Quotes by American Authors - Page 3319

We awaken by asking the right questions. We awaken when we see knowledge being spread that goes against our own personal experiences. We awaken when we see popular opinion being wrong but accepted as being right, and what is right being pushed as being wrong. We awaken by seeking answers in corners that are not popular. And we awaken by turning on the light inside when everything outside feels dark.
Suzy Kassem
We see a lot of feature-driven product design in which the cost of features is not properly accounted. Features can have a negative value to customers because they make the products more difficult to understand and use. We are finding that people like products that just work. It turns out that designs that just work are much harder to produce that designs that assemble long lists of features.
Douglas Crockford
He who writes well runs the civilization. Everyone else does the grunt work.
Kenneth W. Harl
Genius is measured not by static volume but by kinetic vision.
Rich DiSilvio
If i had it all to do again there would be more bodies.
Phil Baker
I man is a prisoner of only his own mind.
Michael Hawkins
Perhaps in his loneliness he had acquired the silent conviction that he was 'the last', the one, the only. And, being the last, he ceased to be Benjamin, becoming Israel. And upon his heart had settled the history of five thousand years, no longer remote, but become as the history of his own lifetime. His "I" was the converse of the imperial "We.
Walter M. Miller Jr
What is humor?' one of their professors had posed, and he had answered, ''nondangerous, unexpectedly inappropriate juxtaposition.
Sena Jeter Naslund
Would Crazy Horse have spent this much to remodel a kitchen?
Ian Frazier
I never could read Foucault. I find philosophy tedious. All of my knowledge comes from reading novels and some history. I read Being and Nothingness and realized that I remembered absolutely nothing when I finished it. I used to go to the library every day and read every day for eight hours. I’d dropped out of high school and had to teach myself. I read Sartre without any background. I just forced myself and I learned nothing.
Michael Gira
There is a perennial classical question that asks which part of the motorcycle, which grain of sand in which pile, is the Buddha. Obviously to ask that question is to look in the wrong direction, for the Buddha is everywhere. But just as obviously to ask the question is to look in the right direction, for the Buddha is everwhere.
Robert M. Pirsig
Imprisoning philosophy within the professionalizations and specializations of an institutionalized curriculum, after the manner of our contemporary European and North American culture, is arguably a good deal more effective in neutralizing its effects than either religious censorship or political terror
Alasdair MacIntyre
Nat: Maybe you broke something.Midge: I know. Never fall down, never fall down!Nat: Ah, it's nothing. I fall down every morning. I get up, I have a cup of coffee, I fall down. That's the system. Two years old, you stand up and then BOOM! seventy years later, you fall down again.
Herb Gardner
[N]ow we have a clearer idea what this story is all about: The world was made for man, and man was made to rule it.
Daniel Quinn
We must think beyond ourselves
Kevin J. Anderson
Every life has a destiny... the trick is to discover it before then end of your life. Otherwise, you will have too many regrets.
Kevin J. Anderson
I am serving the purpose for which I was designed, therefore I am satisfied with my existence.
Kevin J. Anderson
History is a hermaphrodite with many distinguished lovers. We are neither mysteries nor strangers but the living breath of revelation made flesh by the unrestrained desires of a free and universal love. Universal me. Universal you.”--from Past Present and Future are One
Aberjhani
If the world was made for us, then it BELONGS to us and we can do what we damn well please with it.
Daniel Quinn
Wisdom is seeing something in a non-habitual manner.
William James
This law … defines the limits of competition in the community of life. You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war.
Daniel Quinn
The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.
Jonathan Haidt
Faith is not belief in spite of evidence but a life in scorn of the consequences.
Clarence Jordan
By the time we began to understand enough about what the world to ask the right questions, our visit is over, and someone else is visiting, asking the same questions.
D.K. LeVick
Time (again, Time) like the soul, wears many faces, many bodies and climates and attitudes. The past is one face, the present a second and the future yet another.
Aberjhani
Communism is the final logic of the dehumanization of man.
Fulton J. Sheen
No one species shall make the life of the world its own.' … That's one expression of the law. Here's another: 'The world was not made for any one species.
Daniel Quinn
The line between him and the enemy had simultaneously blurred and solidified. Somehow, while perhaps it shouldn't have, this thought provided a strange sense of peace.
Kristina McMorris
Ideas and philosophies have a shelf-life. They must be kept fresh and renewed or they will spoil. If left unattended, the same ideas and philosophies that once nourished you and helped you grow can poison you and make you sick. Become aware of new ideas that can refresh your way of life and be open to the fact that your old ideas and philosophies can work for you for some time, but when the shelf-life has passed, those ideas and philosophies could also harm you.
Steve Maraboli
The best of humanity's recorded history is a creative balance between horrors endured and victories achieved, and so it was during the Harlem Renaissance.
Aberjhani
Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoretically they are very confused, and one easily makes the obscurest assumptions in this science without realizing, until challenged, what internal difficulties they involve.
William James
In my heart's most secret place,I pity them as angels do.
Sara Teasdale
I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object.
Henry Miller
A scientist may not be sure of the answer, but he's often sure he can find one. And that's a condition which is clearly not enjoyed by philosophy.
B.F. Skinner
Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible.
Lois McMaster Bujold
Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.
Peter Singer
See the moon? It hates us.
Donald Barthelme
To sum it all up, the [Ayn] Rand belief system looks like this:1. Facts are facts: things can be absolutely right or absolutely wrong, as determined by reason.2. According to my reasoning, I am absolutely right.3. Charity is immoral.4. Pay for your own fucking schools.
Matt Taibbi
For me, writing is immortality. It is wisdom. It is never-ending.
Al Stone
Only God may be adored, because only God is unlimited goodness, truth, and beauty, and thus only God deserves unlimited love.
Peter Kreeft
The gods are fond of the cryptic and dislike the evident.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Ben, if you get pee in my brand-new car, I am going to cut your balls off."Still peeing, Ben looks over at me smirking. "You´re gonna need a hell of a big knife, bro.
John Green
Everything smaller than Heaven bores us because only Heaven is bigger than our hearts.
Peter Kreeft
The most total opposite of pleasure is not pain but boredom, for we are willing to risk pain to make a boring life interesting.
Peter Kreeft
Yet even in the loneliness of the canyon I knew there were others like me who had brothers they did not understand but wanted to help. We are probably those referred to as "our brother's keepers," possessed of one of the oldest and possible one of the most futile and certainly one of the most haunting instincts. It will not let us go.
Norman Maclean
At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.
Norman Maclean
God created philosophy for all the intellects that got bored of hearing the same bible stories every Sunday.
Shannon L. Alder
We co-create our reality with others in unseen ways.
Doug Dillon
Пустинните бурени оцеляват, а пролетното цвете разцъфва и повяхва.
Khaled Hosseini
In every ancient religious and sacred text, faith is a verb; a thing to be demonstrated. It is in modern days that we have diluted faith from an act to a philosophy.
Steve Maraboli
Such Excessive Preoccupation With The Faults Of Others Only Manages To Bring The Spotlight To Shine Bright On Whatever It Is You May Have Hiding Behind All Your Self Perceived Glory.
Marcie Leeper
You have made the moon," The Jester said. "That is the moon.
James Thurber
And yet we have what purports, or professes, or is claimed, to be a contract—the Constitution—made eighty years ago, by men who are now all dead, and who never had any power to bind us, but which (it is claimed) has nevertheless bound three generations of men, consisting of many millions, and which (it is claimed) will be binding upon all the millions that are to come; but which nobody ever signed, sealed, delivered, witnessed, or acknowledged; and which few persons, compared with the whole number that are claimed to be bound by it, have ever read, or even seen, or ever will read, or see.
Lysander Spooner
There may be some truth (atheists) do not need to believe in a god to be good, but then if they do not believe in a god, who do they believe gives the Universal Law of following good and shunning evil? Obviously, mankind. But then that is a dangerous thing, for if a man does not believe in a god capable of giving perfect laws, he is in the position of declaring all laws come from man, and as man is imperfect, he can declare that as fallible men make imperfect laws, he can pick and choose what he wishes to follow, that which, in his own mind seems good. He does not believe in divine retribution, therefore he can also declare his own morality contrary to what the divine may decree simply because he believes there is no divine decree. He may follow his every whim and passion, declaring it to be good when it may be very evil, for he like all men is imperfect, so how can he tell what is verily good? The atheist is in danger of mistaking vice for good and consequently follow another slave master and tyrant, his own physical and mental weakness. Evil would be wittingly or unwittingly perpetrated, therefore, to recognise the existence of a perfect divine being that gives perfect Universal Laws is much better than not to believe in a god, for if there is a perfect god, they will not allow their laws to be broken with impunity as in the case with many corrupt judges on earth, but will punish accordingly in due time. Therefore, to be pious and reverent is the surest path to true freedom as a perfect god will give perfect laws to prevent all manner of slavery, tyranny and moral wantonness, even if we do not understand why they are good laws at times.
E.A. Bucchianeri
We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately (...) To games or needles, to some other person.
David Foster Wallace
It takes a well-spent lifetime, and perhaps more, to crystalize in us that for which we exist.
Jean Toomer
A crude age. Peace is stabilized with cannon and bombers, humanity with concentration camps and pogroms. We're living in a time when all standards are turned upside-down, Kern. Today the aggressor is the shepherd of peace, and the beaten and hunted are the troublemakers of the world. What's more, there are whole races who believe it!
Erich Maria Remarque
Not only are there meaningless questions, but many of the problems with which the human intellect has tortured itself turn out to be only 'pseudo problems,' because they can be formulated only in terms of questions which are meaningless. Many of the traditional problems of philosophy, of religion, or of ethics, are of this character. Consider, for example, the problem of the freedom of the will. You maintain that you are free to take either the right- or the left-hand fork in the road. I defy you to set up a single objective criterion by which you can prove after you have made the turn that you might have made the other. The problem has no meaning in the sphere of objective activity; it only relates to my personal subjective feelings while making the decision.
Percy Williams Bridgman
This sweet virginal primitive land will metaphorically breathe a sigh of relief --like a whisper of wind--when we are all and finally gone and the place and its creations can return to their ancient procedures unobserved and undisturbed by the busy, anxious, brooding consciousness of man.
Edward Abbey
But spontaneity is not by any means a blind, disorderly urge, a mere power of caprice. A philosophy restricted to the alternatives of conventional language has no way of conceiving an intelligence which does not work according to plan, according to a one-at-a-time order of thought. Yet the concrete evidence of such an intelligence is right to hand in our own thoughtlessly ordered bodies. For the Tao does not 'know' how it produces the universe just as we do not 'know' how we construct our brains.
Alan W. Watts