home albums scrapbooks soundslides quotes guestbook Q U O T E S Winston Churchill apparently said: "It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations"; well, here are some quotes that I have collected... The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page. --Augustine (354-430) If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness, and fears. --Glenn Clark The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself. --Henry Miller I was at peace. The only sounds I heard were the calls of birds and the slap of waves against the hull of my boat. An occasional jet droned high above, to remind me, you'll come back, dreamer, your life depends on those artifacts you've tried to escape. E.O.Wilson --Naturalist It seemed to me a superlative thing - to know the explanation of everything, why it comes to be, why it perishes, why it is. --Socrates A ship in a harbour is a safe ship, but that's not what they were built for. --Anon Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value to one man seems nonsense to another. Hermann Hesse --Siddhartha It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small. --Neil Armstrong I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief. --Gerry Spence It is not easy to remember that in the fading light of day the shadows always point toward the dawn. --Winston O. Abbott Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. --Oscar Wilde A child on a farm sees a plane fly by overhead and dreams of a faraway place. A traveler on the plane sees the farmhouse and dreams of home. --Carl Burns Anything in any way beautiful derives its beauty from itself and asks nothing beyond itself. Praise is no part of it, for nothing is made worse or better by praise. --Marcus Aurelius In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence... and loathing seizes him. Friedrich Nietzsche --The Birth of Tragedy Under the absolute sway of one man the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul; but the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it and rose proudly superior. Such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved. The master no longer says: 'You shall think as I do or you shall die'; but he says: 'You are free to think differently from me and to retain your life, your property, and all that you possess; but you are henceforth a stranger among your people.' Alexis de Tocqueville --Democracy in America Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. Arthur Schopenhauer --Studies in Pessimism The judgemental eye harvests the reflected surface and calls it truth. It enjoys neither the forgiveness nor the imagination to see deeper into the ground of things where truth is paradox. An externalist, image-driven culture is the corollary of such an ideology of facile judgement. --Anam Cara Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go. --Oscar Wilde Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success. --Oscar Wilde And thus a ready mode is provided, by which whoever is on the strongest side may dogmatize at his ease, and instead of proving his propositions, may rail at all who deny them, as bereft of 'the vision and the faculty divine', or blinded to its plainest revelations by a corrupt heart. John Stuart Mill --Coleridge Love, friendship, respect do not unite people as much as common hatred for something. Anton Chekhov --Notebooks What improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. Adam Smith --The Wealth of Nations The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Henry David Thoreau --Walden, or, Life in the Woods One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important. Bertrand Russell --The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell 'So death is having all these tries at me, is he? Let him, then! I had a try at him a long while ago myself.' 'When was this?' you'll say. Before I was born. Death is just not being. What that is like I know already. It will be the same after me as it was before me. Seneca --Epistulae Morales Mankind cannot subsist at all unless there is an infinite number of useful men who possess nothing at all. For a prosperous man will certainly not leave his land to cultivate yours; and if you need a pair of shoes it is not a judge who will make them for you. Francois Voltaire --Philosophical Dictionary Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream. Malcolm Muggeridge --Radio Times, 09/07/64 The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. Blaise Pascal --Pensees Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don't even arise. Jean Baudrillard --Cool Memories Men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance. Giambattista Vico --The New Science An ideology is a complex of ideas or notions which represents itself to the thinker as an absolute truth for the interpretation of the world and his situation within it; it leads the thinker to accomplish an act of self-deception for the purpose of justification, obfuscation and evasion in some sense or other to his advantage. Karl Jaspers --The Origin and Goal of History Many people are afraid of freedom. They are conditioned to be afraid of it. Herbert Marcuse --New York Times, 27/10/1968 More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. Woody Allen --My Speech to the Graduates Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. James Baldwin --The fire next time The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell. Bertrand Russell --On the Value of Scepticism Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment. George Santayana The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos. Stephen Jay Gould --Dinosaur in a Haystack I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others. Marcus Aurelius --Meditations Skepticism is inclined toward toleration, since in its doubts it cannot choose among the competing beliefs that swirl around it, so often in murderous rage. Whether the skeptic seeks personal tranquility in retreat or tries to calm the warring factions around her, she must prefer a government that does nothing to increase the prevailing levels of fanatacism and dogmatism. Judith Shklar --The Liberalism of Fear The envious man thinks that if his neighbor breaks a leg, he will be able to walk better himself. Helmut Schoeck --Envy: A Theory Of Social Behavior I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom. Noam Chomsky --Red and Black Revolution, 1996 Humans ought to preserve for themselves an environment adequate to match their capacity to wonder. Holmes Rolston III --Duties to Endangered Species One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be 'happy' is not included in the plan of 'Creation'... We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things. Sigmund Freud --Civilisation and its Discontents The fundamentalists, by 'knowing' the answers before they start, and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science - or of any honest intellectual inquiry. Stephen Jay Gould --Bully for Brontosaurus 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.. Arthur Schopenhauer --Aphorisms Philosophy, beginning in wonder ... is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. Its mind is full of air that plays round every subject. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices....A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates. William James --Some Problems of Philosophy Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. H. L. Mencken --Chrestomathy If one man offers you democracy and another offers you a bag of grain, at what stage of starvation will you prefer the grain to the vote? Bertrand Russell --Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin. Cardinal Bellarmine --said during the trial of Galileo I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature. Albert Einstein --The World As I See It Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. Karl Marx --A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right One should 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. Bertrand Russell --The Conquest of Happiness For words are wise men's counters, they do but reckon with them; but they are the money of fools. Thomas Hobbes --Leviathan Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies. --Friedrich Nietzsche Desire is half of life, indifference is half of death. --Kahlil Gibran The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. --Bertrand Russell The secret of happiness is this: Let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile. --Bertrand Russell Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one getting burned. --Buddha Happiness consists more in small conveniences or pleasures that occur every day, than in great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom to a man in the course of his life. --Benjamin Franklin He that lives upon hope will die fasting. --Benjamin Franklin If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest. --Benjamin Franklin Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value. --Albert Einstein Most idealistic people are skint. I have discovered that people with money have no imagination, and people with imagination have no money. --George Weiss Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life. --Joseph Conrad To see a World in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, To hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour. --William Blake Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute, that's relativity. --Albert Einstein I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. --Albert Einstein It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. --Aristotle When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love. --Marcus Aurelius Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thought that is forever flowing through one's head. --Mark Twain I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it. --Anne Lamott To avoid criticism do nothing, say nothing, be nothing. --Elbert Hubbard The love we give away is the only love we keep. --Elbert Hubbard The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one. --Elbert Hubbard Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. --George Bernard Shaw I have noticed that the people who are late are often so much jollier than the people who have to wait for them. --E.V. Lucas Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your dreams come true. --Ralph Waldo Emerson He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, and he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere. --Ralph Waldo Emerson Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them. --Ralph Waldo Emerson Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted. --Ralph Waldo Emerson To belittle is to be little! --Anon The secret of success is making your vocation your vacation. --Mark Twain The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become. --Charles DuBois The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are. --Joseph Campbell The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win you're still a rat. --Lily Tomlin Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt. --Shakespeare A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers. Albert Camus --The Fall It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues. --Abraham Lincoln Know thyself. Thales Miletus --Quoted in Diogenes Laertius's Lives of Eminent Philosophers Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase...the human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive. --Frank Herbert And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in all the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. John Steinbeck --East of Eden Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men for they may act their dream with open eyes and make it possible. --T.E. Lawrence Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility. --Sigmund Freud We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same. --Anne Frank Always do what you want, and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind. --Dr Seuss It is not by accident that the happiest people are those who make a conscious effort to live useful lives. Their happiness, of course, is not a shallow exhilaration where life is one continuos intoxicating party. Rather, their happiness is a deep sense of inner peace that comes when they believe their lives have meaning and that they are making a difference for good in the world. --Ernest A. Fitzgerald We tend to forget that happiness doesn't come as a result of getting something we don't have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have. --Frederick Koenig One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken. --Leo Tolstoy It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself. --Ralph Waldo Emerson Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armour of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day… we become seekers. --Peter Matthiessen Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you. --Carl Sandburg It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening. --H.G. Wells Success is never final. Failure is never fatal. It is courage that counts. --Winston Churchill If you knew how much work went into it, you wouldn't call it genius. --Michelangelo If we did the things we are capable of, we would astound ourselves. --Thomas Edison The reward of a thing well done is to have done it. --Ralph Waldo Emerson "I have done my best." That is about all the philosophy of living one needs. --Lin Yutang Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself. --Henry Miller How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world. --William Shakespeare I would rather fail in a cause that will ultimately triumph than to triumph in a cause that will ultimately fail. --Woodrow Wilson We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future. --George Bernard Shaw The purpose of education is to replace an empty mind with an open one. --Malcom Forbes Half the work that is done in the world is to make things appear what they are not. --E.R. Beadle By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest. --Confucius There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. --William James You see the Earth as a bright blue and white Christmas tree ornament in the black sky. It's so small and so fragile - you realize that on that small spot is everything that means everything to you; all of history and art and death and birth and love. --Russell Schweikart, astronaut The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved -- loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves. --Victor hugo Time you enjoyed wasting is not wasted time. --T.S. Elliot Never does a man portray his character more vividly than his proclaiming the character of another. --Winston Churchill When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced; live your life so that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice. --Cherokee saying To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else. --Emily Dickinson To affect the quality of the day; that is the art of life. --Henry David Thoreau Real learning comes when the competitive spirit has ceased. --Krishnamurti Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a Summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time. --Sir J Lubbock (So that's how you get a knighthood! Where's mine?) All great truths begin as blasphemies. --George Bernard Shaw 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. --Kahlil Gibran It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere. --Agnes Repplier How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives. --Anne Dillard The greater part of happiness or misery depends on our dispositions, not our circumstances. --Martha Washington Life is not a matter of milestones, but of moments. --Rose Kennedy If there is to be any peace it will come through being, not having. --Henry Miller You can't change the past, and you can ruin a perfectly good present, by worrying about the future. --Anon Punctuality is the thief of time. --Oscar Wilde How beautiful it is to do nothing, and then rest afterward. --Spanish proverb Happiness, that grand mistress of the ceremonies in the dance of life, impels us through all its mazes and meanderings, but leads none of us by the same route. --Charles Caleb Colton Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. --Marcel Proust Happiness is like a butterfly, which, when you pursue it is always beyond your grasp, but, which, when you sit down may alight upon you. --Nathaniel Hawthorne There are things that are known, and things that are unknown. In between there are doors. --William Blake What if you slept; and what if in your sleep you dreamed; and what if in your dream you went to heaven and there you plucked a strange and beautiful flower; and what if when you awoke you had the flower in your hand? Oh, what then? --Samuel Taylor Coleridge Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, old time is still a-flying: and this same flower that smiles today, tomorrow will be dying. Robert Herrick --To the Virgins, to make much of Time You grow up the day you have your first real laugh at yourself. --Ethel Barrymore Nature is very clear about how things work; be briefly happy it says, there can be no longer happiness and then die. This is nature's simple message. The pursuit of both beauty and happiness are noble missions only when played in the sunlight against a background of black. Look at the place I leave behind, just look at its twisted nature. If a child today finds himself born in cool meadows sparkling with streams where the answers to everything can be felt on the skin or smelled on a breeze, he will see it as a plague; because the television will flicker and bewitch his dreams 'til he runs to join our world of altered cares, to serve the only real omnipotence the world has ever known, a force beyond conscience or control, one that resides in every being at once and spins the wheel of fortune for all things: the economy. Where the dumb and lazy are powerful. Decadence comes to every empire not lucky enough to be destroyed at a stroke. DBC Pierre --Lights Out in Wonderland We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps." Michael Ondaatje --The English Patient There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as an unfinished song or an old address book. Carson McCullers Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, 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 [they are] 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. Marcus Aurelius