuth discovered that computer program development goes through five stages. These steps also apply to building models, and I rigorously adhere to them in my consulting work. 1. Decide what you want the model to do. 2. Decide how to build the model. 3. Build the model. 4. Debug the model. 5. Trash stages 1 through 4 and start again, now that you know what you really wanted in the first place. Once you realize that step 5 is inevitable, you become more willing to discard bad models early rather than continually to patch them up. In fact, I recommend getting to step 5 many times by building an evolving set of prototypes. This is consistent with an emerging style of system development known as Extreme Programming.2 To get a large model to work you must start with a small model that works, not a large model that doesn’t work. —Alan Manne, Stanford energy economist

Karl Weierstrass #

When I wrote this, only God and I understood what I was doing. Now, God only knows.

Vincent van Gogh #

Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.

vincent van gogh #

I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.

James Ellroy #

Bissell fingered his napkin. “I do, Mr. Boyd. And I know how generous Mr. Hoffa, Mr. Marcello and a few other Italian gentlemen have been to the Cause, and I know that you possess a certain amount of influence in the Kennedy camp. And as the President’s chief Cuban-issue liaison, I also know that Fidel Castro and Communism are a good deal worse than the Mafia, although I wouldn’t dream of asking you to intercede on our friends’ behalf, because it might cost you credibility with your sacred Kennedys.“Stanton dropped his soup spoon. Pete let a big breath out eeeasy.Boyd put out a big shit-eating grin. “I’m glad you feel that way, Mr. Bissell. Because if you did ask me, I’d have to tell you to go fuck yourself.

Anybody who doesn’t know that politics is crime has got a few screws loose.

Dear FB Friends,Fuck Facebook!!!!! — It has proven to be worthless as a book-selling device, and is nothing but a repository for perverts, reparation-seekers, old buddies looking for handouts, syphillitic ex-girlfriends looking for extra-curricular schlong and hack writers begging for blurbs.

Some men get the world, some men get ex-hookers and a trip to Arizona. You’re in with the former, but my God I don’t envy the blood on your conscience.

Some people don’t respond to civility.

I learn things late–and only the hard way.

Henry David Thoreau #

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..

Virtue does not remain as an abandoned orphan; it must of necessity have neighbors.

I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, …., we never need read of another. One is enough. If you’re acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old (wo)men over their tea.

Men say they know many things;But lo! they have taken wings, —The arts and sciences,And a thousand appliances;The wind that blowsIs all that any body knows

I should not talk so much about myself if there were any body else whom I knew as well.

None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty…. To be a philosopher is not mere to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.

Adrian Goldsworthy #

Roman women kept their name throughout their lives, and did not change it on marriage.

Guillermo Del Toro #

video games are the comic books of our time… It’s a medium that gains no respect among the intelligentsia”.

Daniel J. Boorstin #

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.

Carl Sagan #

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

Rita Mae Brown #

Women need to feel loved and men need to feel needed.

Charlotte Brontë #

I would always rather be happy than dignified.

Marcel Proust #

Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.

Elizabeth Peters #

No woman really wants a man to carry her off; she only wants him to want to do it.

Shannon Alder #

When you find a guy who calls you beautiful instead of hot, who calls you back when you hang up on him, who will stand in front of you when other’s cast stones, or will stay awake just to watch you sleep, who wants to show you off to the world when you are in sweats, who will hold your hand when your sick, who thinks your pretty without makeup, the one who turns to his friends and say, ‘that’s her’, the one that would bear your rejection because losing you means losing his will to live, who kisses you when you screw up, watches the stars and names one for you and will hold and rock that baby for hours so you can sleep…..you marry him all over again.

Mindy Kaling #

I think when men hear that women want a commitment, they think it means commitment to a romantic relationship, but that’s not it. It’s a commitment to not floating around anywhere. I want a guy who is entrenched in his own life.

Frank O’Hara #

I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

Socrates #

The greatest blessing granted to mankind come by way of madness, which is a divine gift.

Friedrich Neitzsche #

Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.

John le Carré #

A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world.

Do you know what love is? I’ll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray.

The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.

The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous

The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.

Survival…is an infinite capacity for suspicion.

All men are born free: just not for long.

John LeCarre #

After all, if you make your enemy look like a fool, you lose the justification for engaging him.

T.S. Eliot #

If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?

Jon Krakauer #

According to the moral absolutism that characterizes McCandless’s beliefs, a challenge in which a successful outcome is assured isn’t a challenge at all.

Craig D. Lounsbrough #

If your dream doesn’t scare you, it’s not big enough.

The most critical time in any battle is not when I’m fatigued, it’s when I no longer care.

George Eliot #

It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.

It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

Blameless people are always the most exasperating.

It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self—never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.

You must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honorable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well, and not be always saying, There’s this and there’s that—if I had this or that to do, I might make something of it. No matter what a man is—I wouldn’t give twopence for him’— here Caleb’s mouth looked bitter, and he snapped his fingers— ‘whether he was the prime minister or the rick-thatcher, if he didn’t do well what he undertook to do.

He distrusted her affection; and what loneliness is more lonely than distrust.

Ajahn Chah #

But when I know that the glass is already broken, every minute with it is precious.

These days people don’t search for the Truth. People study simply in order to find knowledge necessary to make a living, raise families and look after themselves, that’s all. To them, being smart is more important than being wise!

Peace is within oneself to be found in the same place as agitation and suffering. It is not found in a forest or on a hilltop, nor is it given by a teacher. Where you experience suffering, you can also find freedom from suffering. Trying to run away from suffering is actually to run toward it.

Just try to keep your mind in the present. Whatever arises in the mind, just watch it and let go of it. Don’t even wish to be rid of thoughts. Then the mind will return to its natural state. No discriminating between good and bad, hot and cold, fast and slow. No me and no you, no self at all—just what there is. When you walk there is no need to do anything special. Simply walk and see what is there. No need to cling to isolation or seclusion. Wherever you are, know yourself by being natural and watching. If doubts arise, watch them come and go. It’s very simple. Hold on to nothing. It’s as though you are walking down a road. Periodically you will run into obstacles. When you meet defilements, just see them and overcome them by letting them go. Don’t think about the obstacles you’ve already passed; don’t worry about those you have not yet seen. Stick to the present. Don’t be concerned about the length of the road or the destination. Everything is changing. Whatever you pass, don’t cling to it. Eventually the mind will reach its natural balance where practice is automatic. All things will come and go of themselves.

Buddha once saw a jackal, a wild dog, run out of the forest where he was staying. It stood still for a while, then it ran into the underbrush, and then out again. Then it ran into a tree hollow, then out again. Then it went into a cave, only to run out again. One minute it stood, the next it ran, then it lay down, then it jumped up. The jackal had the mange. When it stood, the mange would eat into its skin, so it would run. Running, it was still uncomfortable, so it would stop. Standing, it was still uncomfortable, so it would lie down. Then it would jump up again, running to the underbrush, the tree hollow, never staying still. The Buddha said, “Monks, did you see that jackal this afternoon? Standing, it suffered. Running, it suffered. Sitting, it suffered. Lying down, it suffered. It blamed standing for its discomfort. It blamed sitting. It blamed running and lying down. It blamed the tree, the underbrush, and the cave. In fact, the problem was with none of those things. The problem was with his mange.” We are just the same as that jackal. Our discontent is due to wrong view. Because we don’t exercise sense restraint, we blame our suffering on externals. Whether we live in Thailand, America or England, we aren’t satisfied. Why not? Because we still have wrong view. Just that! So wherever we go, we aren’t content. But just as that jackal would be content wherever it went as soon as its mange was cured, so would we be content wherever we went once we rid ourselves of wrong view.

You are your own teacher. Looking for teachers can’t solve your own doubts. Investigate yourself to find the truth - inside, not outside. Knowing yourself is most important.

If it isn’t good, let it die. If it doesn’t die, make it good.

Mindfulness is life. Whenever we don’t have mindfulness, when we are heedless, it’s as if we are dead.

Do not try to become anything. Do not make yourself into anything. Do not be a meditator. Do not become enlightened. When you sit, let it be. What you walk, let it be. Grasp at nothing. Resist nothing. Ajahn Chah

Only when the mind sees for itself, can it uproot andrelinquish attachment.

Strengthening the mind is not done by making it move around as is done to strengthen the body, but by bringing the mind to a halt, bringing it to rest.

When we practice only when we’re feeling good, how are we going to get anywhere like that?

Of course, there are dozens of meditation techniques, but it all comes down to this - just let it all be.

Anyone can build a house of wood and bricks, but the Buddha taught us that sort of home is not our real home. It’s a home in the world and it follows the ways of the world. Our real home is inner peace.

There are two kinds of suffering: the suffering which leads to more suffering, and the suffering which leads to the end of suffering. The first is the pain of grasping after fleeting pleasures and aversion for the unpleasant, the continued struggle of most people day after day. The second is the suffering which comes when you allow yourself to feel fully the constant change of experience - pleasure, pain, joy, and anger - without fear or withdrawal. The suffering of our experience leads to inner fearlessness and peace.

Love and hate are both suffering, because of desire. Wanting is suffering, wanting not to have is suffering. Even if you get what you want, it’s still suffering because once you’ve got it, you then live in the fear of losing it. How are you going to live happily with fear?

Your doubts about your teacher can help you. Take from your teacher what is good, and be aware of your own practice. Wisdom is yourself to watch and develop.

Someone commented: “I can observe desire and aversion in my mind, but it’s hard to observe delusion.“Ajahn Chah replied: " You’re riding on a horse and asking where the horse is?

If you see things with real insight, then there is no stickiness in your relationship to them. They come, pleasant and unpleasant, you see them and there is no attachment, They come and they pass. Even if the worst kinds of defilement come up, such as greed or anger, there enough wisdom to see their impermanent nature and allow them to fade away. If you react to them, by liking or disliking, that is not wisdom. You’re only creating more suffering for yourself.

With mindfulness you can see the real owner of things. Do you think this is your world, your body? It is the world’s world, the body’s body. If you tell it, Don’t get old, does the body listen? Does your stomach ask permission to get sick? We only rent this house; why not find out who really owns it?

I know this glass is already broken, so I enjoy it incredibly.

Franz Kafka #

Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

Mahatma Gandhi #

To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.

It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.

Jess C Scott #

I envy people that know love. That have someone who takes them as they are.

Jean Racine #

Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt #

I think there is something beautiful in reveling in sadness. The proof is how beautiful sad songs can be. So I don’t think being sad is to be avoided. It’s apathy and boredom you want to avoid. But feeling anything is good, I think. Maybe that’s sadistic of me.

The universe is not made up of atoms; it’s made up of tiny stories.

You’re gone. No mailing address.But I send you letters anyway.

Nora Roberts #

Feeling too much is a hell of a lot better than feeling nothing.

Epicurus #

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.

Of all the means to insure happiness throughout the whole life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friends.

You don’t develop courage by being happy in your relationships everyday. You develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity.

Why should I fear death?If I am, then death is not.If Death is, then I am not.Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?Long time men lay oppressed with slavish fear.Religious tyranny did domineer.At length the mighty one of GreeceBegan to assent the liberty of man.

I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know.

Not what we have But what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.

Haec ego non multis (scribo), sed tibi: satis enim magnum alter alteri theatrum sumus. I am writing this not to many, but to you: certainly we are a great enough audience for each other.

Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.

It is better for you to be free of fear lying upon a pallet, than to have a golden couch and a rich table and be full of trouble.

He who least needs tomorrow, will most gladly greet tomorrow.

If you wish to make Pythocles rich, do not add to his store of money, but subtract from his desires.

Misfortune seldom intrudes upon the wise man; his greatest and highest interests are directed by reason throughout the course of life.

The time when you should most of all withdraw into yourself is when you are forced to be in a crowd.

The purpose of all knowledge, metaphysical as well as scientific, is to achieve what Epicurus called ataraxia, freedom from irrational fears and anxieties of all sorts—in brief, peace of mind.

do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not

Thomas Mann #

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Philip Pullman #

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

Epicurus #

It is not so much our friends’ help that helps us as the confident knowledge that they will help us.

Never say that I have taken it, only that I have given it back.

Sariel Har-Peled #

We will start by sketching the recursive algorithm and then add details to get to a full description of the algorithm. Footnote : Translation: We will add details till the mess becomes both undecipherable and incomprehensible at the same time. Hopefully, the inner poetical and rhythmical beauty of the text will keep the reader going.

V #

You have information for us?No, you have all the information you need in your head, what you want, what you need, is a story.A story can be true or false.I leave that judgement to you.

Thoreau, Henry David #

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.

E. Badian #

It should now be a truism that the historian must not claim to give the explanation of a complex historical phenomenon. Such questions as: “What were the causes of the Great War, of the Fall of the Roman Republic?” – expecting, by implication, a list of neatly defined items – such questions are by now relegated to the privacy of the tutorial or the examination room, where the historian is shielded from the critical eye of his professional colleagues. But it is the historian’s legitimate task to single out some of the strands in the complex weave and to trace their importance in the pattern; and it is in this humbler frame of mind that he will most usefully perform his proper task of letting the present and past illuminate each other.

Alan Watts #

This is the real secret of life – to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.

Alan Wilson Watts #

The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.

Robert Harris #

Against the alchemy of two naked bodies in a bed in the darkness, and against all the complex longings and attachments and commitments such intimacy might arouse, he had nothing with which to fight.

What do you do,’ he said, ‘if you devote your life to discovering criminals, and it gradually occurs to you that the real criminals are the people you work for? What do you do when everyone tells you not to worry, you can’t do anything about it, it was a long time ago?’ She was looking at him in a different way. ‘I suppose you go crazy.’ ‘Or worse. Sane.

every time you fill an appointment, you make one man grateful and ten resentful.

Ray Bradbury #

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

André Gide #

There are many things that seem impossible only so long as one does not attempt them.

T.H. White #

The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.

Wendy Mass #

A fight is going on inside me,” said an old man to his son. “It is a terrible fight between two wolves. One wolf is evil. He is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other wolf is good. he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you.” The son thought about it for a minute and then asked, “Which wolf will win?” The old man replied simply, “The one you feed.

Morihei Ueshiba #

In Aikido we never attack. An attack is proof that one is out of control. Never run away from any kind of challenge, but do not try to suppress or control an opponent unnaturally. Let attackers come any way they like and then blend with them. Never chase after opponents. Redirect each attack and get firmly behind it.

As soon as you concern yourself with the “good” and “bad” of your fellows, you create an opening in your heart for maliciousness to enter. Testing, competing with, and criticizing others weakens and defeats you.

To injure an opponent is to injure yourself. To control aggression without inflicting injury is the Art of Peace.

Never fear another challenger, no matter how large; Never despise another challenger, no matter how small.Large does not always defeat little. Little can become large by constant building; large can become little by falling apart.

Do not failto learn from The pure voice of anEver-flowing mountain streamSplashing over the rocks.

Jon Kabat-Zinn #

we all tend to fill up our days with things that just have to be done and then run around desperately trying to do them all, while in the process not really enjoying much of the doing because we are too pressed for time, too rushed, too busy, too anxious? We can feel overwhelmed by our schedules, our responsibilities, and our roles at times, even when everything we are doing is important, even when we have chosen to do them all. We live immersed in a world of constant doing. Rarely are we in touch with who is doing the doing—or, put otherwise, with the world of being. To get back in touch with being is not that difficult. We only need to remind ourselves to be mindful. Moments of mindfulness are moments of peace and stillness, even in the midst of activity. When your whole life is driven by doing, formal meditation practice can provide a refuge of sanity and stability that can be used to restore some balance and perspective. It can be a way of stopping the headlong momentum of all the doing, giving yourself some time to dwell in deep relaxation and well-being and to remember who you are.

Thich Nhat Hanh, the venerable and highly respected Vietnamese meditation teacher, poet, and peace activist, uses the image of cloudy apple juice settling in a glass to describe meditation. You just sit with whatever is present, even discomfort, anxiety, or confusion, with whatever is present, and the mind settles all by itself.

Wherever you go, there you are

Intelligence is the door to freedom and alert attention is the mother of intelligence.

You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.

You might be tempted to avoid the messiness of daily living for the tranquility of stillness and peacefulness. This of course would be an attachment to stillness, and like any strong attachment, it leads to delusion. It arrests development and short-circuits the cultivation of wisdom.

Bill Godbout #

George Morrow summed it up much more elegantly than I,” Godbout said in a 1984 interview. “He said ‘I have the best of both worlds. I enjoy what I’m doing, have immense fun at it and I get paid to boot’. I couldn’t concur more.

Musashi Miyamoto #

Do nothing that is of no use

Step by step walk the thousand-mile road.

Musashi Miyomoto #

Even if you strive diligently on your chosen path day after day, if your heart is not in accord with it, then even if you think you are on a good path, from the point of view of the straight and true, this is not a genuine path. If you do not pursue a genuine path to its consummation, then a little bit of crookedness in the mind will later turn into a major warp. Reflect on this.

Baltasar Gracian #

A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.

W. B. Swann, Jr #

… an interesting feature was that individual who had the opportunity to resist the discrepant feedback displayed little self rating change, even though they did not believe that they had succeeded in modifying the confederates appraisal of them

…suggest that people’s selective attention, encoding, retrieval and interpretation processes may work to ensure that their self-concepts will survive even in the face of a mountain of discrepant evidence.

Bell, John L. #

Continuity connotes unity; discreteness, plurality.

Paul Kjellberg #

The goal of pyrrhonist skepticism according to Sextus Empiricus is ataraxia (peace of mind) through epoche, the suspension of dogmatic judgments. Dogmatic judgments concern things non-evident, most important any alleged truth about things beyond or behind their appearance.

Douglas Adams #

We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!

Richard P. Feynman #

I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here. I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.

Dogen #

Forgetting oneself is opening oneself

Dogen Zenji #

Prefer to be defeated in the presence of the wise than to excel among fools.

No matter how bad a state of mind you may get into, if you keep strong and hold out, eventually the floating clouds must vanish and the withering wind must cease.

If you have compassion and are imbued with the spirit of the Way, it is of no consequence to be criticized, even reviled, by the ignorant. But if you lack the spirit of the Way, you should be wary of being thought of by others as having the Way.

It’s too late to be ready.

Eihei Dogen #

When you paint Spring, do not paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots, but just paint Spring. To paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots is to paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots - it is not yet painting Spring.

Dōgen #

Those who are extremely stupid think that women are merely the objects of sexual desire and treat women in this way. The Buddha’s children should not be like this. If we discriminate against women because we see them merely as objects of sexual desire, do we also discriminate against all men for the same reason?

There is a simple way to become a buddha: When you refrain from unwholesome actions, are not attached to birth and death, and are compassionate toward all sentient beings, respectful to seniors and kind to juniors, not excluding or desiring anything, with no thoughts or worries, you will be called a buddha. Seek nothing else.

Arkady Strugatsky #

Or how about this hypothetical definition. Reason is a complex type of instinct that has not yet formed completely. This implies that instinctual behavior is always purposeful and natural. A million years from now our instinct will have matured and we will stop making the mistakes that are probably integral to reason. An then, if something should change in the universe, we will all become extinct - precisely because we will have forgotten how to make mistakes, that is, to try various approaches not stipulated by an inflexible program of permitted alternatives.

Justin II #

You behold the ensigns of supreme power. You are about to receive them, not from my hand, but from the hand of God. Honor them, and from them you will derive honor. Respect the empress your mother: you are now her son; before, you were her servant. Delight not in blood; abstain from revenge; avoid those actions by which I have incurred the public hatred; and consult the experience, rather than the example, of your predecessor. As a man, I have sinned; as a sinner, even in this life, I have been severely punished: but these servants (and he pointed to his ministers), who have abused my confidence, and inflamed my passions, will appear with me before the tribunal of Christ. I have been dazzled by the splendor of the diadem: be thou wise and modest; remember what you have been, remember what you are. You see around us your slaves, and your children: with the authority, assume the tenderness, of a parent. Love your people like yourself; cultivate the affections, maintain the discipline, of the army; protect the fortunes of the rich, relieve the necessities of the poor.

Kabat-Zinn #

You make problem, you have problem

Zhuangzi #

The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once you’ve gotten the fish you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit. Once you’ve gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning. Once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can talk with him?

The wise man knows that it is better to sit on the banks of a remote mountain stream than to be emperor of the whole world.

A frog in a well cannot discuss the ocean, because he is limited by the size of his well. A summer insect cannot discuss ice, because it knows only its own season. A narrow-minded scholar cannot discuss the Tao, because he is constrained by his teachings. Now you have come out of your banks and seen the Great Ocean. You now know your own inferiority, so it is now possible to discuss great principles with you.井蛙不可以語於海者，拘於虛也；夏蟲不可以語於冰者，篤於時也；曲士不可以語於道者，束於教也。今爾出於崖涘，觀於大海，乃知爾醜，爾將可與語大理矣。

You can’t discuss the ocean with a well frog - he’s limited by the space he lives in. You can’t discuss ice with a summer insect - he’s bound to a single season.

The Perfect Man uses his mind like a mirror - going after nothing, welcoming nothing, responding but not storing.

The one-legged creature is envious of the millipede; the millipede is envious of the snake; the snake is envious of the wind; the wind is envious of the eye; the eye is envious of the heart.

All attempts to create something admirable are the weapons of evil. You may think you are practising benevolence and righteousness, but in effect you will be creating a kind of artificiality. Where a model exists, copies will be made of it; where success has been gained, boasting follows; where debate exists, there will be outbreaks of hostility.

To forget the whole world is easy; to make the whole world forget you is hard.

Zhuangzi’s wife died. When Huizu went to convey his condolences, he found Zhuangzi sitting with his legs sprawled out, pounding on a tub and singing. “You lived with her, she brought up your children and grew old,” said Huizu. “It should be enough simply not to weep at her death. But pounding on a tub and singing - this is going too far, isn’t it?“Zhuangzi said, “You’re wrong. When she first died, do you think I didn’t grieve like anyone else? But I looked back to her beginning and the time before she was born. Not only the time before she was born, but the time before she had a body. Not only the time before she had a body, but the time before she had a spirit. In the midst of the jumble of wonder and mystery a change took place and she had a spirit. Another change and she had a body. Another change and she was born. Now there’s been another change and she’s dead. It’s just like the progression of the four seasons, spring, summer, fall, winter.“Now she’s going to lie down peacefully in a vast room. If I were to follow after her bawling and sobbing, it would show that I don’t understand anything about fate. So I stopped.

Rest in inaction, and the world will be reformed of itself; Forget your body and spit forth intelligence. Ignore all differences and become one with the Infinite. Release your mind, and free your spirit. Be vacuous, be devoid of soul. Thus will things grow and prosper and return to their Rust and Rest. Returning to their Root. Returning to their Root without their knowing it, the result will be a formless whole which will never be cut up, to know it is to cut it up. (Great Nebulous says to General Clouds)

Let your mind wander in simplicity, blend your spirit with the vastness, follow along with things the way they are, and make no room for personal views - then the world will be governed.

During our dreams we do not know we are dreaming. We may even dream of interpreting a dream. Only on waking do we know it was a dream. Only after the great awakening will we realize that this is the great dream.

Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.

Suppose I try saying something. What way do I have of knowing that if I say I know something I don’t really not know it? Or what way do I have of knowing that if I say I don’t know something I don’t really in fact know it?

I’m going to try speaking some reckless words, and I want you to listen recklessly.

Your life has a limit, but knowledge has none. If you use what is limited to pursue what has no limit, you will be in danger.

The Great Course is unproclaimed. Great demonstration uses no words. (2:34) Great Humanity is not humane. Great rectitude is not fastidious. Great courage is not invasive. For when the Course becomes explicit, it ceases to be the Course. When words demonstrate by debate, they fail to communicate. When Humanity is constantly sustained, it cannot reach its maturity.21 When rectitude is pure, it cannot extend itself to others. When courage is invasive, it cannot succeed.22 These five are originally round, but they are forced toward squareness.

When you’re betting for tiles in an archery contest, you shoot with skill. When you’re betting for fancy belt buckles, you worry about your aim. And when you’re betting for real gold, you’re a nervous wreck. Your skill is the same in all three cases - but because one prize means more to you than another, you let outside considerations weigh on your mind. He who looks too hard at the outside gets clumsy on the inside.

Forget about life, forget about worrying about right and wrong. Plunge into the unknown and the endless and find your place there!

But a gentleman may embrace a doctrine without necessarily wearing the garb that goes with it, and he may wear the garb without necessarily comprehending the doctrine.

Words have value; what is of value in words is meaning. Meaning has something it is pursuing, but the thing that it is pursuing cannot be put into words and handed down.

When I speak of good hearing, I do not mean listening to others; I mean simply listening to yourself. When I speak of good eyesight, I do not mean looking at others; I mean simply looking at yourself. He who does not look at himself but looks at others, who does not get hold of himself but gets hold of others, is getting what other men have got and failing to get what he himself has got. He finds joy in what brings joy to other men, but finds no joy in what would bring joy to himself.

If you were to hide the world in the world, so that nothing could get away, this would be the final reality of the constancy of things.

Can you be a little baby? The baby howls all day, yet its throat never gets hoarse - harmony at its height! The baby makes fists all day, yet its fingers never get cramped - virtue is all it holds to. The baby stares all day without blinking its eyes - it has no preferences in the world of externals.

How do I know that loving life is not a delusion? How do I know that in hating death I am not like a man who, having left home in his youth, has forgotten the way back?Lady Li was the daughter of the border guard of Ai. When she was first taken captive and brought to the state of Jin, she wept until her tears drenched the collar of her robe. But later, when she went to live in the palace of the ruler, shared his couch with him, and ate the delicious meats of his table, she wondered why she had ever wept. How do I know that the dead do not wonder why they ever longed for life?

Emptiness is the fasting of the mind.

Eventually there comes the day of reckoning and awakening, and then we shall know that it was all a great dream. Only fools think that they are now awake and that they really know what is going on, playing the prince and then playing the servant. What fools! The Master and you are both living in a dream. When I say a dream, I am also dreaming. This very saying is a deception. If after ten thousand years we could once meet a truly great sage, one who understands, it would seem as if it had only been a morning.

I obtained life because the time was right. I will lose life because it is time. Those who go quietly with the flow of nature are not worried by either joy or sorrow. People like these were considered in the past as having achieved freedom from bondage. Those who cannot free themselves are constrained by things.

Those who seek to satisfy the mind of man by hampering it with ceremonies and music and affecting charity and devotion have lost their original nature

The way comes about as we walk it.

Waiting for changing opinions is like waiting for nothing.

If a man, having lashed two hulls together, is crossing a river, and an empty boat happens along and bumps into him, no matter how hot-tempered the man may be, he will not get angry. But if there should be someone in the other boat, then he will shout out to haul this way or veer that. If his first shout is unheeded, he will shout again, and if that is not heard, he will shout a third time, this time with a torrent of curses following. In the first instance, he wasn’t angry; now in the second he is. Earlier he faced emptiness, now he faces occupancy. If a man could succeed in making himself empty, and in that way wander through the world, then who could do him harm?

In all affairs, whether large or small, there are few men who reach a happy conclusion except through the Way. If you do not succeed, you are bound to suffer from the judgment of men. If you do succeed, you are bound to suffer from the yin and yang. To suffer no harm whether or not you succeed - only the man who has virtue can do that.

So it is that the great man through his actions will not set out to harm others, nor make much of benevolence and charity; he does not make any move for gain, nor consider the servant at the gate as lowly; he will not barter for property and riches, nor does he make much of having turned them down; he asks for no one’s help, nor does he make much of his own self-reliance, nor despise the greedy and mean; he does not follow the crowd, nor does he make much of being so different; he comes behind the crowd, but does not make much of those who get ahead through flattery. The titles and honours of this world are of no interest to him, nor is he concerned at the disgrace of punishments. He knows there is no distinction between right and wrong, nor between great and little. I have heard it said, “The Tao man earns no reputation, perfect Virtue is not followed, the great man is self-less.” In perfection, this is the path he follows.

Flow with whatever may happen, and let your mind be free: Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.

I’ve heard my teacher say, where there are machines, there are bound to be machine worries; where there are machine worries, there are bound to be machine hearts. With a machine heart in your breast, you’ve spoiled what was pure and simple; and without the pure and simple, the life of the spirit knows no rest.

Yet the stupid believe they are awake, busily and brightly assuming they understand things, calling this man ruler, that one herdsman – how dense! Confucius and you are both dreaming! And when I say you are dreaming, I am dreaming, too. Words like these will be labeled the Supreme Swindle.

I have heard that he who knows what is enough will not let himself be entangled by thoughts of gain; that he who really understands how to find satisfaction will not be afraid of other kinds of loss; and that he who practices the cultivation of what is within him will not be ashamed because he holds no position in society.

The effect of life in society is to complicate and confuse our existence, making us forget who we really are by causing us to become obsessed with what we are not.

Not to understand is profound; to understand is shallow. Not to understand is to be on the inside; to understand is to be on the outside.

All men know the use of the useful, but nobody knows the use of the useless!

He set forth his intractable ideas but was never partisan or restricted to his own subjective stance. He moved alone with the spirit of heaven and earth, and did not exalt himself above all things. He did not dispute right and wrong, but sought to live peacefully with the prevalent views.

The dao is at the limit of the world of things. Speech and silence are not adequate to represent the idea of it. Neither speech nor silence can be the highest expression of our thinking about it.

Chuang Tzu #

A path is made by walking on it.

Rewards and punishment is the lowest form of education.

Happiness is the abscence of the striving for happiness.

To be truly ignorant, be content with your own knowledge.

To a mind that is still, the entire universe surrenders.

The sound of water says what I think.

We are born from a quiet sleep, and we die to a calm awakening

The purpose of a fish trap is to catch fish, and when the fish are caught the trap is forgotten. The purpose of a rabbit snare is to catch rabbits. When the rabbits are caught, the snare is forgotten. The purpose of the word is to convey ideas. When the ideas are grasped, the words are forgotten. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words? He is the one I would like to talk to.

Cherish that which is in you and shut out that which is without, for much knowledge is a curse.

Words are not just wind. Words have something to say. But if what they have to say is not fixed, then do they really say something? Or do they say nothing? People suppose that words are different from the peeps of baby birds, but is there any difference, or isn’t there? What does the Way rely upon, that we have true and false? What do words rely upon, that we have right and wrong? How can the Way go away and not exist? How can words exist and not be acceptable? When the Way relies on little accomplishments and words reply on vain show, then we have rights and wrongs of the Confucians and the Mo-ists. What one calls right the other calls wrong; what one calls wrong the other calls right. But if we want to right their wrongs and wrong their rights, then the best to use is clarity.

When affirmation and negation came into being, Tao faded. After Tao faded, then came one-sided attachments.

Fernando Corbató #

I got more interested in the calculator than I did in the problem.

Sextus Empiricus #

Skepticism relieved two terrible diseases that afflicted mankind: anxiety and dogmatism.

The wise man is always similar to himself.

Those who claim for themselves to judge the truth are bound to possess a criterion of truth. This criterion, then, either is without a judge’s approval or has been approved. But if it is without approval, whence comes it that it is truthworthy? For no matter of dispute is to be trusted without judging. And, if it has been approved, that which approves it, in turn, either has been approved or has not been approved, and so on ad infinitum.

Musonius Rufus #

Musonius ordered a thousand sesterces to be given to a man pretending to be a philosopher, when several people told him the man was a bad and vicious fellow, deserving of nothing good, Musonius answered with a smile, ‘Well then he deserves money’.

If you accomplish something good with hard work, the labor passes quickly, but the good endures; if you do something shameful in pursuit of pleasure, the pleasure passes quickly, but the shame endures

For what does the man who accepts insult do that is wrong? It is the doer of wrong who puts themselves to shame-the sensible man wouldn’t go to the law, since he wouldn’t even consider that he had been insulted! Besides, to be annoyed or angered about such things would be petty-instead easily and silently bear what has happened, since this is appropriate for those whose purpose is to be noble-minded.

The mind of someone listening to a philosopher, if the things said are useful, helpful and furnish remedies for faults and errors, has no leisure and time for profuse and extravagant praise. … Great applause and admiration are not unrelated, but the greatest admiration yields silence rather than words.

It is widely held that we’ll be despised by others if we don’t try hard to hurt the first enemies we meet-this is the mark of cold-hearted, ignorant individuals. We say that the detestable person is recognized (among other things) by their inability to harm their enemies-actually, they are much more easily recognized by their inability to help them.

What good are gilded rooms or precious stones-fitted on the floor, inlaid in the walls, carried from great distances at the greatest expense? These things are pointless and unnecessary-without them isn’t it possible to live healthy? Aren’t they the source of constant trouble? Don’t they cost vast sums of money that, through public and private charity, may have benefited many?

To many people, even to most, despite living safely in their home city, fear of what seem to them the dire consequences of free speech is present. The courageous, in exile or at home, is fearless in the face of all such threats; for that reason they’ve the courage to say what they think equally at home or in exile.

We should not use philosophy like a herbal remedy, to be discarded when we’re through. Rather, we must allow philosophy to remain with us, continually guarding our judgements throughout life, forming part of our daily regimen, like eating a nutritious diet or taking phisical exercise.

Consider what intemperate lovers undergo for the sake of evil desires, and how much exertion others expend for the sake of making profit, and how much suffering those who are pursuing fame endure, and bear in mind that all of these people submit to all kinds of toil and hardship voluntarily. Is it then not monstrous that they for no honorable reward endure such things, while we for the sake of the ideal good - that is not only the avoidance of evil such as wrecks our lives, but also the acquisition of virtue, which we may call the provider of all goods – are not ready to bear every hardship?And yet would not anyone admit how much better it is, in place of exerting oneself to win someone else’s wife, to exert oneself the discipline of one’s desires; in place of enduring hardships for the sake of money, the train oneself to want little; instead of giving oneself trouble about getting notoriety; instead of trying to find a way to injure an envied person, to enquire how not to envy anyone; and instead of slaving, as sycophants do, to win false friends, to undergo suffering in order to possess true friends?Since toil and hardship are a necessity for all, both for those who seek better and worse, it is preposterous that those pursuing the better are not much more eager in their efforts than those for whom there is small hope of reward for all their pains. …It remains for me to say that who is unwilling to exert himself almost always convicts himself as unworthy of good, since all good is gained by toil.

You will earn the respect of all if you begin by earning the respect of yourself. Don’t expect to encourage good deeds in people conscious of your own misdeeds.

wealth is able to buy the pleasures of eating, drinking and other sensual pursuits-yet can never afford a cheerful spirit or freedom from sorrow.

If we were to measure what is good by how much pleasure it brings, nothing would be better than self-control- if we were to measure what is to be avoided by its pain, nothing would be more painful than lack of self-control

To accept injury without a spirit of savage resentment-to show ourselves merciful toward those who wrong us-being a source of good hope to them-is characteristic of a benevolent and civilized way of life.

And this, according to Musonius, should be one of the primary objectives of philosophy: to reveal to us our shortcomings so we can overcome them and thereby live a good life.

Chuang-Tzu #

I cannot tell if what the world considers ‘happiness’ is happiness or not. All I know is that when I consider the way they go about attaining it, I see them carried away headlong, grim and obsessed, in the general onrush of the human herd, unable to stop themselves or to change their direction. All the while they claim to be just on the point of attaining happiness.

If a man crosses a riverand an empty boat collides with his own skiff,Even though he be bad tempered manHe will not become very angry. But if he sees a man in the boat,He will shout at him to steer clear.If the shout is not heard, he will shout again, and yet again, and begin cursing.And all because someone is in the boat.Yet if the boat were empty,He would not be shouting, and not angry.If you can empty your own boatCrossing the river of the world,No one will oppose you, No one will seek to harm you

Dmitry Glukhovsky #

There’s only one thing that can save a man from madness and that’s uncertainty.

Rust #

Many languages are dogmatic about the solutions they offer for handling concurrent problems. For example, Erlang has elegant functionality for message-passing concurrency but has only obscure ways to share state between threads. Supporting only a subset of possible solutions is a reasonable strategy for higher-level languages, because a higher-level language promises benefits from giving up some control to gain abstractions. However, lower-level languages are expected to provide the solution with the best performance in any given situation and have fewer abstractions over the hardware.

Gaius Musonius Rufus #

Humanity must seek what is NOT simple and obvious using the simple and obvious.

John Bercow #

Persist, persist, persist!

Herman Hesse #

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow. Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail. A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live. When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all. A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother. So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

Robert Eno #

In (Ancient) Greece the search for knowledge was a linguistic endeavor. I suggest that in China, ideas of valid knowing derived in association with the notion of efficacious arts, or daos, and the central questions that lie behind the philosophical enterprise of early China concern control over action and events rather than understanding; the keys to understanding lay in daos rather than in theories.

Cicero #

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

Marcus Tullius Cicero #

Friendship improves happiness, and abates misery, by doubling our joys, and dividing our grief

David Hume #

Epicurus’s old questions are still unanswered: Is he (God) willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? then whence evil?

Daniel Klein #

When my father-in-law, Jan Vuijst, a Dutch Reformed minister, was on his deathbed, I had a deeply intimate conversation with him - as it turned out, my last conversation with him. He said to me, ‘It was a privilege to have lived.’ The soulful gratitude of that simple statement will never leave me.

Gorgias #

Nothing exists, though if it did exist, it could not be known, but even if it could be known, it could not be communicated, and, if it could be communicated, it could not be understood. - Gorgias, On Nature or the Non-Existent

Joel J Kupperman #

The Upanishads promise that, in a spiritual state referred to as moksha (liberation or release), you can have permanent spiritual fulfillment after death. In order to have this, you must follow the path of joy rather than the path of pleasure.

Lee H. Yearly #

Zhuangzi’s position is not the simple and finally untenable “we know nothing”. Rather, it is the more complex and subtle “We do not know if we do know or if we do not know”. … “How do I know that we who hate death are not exiles since childhood who have forgotten the way home?” … He neither answers such questions nor things he can answer them; he simply does not know.

Ajahn Chah #

Do everything with a mind that lets go. Don’t accept praise or gain or anything else. If you let go a little you a will have a little peace; if you let go a lot you will have a lot of peace; if you let go completely you will have complete peace.

Marcelo Gleiser #

We’re living in very strange times. The idea of being popular for being outrageous is coming from the leadership,

Poonja #

Student: When I ask myself what this spiritual journey is about, I say it is nothing more than getting ride of all concepts, am I right?Poonjaji: Spirituality doesn’t tell you to get rid of anything. What will be removed? Where will you put it? In this world there are mountains and rivers and animals. If you get rid of them, where will they go? They have to stay here. It is better to stay with everything and with love, not to reject or accept. –Poonja, 1992b, p.36

Carl Sandburg #

If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell

Time is the most valuable coin in your life. You and you alone will determine how that coin will be spent. Be careful that you do not let other people spend it for you.

I’m an idealist. I don’t know where I’m going but I’m on the way.

Jon Hopkins (musician) #

I like the idea of starting from a point of reality and then twisting it into something rather more abstract

Linus Torvalds #

Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time.

Leesa S Davis #

Student: Through the grace of your presence we are now in silence. What will happen to us when you go away?Poonjaji: Because you saw me coming, you suppose that I will one day go away. I never come or go.Student: But you are going away soon. What will I do in your absence?Poonjaji: If you know how to create separation in the presence, why don’t you create presence in the separation?

Alain de Botton #

Epicurus founded a school of philosophy which placed great emphasis on the importance of pleasure. “Pleasure is the beginning and the goal of a happy life,” he asserted, confirming what many had long thought, but philosophers had rarely accepted. Vulgar opinion at once imagined that the pleasure Epicurus had in mind involved a lot of money, sex, drink and debauchery (associations that survive in our use of the word ‘Epicurean’). But true Epicureanism was more subtle. Epicurus led a very simple life, because after rational analysis, he had come to some striking conclusions about what actually made life pleasurable - and fortunately for those lacking a large income, it seemed that the essential ingredients of pleasure, however elusive, were not very expensive.The first ingredient was friendship. ‘Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one’s entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship,’ he wrote. So he bought a house near Athens where he lived in the company of congenial souls. The desire for riches should perhaps not always be understood as a simple hunger for a luxurious life, a more important motive might be the wish to be appreciated and treated nicely. We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us. Epicurus, discerning our underlying need, recognised that a handful of true friends could deliver the love and respect that even a fortune may not.Epicurus and his friends located a second secret of happiness: freedom. In order not to have to work for people they didn’t like and answer to potentially humiliating whims, they removed themselves from employment in the commercial world of Athens (‘We must free ourselves from the prison of everyday affairs and politics’), and began what could best have been described as a commune, accepting a simpler way of life in exchange for independence. They would have less money, but would never again have to follow the commands of odious superiors.The third ingredient of happiness was, in Epicurus’s view, to lead an examined life. Epicurus was concerned that he and his friends learn to analyse their anxieties about money, illness, death and the supernatural. There are few better remedies for anxiety than thought. In writing a problem down or airing it in conversation we let its essential aspects emerge. And by knowing its character, we remove, if not the problem itself, then its secondary, aggravating characteristics: confusion, displacement, surprise. Wealth is of course unlikely ever to make anyone miserable. But the crux of Epicurus’s argument is that if we have money without friends, freedom and an analysed life, we will never be truly happy. And if we have them, but are missing the fortune, we will never be unhappy.

Luke Slattery #

The true Epicurean cultivates the capacity to take pleasure in simple things, while those around him chase pleasure in more things.

Vladimir N Vapnik #

I heard reiteration of the following claim: Complex theories do not work; simple algorithms do.One of the goals of this book is to show that, at least in the problems of statistical inference, this is not true. I would like to demonstrate that in the area of science a good old principle is valid:Nothing is more practical than a good theory.

Ajahn Chach #

Any speech which ignores uncertainty is not spoken by a sage.

We never really get away with anything.

Good actions bring good results, badactions bring bad results. Don’t expect the gods to do thing for you, or the angles and guardian deities to protect you, or the auspicious days to help you. These things aren’t true. Don’t believe in them. If you believe in them, you will suffer. You will always be waiting for the right day, the right month, the right year, the angels, or the guardian deities. You’ll only suffer that way. Look into your own actions and speech, into your kamma. Doing good, you inherit good- ness, doing bad you inherit badness.

When they feel well, will they practice? No. They get lost in happiness. If they’re suffering they still don’t practice. They get lost in that, too. I don’t know when people think they’re going to practice.

I went all over looking for places to meditate. I didn’t realize it was already there, in my heart. All the meditation is right there inside you. Birth, old age, sickness and death are right there within you. I travelled all over until I was ready to drop dead from exhaustion. Only then, when I stopped, did I find what I was looking for… inside me.

You’re blind and deaf without meditiation. Dhamma isn’t easily seen. You must meditiate to see what you’ve never seen. Were you born a teacher? No. You must study first. A lemon is sour only when you have tasted it.

Bankei #

Don’t side with yourself

Yoshito Hakeda #

Trying to suppress delusion is delusion too. Delusions have no original existence; they’re only things you create yourself by indulging in discrimination.

Paul Reps #

When asked to perform a miracle, a Zen master responded:“My miracle is that when I feel hungry I eat, and when I feel thirsty I drink.

Hannah Szenes #

There are stars whose light reaches the earth when they themselves are gone and no more, there are people whose radiance illuminates when they themselves are gone and no longer among us. These lights , brilliant in the dark of night, they kindle for humanity the lights among the path.

Chuang Tse #

Cease striving. Then there will be transformation.

Friedrich Von Schiller #

Freundlos war der große Weltenmeister,Fühlte Mangel - darum schuf er Geister.Sel’ge Spiegel seiner Seligkeit!Fand das höchste Wesen schon kein gleiches,Aus dem Kelch des ganzen SeelenreichesSchäumt ihm - die Unendlichkeit.

Unknown #

An uttered thought is a lie.

Freedom is freeing yourself from attachment to desires, obstacles, delusions, that prevent you from doing what you are intent to do.

To learn is to model the observable world in order to understand it. A model is a set of relations between data or evidence obtained with a set of instruments, and actions performed by a set of acting agents. Understanding requires that the model fulfills are certain goal. The goal is set when agents detect a need for resources or data to accomplish a task. To understand, therefore, is to provide a set of adequate responses in order to adapt the system to the surrounding world, or to maintain its identity in a changing environment.

Frédéric Beigbeder #

Recette pour aller mieux. Répéter souvent ces trois phrases : le bonheur n’existe pas. L’amour est impossible. Rien n’est grave.

Amélie Nothomb #

Il y a des beautés qui sautent aux yeux et d’autres qui sont écrites en hyéroglyphes: on met du temps à déchiffrer leur splendeur mais, quand elle est apparue, elle est plus belle que la beauté.

Ranata Suzuki #

I believe in love at first sight…But it’s not the first moment you lay eyes on a person, it’s the moment you first seethe person they truly are.

Dan Saks #

The purpose of social media is to reinforce your own beliefs.