Quotes by American Authors - Page 3327

If you don't behave as you believe, you will end by believing as you behave.
Fulton J. Sheen
Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
Alan W. Watts
You were born a child of light’s wonderful secret— you return to the beauty you have always been.
Aberjhani
Choose to be happy. It is what we have all done.
Melissa Marr
The only way we'll get freedom for ourselves is to identify ourselves with every oppressed people in the world. We are blood brothers to the people of Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba -- yes Cuba too.
Malcolm X
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
Ursula K Le Guin
Criticism of others is thus an oblique form of self-commendation. We think we make the picture hang straight on our wall by telling our neighbors that all his pictures are crooked.
Fulton J. Sheen
Challenges are gifts that force us to search for a new center of gravity. Don't fight them. Just find a new way to stand.
Oprah Winfrey
Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.
Kahlil Gibran
The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.
Carl Sagan
No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness.If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.
Kahlil Gibran
I consider it an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves.
Carl Sagan
Our ability to adapt is amazing. Our ability to change isn't quite as spectacular.
Lisa Lutz
Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.
David Foster Wallace
Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
Henry David Thoreau
Do you know what punishments I've endured for my crimes, my sins? None. I am proof of the absurdity of men's most treasured abstractions. A just universe wouldn't tolerate my existence.
Brent Weeks
I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love.
Alice Walker
Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible
William S Burroughs
If you reveal your secrets to the wind,you should not blame the wind forrevealing them to the trees.
Kahlil Gibran
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
William James
We are the hollow menWe are the stuffed menLeaning togetherHeadpiece filled with straw. Alas!Our dried voices, whenWe whisper togetherAre quiet and meaninglessAs wind in dry grassOr rats' feet over broken glassIn our dry cellarShape without form, shade without colour,Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
T.S Eliot
The most important reason for going from one place to another is to see what's in between, and they took great pleasure in doing just that.
Norton Juster
Until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven.
Arthur Miller
The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution!
Albert Einstein
Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly if there wasn't someone, somewhere, laughing?
Jonathan Safran Foer
Perhaps not one religion contains all of the truth of the world. Perhaps every religion contains fragments of the truth, and it is our responsibility to identify those fragments and piece them together.
Christopher Paolini
A cult is a religion with no political power.
Tom Wolfe
I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.
Richard Feynman
In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.
Henry David Thoreau
I was never aware of any other option but to question everything.
Noam Chomsky
Anyway—because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next—and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis—at any time of night or day.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather, we should thank God that such men lived.
George S. Patton Jr.
The menu is not the meal.
Alan W. Watts
You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.
Alan W. Watts
Take it easy, but take it.
Woody Guthrie
She said, "It's not life or death, the labyrinth.""Um, okay. So what is it?""Suffering," she said. "Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you. That's the problem. Bolivar was talking about the pain, not about the living or dying. How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?... Nothing's wrong. But there's always suffering, Pudge. Homework or malaria or having a boyfriend who lives far away when there's a good-looking boy lying next to you. Suffering is universal. It's the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about.
John Green
There are no ordinary moments.
Dan Millman
It takes three to make love, not two: you, your spouse, and God. Without God people only succeed in bringing out the worst in one another. Lovers who have nothing else to do but love each other soon find there is nothing else. Without a central loyalty life is unfinished.
Fulton J. Sheen
I have a friend who's an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say "look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. Then he says "I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing," and I think that he's kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is ... I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it's not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there's also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.
Richard Feynman
Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.
Babe Ruth
A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet "for sale", who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his "normal" contemporaries. Not rarely will he suffer from neurosis that results from the situation of a sane man living in an insane society, rather than that of the more conventional neurosis of a sick man trying to adapt himself to a sick society. In the process of going further in his analysis, i.e. of growing to greater independence and productivity,his neurotic symptoms will cure themselves.
Erich Fromm
You show me a capitalist, and I'll show you a bloodsucker
Malcolm X
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding... And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy
Kahlil Gibran
Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
James Baldwin
If it turns out that there is a God...the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.
Woody Allen
The journey is what brings us happiness not the destination.
Dan Millman
belief is the death of intelligence.
Robert Anton Wilson
I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa
Lauren Oliver
Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. . . If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication ... and there is the real illness.
Philip K Dick
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible.
Albert Einstein
Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
Alan W. Watts
I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.
Daniel Keyes
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
Thomas Jefferson
Expect everything, I always say, and the unexpected never happens.
Norton Juster
Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Heres Tom with the Weather.
Bill Hicks
It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when they have lost their way.
Rollo May
You didn't kill him. He would have killed you, but you didn't kill him.""So? He was stupid. If I killed everyone who was stupid, I wouldn't have time to sleep.
Tamora Pierce
Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.
Bruce Lee
Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Back, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice.
Charles Bukowski