Quotes by American Authors - Page 3323

We are citizens of the world. The tragedy of our times is that we do not know this.
Woodrow Wilson
I think it was the institution...I was trying to master it.
E. Lockhart
Women's liberation is one thing, but the permeation of anti-male sentiment in post-modern popular culture - from our mocking sitcom plots to degrading commercial story lines - stands testament to the ignorance of society. Fair or not, as the lead gender that never requested such a role, the historical male reputation is quite balanced. For all of their perceived wrongs, over centuries they've moved entire civilizations forward, nurtured the human quest for discovery and industry, and led humankind from inconvenient darkness to convenient modernity. Navigating the chessboard that is human existence is quite a feat, yet one rarely acknowledged in modern academia or media. And yet for those monumental achievements, I love and admire the balanced creation that is man for all his strengths and weaknesses, his gifts and his curses. I would venture to say that most wise women do.
Tiffany Madison
There are no bad words. Bad thoughts. Bad intentions, and wooooords.
George Carlin
The debate was wearing me out. Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't. Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Made a stupid remark—why not kill myself? Missed the bus—better put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked that movie—maybe I shouldn’t kill myself.
Susanna Kaysen
Love taught me to die with dignity that I might come forth anew in splendor. Born once of flesh, then again of fire, I was reborn a third time to the sound of my name humming haikus in heaven’s mouth.
Aberjhani
What comes, is called.
Ki Longfellow
Ain't no sense worryin' about the things you got control over, 'cause if you got control over 'em, ain't no sense worryin'. And ain't no sense worryin' about the things you don't got control over, 'cause if you don't got control over 'em, ain't no sense worryin'.
Mickey Rivers
The universe never complains.When you're wrong or right,She always loves and cares,She always gives and shares. When you get lost she becomes the light,Helps you to find what is right. But she never forgetsTo show you the light.
Debasish Mridha
All statistics have outliers.
Nenia Campbell
Treat everyone you meet as if they were you.
Doug Dillon
Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces "nice" people, not heroes.
Peter Kreeft
A sin is nothing more than regret. Not for doing it once, but doing it again when you know you’re going to regret it.
Carroll Bryant
Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, orperhaps of subconsciousness—I wouldn't know. But I amsure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.
Aaron Copland
Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something(All The King's Men)
Robert Penn Warren
See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalises. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all sorts of definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer. When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just why we must defer, the rationalist is unable to recognise the concretes from which his own abstraction is taken. He accuses us of denying truth; whereas we have only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought to follow it. Your typical ultra-abstractions fairly shudders at concreteness: other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer, nobler.
William James
Sitting still is a pain in the ass.
Noah Levine
Socrates should have written comics.
Mark Waid
You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education.
Bob Black
It's always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned.
David Foster Wallace
You are happy when you are enthusiastic and action-oriented, not when you are luxury and pleasure oriented.
Debasish Mridha
It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it.
Henry David Thoreau
Most of us try to do too much because we are secretly afraid we will not be able to do anything at all.
Rick Aster
And now we step to the rhythm of miracles.--from The Light, That Never Dies
Aberjhani
Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?
William James
It's not oil that runs the world, it's shame.
Sherman Alexie
Of Equality--as if it harm'd me, giving others the same chances and rights as myself--as if it were not indispensable to my own rights that others possess the same.
Walt Whitman
If everyone is a product of this society, who will say the things that need to be said, and do the things that need to be done, without compromise? Truth will never start out popular in a world more concerned with marketability than righteousness. It will initially suffer ridicule and even violence- yet ultimately it is undeniable. All of humanity is living in a dream world, but suffering real consequences.
Lauryn Hill
Never forget that there are only two philosophies to rule your life: the one of the cross, which starts with the fast and ends with the feast. The other of Satan, which starts with the feast and ends with the headache.
Fulton J. Sheen
when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.
George Steiner
A bridge of silver wings stretches from the dead ashes of an unforgiving nightmareto the jeweled vision of a life started anew.
Aberjhani
We youths say “like” all the time because we mistrust reality.
James S. Kunen
Naive people tend to generalize people as—-good, bad, kind, or evil based on their actions. However, even the smartest person in the world is not the wisest or the most spiritual, in all matters. We are all flawed. Maybe, you didn’t know a few of these things about Einstein, but it puts the notion of perfection to rest. Perfection doesn’t exist in anyone. Nor, does a person’s mistakes make them less valuable to the world. 1. He divorced the mother of his children, which caused Mileva, his wife, to have a break down and be hospitalized.2.He was a ladies man and was known to have had several affairs; infidelity was listed as a reason for his divorce.3.He married his cousin.4.He had an estranged relationship with his son.5. He had his first child out of wedlock.6. He urged the FDR to build the Atom bomb, which killed thousands of people.7. He was Jewish, yet he made many arguments for the possibility of God. Yet, hypocritically he did not believe in the Jewish God or Christianity. He stated, “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.
Shannon L. Alder
On marriage: You sort of stumble along and reconnect and lose each other and reconnect again.
Felicity Huffman
wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.
Wallace Stegner
A writer is one who communicates ideas and emotions people want to communicate but aren't quite sure how, or even if, they should communicate them.
Criss Jami
The inner revolution will not be televised or sold on the Internet. It must take place within one's own mind and heart.
Noah Levine
The truth is, going against the internal stream of ignorance is way more rebellious than trying to start some sort of cultural revolution.
Noah Levine
A sign of a lover of wisdom is his delight in not running his mouth about things he doesn't know.
Criss Jami
TO the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little, Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever after-ward resumes its liberty.
Walt Whitman
We...sin not because we want what is evil, but because we want what isn't good enough.
Scott Hahn
If you ask me to tell you anything about the nature of what lies beyond the phaneron… my answer is “How should I know?”… I am not dismayed by ultimate mysteries… I can no more grasp what is behind such questions as my cat can understand what is behind the clatter I make while I type this paragraph.
Martin Gardner
Oh, why does compassion weaken us?'It doesn't, really ... Somewhere where it all balances out - don't the philosophers have a name for it, the perfect place, the place where the answers live? - if we could go there, you could see it doesn't. It only looks, a little bit, like it does, from here, like an ant at the foot of an oak tree. He doesn't have a clue that it's a tree; it's the beginning of the wall round the world, to him.
Robin McKinley
To be a god can ultimately become boring and degrading. There'd be reason enough for the invention of free will! A god might wish to escape into sleep and be alive only in the unconscious projections of his dream-creatures.
Frank Herbert
One picture puzzle pieceLyin' on the sidewalk,One picture puzzle pieceSoakin' in the rain.It might be a button of blueOn the coat of the womanWho lived in a shoe.It might be a magical bean,Or a fold in the redVelvet robe of a queen.It might be the one little biteOf the apple her stepmotherGave to Snow White.It might be the veil of a brideOr a bottle with some evil genie inside.It might be a small tuft of hairOn the big bouncy bellyOf Bobo the Bear.It might be a bit of the cloakOf the Witch of the WestAs she melted to smoke.It might be a shadowy traceOf a tear that runs down an angel's face.Nothing has more possibilitiesThan one old wet picture puzzle piece.
Shel Silverstein
Bring the mind into sharp focus and make it alert so that it can immediately intuit truth, which is everywhere. The mind must be emancipated from old habits, prejudices, restrictive thought processes and even ordinary thought itself.
Bruce Lee
Philosophers can debate the meaning of life, but you need a Lord who can declare the meaning of life.
Max Lucado
A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it.
H.L. Mencken
There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
It is the man of science, eager to have his every opinion regenerated, his every idea rationalized, by drinking at the fountain of fact, and devoting all the energies of his life to the cult of truth, not as he understands it, but as he does not yet understand it, that ought properly to be called a philosopher.
Charles Sanders Peirce
I drink cup of sunlight every morning to brighten myself.
Debasish Mridha
Each religion makes scores of purportedly factual assertions about everything from the creation of the universe to the afterlife. But on what grounds can believers presume to know that these assertions are true? The reasons they give are various, but the ultimate justification for most religious people’s beliefs is a simple one: we believe what we believe because our holy scriptures say so. But how, then, do we know that our holy scriptures are factually accurate? Because the scriptures themselves say so. Theologians specialize in weaving elaborate webs of verbiage to avoid saying anything quite so bluntly, but this gem of circular reasoning really is the epistemological bottom line on which all 'faith' is grounded. In the words of Pope John Paul II: 'By the authority of his absolute transcendence, God who makes himself known is also the source of the credibility of what he reveals.' It goes without saying that this begs the question of whether the texts at issue really were authored or inspired by God, and on what grounds one knows this. 'Faith' is not in fact a rejection of reason, but simply a lazy acceptance of bad reasons. 'Faith' is the pseudo-justification that some people trot out when they want to make claims without the necessary evidence.But of course we never apply these lax standards of evidence to the claims made in the other fellow’s holy scriptures: when it comes to religions other than one’s own, religious people are as rational as everyone else. Only our own religion, whatever it may be, seems to merit some special dispensation from the general standards of evidence.And here, it seems to me, is the crux of the conflict between religion and science. Not the religious rejection of specific scientific theories (be it heliocentrism in the 17th century or evolutionary biology today); over time most religions do find some way to make peace with well-established science. Rather, the scientific worldview and the religious worldview come into conflict over a far more fundamental question: namely, what constitutes evidence.Science relies on publicly reproducible sense experience (that is, experiments and observations) combined with rational reflection on those empirical observations. Religious people acknowledge the validity of that method, but then claim to be in the possession of additional methods for obtaining reliable knowledge of factual matters — methods that go beyond the mere assessment of empirical evidence — such as intuition, revelation, or the reliance on sacred texts. But the trouble is this: What good reason do we have to believe that such methods work, in the sense of steering us systematically (even if not invariably) towards true beliefs rather than towards false ones? At least in the domains where we have been able to test these methods — astronomy, geology and history, for instance — they have not proven terribly reliable. Why should we expect them to work any better when we apply them to problems that are even more difficult, such as the fundamental nature of the universe?Last but not least, these non-empirical methods suffer from an insuperable logical problem: What should we do when different people’s intuitions or revelations conflict? How can we know which of the many purportedly sacred texts — whose assertions frequently contradict one another — are in fact sacred?
Alan Sokal
God has abandoned you. Fear does not serve you. Your heart has betrayed you. Only the music can guide you.
Noah Levine
It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought.
Don DeLillo
Beyond all sciences, philosophies, theologies, and histories, a child's relentless inquiry is truly all it takes to remind us that we don't know as much as we think we know.
Criss Jami
In one way, I suppose, I have been "in denial" for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can't see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it's all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.
Christopher Hitchens
This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?
Marguerite Yourcenar
If I had to live my life over, I'd live over a saloon.
W.C.Fields
NIHILIST, n. A Russian who denies the existence of anything but Tolstoi. The leader of the school is Tolstoi.
Ambrose Bierce
If you were born with the ability to change someone’s perspective or emotions, never waste that gift. It is one of the most powerful gifts God can give—the ability to influence.
Shannon L. Alder