What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.
-Madeleine L'Engle
This is perhaps the most distinctive Buddhist teaching, that suffering is the product of 'the craving of the passions, the craving for existence, the craving for nonexistence.' It is, however, far from an obvious truth. Certain cases of suffering are plainly due to craving, namely, those that are due to frustrated desires. Desires may be eased by satisfaction or extirpation; and one may allow that if one stopped desiring, it would amount to preventing all the suffering due to frustration. But this does not prove the general case.... Body, feelings, perception, mentality, and consciousness are separate sets of graspings. There is nothing that -does- the grasping. -We- are the aggregate of the graspings, not something, apart from them, that does the grasping. This is an interesting and startling thought.
-Arthur Coleman Danto
In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Without music life would be a mistake.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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 the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
-W. H. Auden
One may say that evil does not exist for subjective man at all, that there exist only different conceptions of good. Nobody ever does anything deliberately in the interests of evil, for the sake of evil. Everybody acts in the interests of good, as he understands it. But everybody understands it in a different way. Consequently men drown, slay, and kill one another in the interests of good.
-Gurdjieff
A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.
-Joseph Stalin
Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.
-Jean Baudrillard
Who sees all beings in his own Self, and his own Self in all beings, loses all fear.
-Isa Upanishad
Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.
-Thomas Henry Huxley
If it can be verified, we don't need faith... Faith is for that which lies on the other side of reason. Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.
-Madeleine L'Engle
Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Behind every successful man is a woman, behind her is his wife.
-Groucho Marx
Why hate someone for the color of their skin when there are much better reasons to hate them.
-Denis Leary
To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking,"I am listening to this music," you are not listening. To understand joy or fear, you must be wholly and undividedly aware of it. So long as you are calling it names and saying, "I am happy," or "I am afraid," you are not being aware of it. Fear, pain, sorrow, and boredom must remain problems if we do not understand them, but understanding requires a single and undivided mind. This, surely, is the meaning of thats trange saying, "If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.
-Alan Wilson Watts
Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.
-Samuel Butler
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.
-Walt Whitman
We cannot conceive of matter being formed of nothing, since things require a seed to start from...Therefore there is not anything which returns to nothing, but all things return dissolved into their elements.
-Lucretius
Advertising is legalized lying.
-H. G. Wells
If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.
Martin Luther King Jr.
When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable.
-Madeleine L'Engle
All in all, punishment hardens and renders people more insensible; it concentrates; it increases the feeling of estrangement; it strengthens the power of resistance.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Suppressed grief suffocates, it rages within the breast, and is forced to multiply its strength.
-Ovid
Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.
-James Morrison
Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?
-Walt Whitman
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, "What! You too? I thought I was the only one!"
-C. S. Lewis
Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through anyone that suits you.
-Jim Morrison
If you resist reading what you disagree with, how will you ever acquire deeper insights into what you believe? The things most worth reading are precisely those that challenge our convictions.
-Unknown
We have reason to be afraid. This is a terrible place.
-John Berryman
History is a race between education and catastrophe.
-H. G. Wells
Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.
-William Dement
I want to go ahead of Father Time with a scythe of my own.
-H. G. Wells
People fear death even more than pain. It's strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over. Yeah, I guess it is a friend...
-James Morrison
I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?
-Ernest Hemingway
What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree.
-Sigmund Freud
"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."
-Terence Hanbury White
And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
I am free of all prejudices. I hate everyone equally.
-W. C. Fields
Death is the only inescapable, unavoidable, sure thing. We are sentenced to die the day we're born.
-Gary Gilmore
He who knows does not speak; He who speaks does not know. He who is truthful is not showy; He who is showy is not truthful. He who is virtuous does not dispute; He who disputes is not virtuous. He who is learned is not wise; He who is wise is not learned. Therefore the sage does not display his own merits.
-Lao-Tzu
Cynicism is humor in ill health.
-H. G. Wells
Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
-Groucho Marx
Believe me! The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously!
-Friedrich Nietzsche
If you deliberately plan on being less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you'll be unhappy for the rest of your life.
-Abraham H. Maslow
Not necessity, not desire --no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything --health, food, a place to live, entertainment --they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Most people love you for who you pretend to be... To keep their love, you keep pretending--performing. You get to love your pretense... It's true, we're locked in an image, an act. And, the sad thing is, people get so used to their image--they grow attached to their masks. They love their chains. They forget all about who they really are. And, if you try to remind them, they hate you for it. They feel like you're trying to steal their most precious possession.
-James Morrison