Serious Quotes

The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few in most personal experience.  There's lots of good fish in the sea....maybe...but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you're not mackerel or herring yourself, you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea. -DH Lawrence, Lady Chatterly's Lover

Life is a spiral, we come the same way repeatedly, but each time we have a different view.-Morgan Llywelyn

Humans who think they can explain magic or gods have experienced neither.  -Morgan Llywelyn

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher regard those who think alike than those who think differently. -Nietzche

Everyone takes the limits of his vision for the limits of the world. -Arthur Schopenhaur

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be. -Kurt Vonnegut

...we are robbed of that rare and wonderful satisfaction that comes with personal accomplishment.  In early times, nearly every single thing a person touched was the result of his own labor.  The cloth of his clothing, the meal on the table, the chair he sat in, and the floor he walked upon, all were made by the user.  This is why those people had an extraordinary awareness of life.  --Eric Sloane

To live content with small means, to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable; and wealthy, not rich; to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, and act frankly.  This is my symphony.  -William Ellery Channing

If you ask a question, and stop long enough to listen, the universe will answer. -Jack Flanders>

Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.

Reality is the ultimate Rorschach. -Principia Discordia

Mediocrity is the refuge of the timid and unimaginative. -Principia Discordia

The human race will begin solving its problems on the day that it ceases taking itself so seriously.- Principia Discordia

Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength. -Eric Hoffer

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make ye mad. -Aldous Huxley

Insanity in individuals is something rare, but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule. -Nietzsche

Autonomy is the whole thing; it's what unhappy people are missing. They have given the power to run their lives over to other people. -Judith Guest

Nothing is enough for the man for whom enough is too little. -Epicurous

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, command a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently and die gallantly.  Specialization is for insects. -Robert Heinlein

Is it possible to prove that the past really did happen, instead of everything from fossils to our memories, to the date being simply details created in the mind of some pre-adolescent godling with only three minutes left to sleep? -a person from an email list

Life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician. -Martin Gardner

An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness. -Margaret Atwood

The true genius shudders at incompleteness- and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be. -Edgar Allen Poe

Don't speak unless you can improve on the silence. -Spanish proverb

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures. -Heny Ward Beecher

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. -Berthold Auerbach

Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back in the same box. -Italian proverb

In my end is my beginning. -Mary Stewart, Queen of Scots

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

All that is gold does not glitter; not all those who wander are lost. The old that is strong does not wither; deep roots are not touched by the frost. -JRR Tolkien

There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way. -Christopher Morley

It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument. -William G. McAdoo

When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.-Jonathan Swift

A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone. -Jo Godwin

One need not be a chamber to be haunted, one need not be a house; the brain has corridors surpassing material place. -Emily Dickinson

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. -Oscar Wilde

All great truths begin as blasphemies. -George Bernard Shaw

All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players.  They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts. -William Shakespeare

You see things and you say Why? But I dream things that never were and I say Why not? -George Bernard Shaw

Life is eternal and love is immortal, and death is only a horizon...and a horizon is nothing, save the limit of our sight. -Carly Simon

The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is mingled with grief, love grows perhaps the greater. -JRR Tolkien

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. -Rudyard Kipling

Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine. -Honore de Balzac

Television is a triumph of equipment over people, and the minds that control it are so small that you could put them in a gnat's navel with room left over for two caraway seeds and an agent's heart. -Fred Allen, "CoEvolution Quarterly, Winter '77

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought, and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used. -Oliver Wendell Holmes

What is to give light must endure burning. -Viktor Frankl

There are trivial truths and there are great truths.  The opposite of a trival truth is plainly false.  The opposite of a great truth is also true. -Neils Bohr

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.  Boldness has genius, magic and power in it.  Begin it now. -Goethe

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. -Ernest Hemingway

Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long.  I can give you nothing that has not already its being within yourself.  I can throw open to you no picture gallery but your own soul.  All I can give you is the opportunity, the impulse, the key. -Herman Hesse, "Steppenwolf"

To avoid criticism do nothing, say nothing, be nothing. -Elbert Hubbard

No society has been able to abolish human sadness; no politcal system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute.  It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice-versa. -Eugene Ionesco

To change one's life:
1. Start immediately,
2. Do it flamboyantly,
3. No exceptions.
-William James

Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame. -Erica Jong

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.  It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.   The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep,  his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. -CS Lewis

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, or perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. -Machiavelli

She was weeping over the end of a cycle.  How one must be thrust out of a finished cycle in life and that leap the most difficult to make, to part with one's faith, one's love, when one would prefer to renew the faith and recreate the passion.  The struggle to emerge out of the past, clean of memories; the inadequacy of our hearts to cut life into separate and final portions; the pain of this constant ambivalence and interrelationship of emotions; the hunger for frontiers against which we might lean as upon closed doors before we proceed forward; the struggle against diffusion, new beginnings, against finality in acts without finality or end... -Anais Nin

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 upon buildings.  We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our experience.  All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps. -Michal Ondaatje

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself. -Thomas Paine

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who only dream by night. -Edgar Allen Poe

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 which he hears, however measured or far away. -Henry David Thoreau

Listen, God loves everything you love, and a mess of stuff you don't.  But more than anything else, God loves admiration.  I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. -Alice Walker

The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one's people that has not previously been taken into account. -Alice Walker

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained. -Mark Twain