Quotes by Authors - Page 5026

Conformity to the present is invisibility to the future.
Stefan Molyneux
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
Hope burns eternal in the human heart.
O.R. Melling
The ethos of redemption is realied in self-mastery, by means of temperance, that is, continence of desires.
John Paul II
I didn't want to do it,' Kiala said. 'The universe just kind of conspired to force me to make a fool of myself. It does that quite a lot, actually.
Graham Parke
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
But is all this true?" said Brutha.Didactylos shrugged. "Could be. Could be. We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork.""You mean you don't KNOW it's true?" said Brutha."I THINK it might be," said Didactylos. "I could be wrong. Not being certain is what being a philosopher is all about.
Terry Pratchett
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
Philosophers can debate the meaning of life, but you need a Lord who can declare the meaning of life.
Max Lucado
Words are the clothes thoughts wear.
Samuel Beckett
Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order. It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life.
Kakuzō Okakura
The better organized the state, the duller its humanity.
David Mitchell
We are supposed to call poison medicine and we wonder why we're always sick.
Stefan Molyneux
When people have invested their identities into clichés, the only counter argument they have is 'being offended'.
Stefan Molyneux
There is no key to open the heart of another - except curiosity.
Stefan Molyneux
If you can convince people that freedom is injustice, they will then believe that slavery is freedom.
Stefan Molyneux
I drink cup of sunlight every morning to brighten myself.
Debasish Mridha
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
And don't tell me the end justifies the means because it doesn't. We never reach the end. All we ever get is means. That's what we live with.
Nick Harkaway
This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?
Marguerite Yourcenar
Calling sex by its name thereafter [the 17th c.] became more difficult and more costly. As if in order to gain mastery of it in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of language, control its free circulation in speech, expunge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present.
Michel Foucault
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
Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist... And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something... What chaos! What a farce!
Ivan Turgenev
No living creature is naturally greedy, except from fear of want - or in the case of human beings, from vanity, the notion that you're better than people if you can display more superfluous property than they can.
Thomas More
From the scientific view, the theory of karma may be a metaphysical assumption -- but it is no more so than the assumption that all of life is material and originated out of pure chance
Dalai Lama XIV
No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition.
Albert Camus
No dirt can touch me, like an ocean, everything that comes to me becomes clean.
Debasish Mridha
A thing is only as great as the amount a person is willing to risk for it. If you are not willing to risk anything, then the thing mustn't be so great at all.
Madeline Claire Franklin
Having just enough life to enjoy being dead.
Jim Holt
Writing blooms flowers for mind, which last forever.
Debasish Mridha
Awkward silences rule the world. People are so terrified of awkward silences that they will literally go to war rather than face an awkward silence.
Stefan Molyneux
Each voice carries a portion of value, no matter how unpalatable or distasteful that voice may be: no one person, government, ideology, transnational, or religious institution can own and dominate the whole.
B.W. Powe
Body is a home, a prison and a grave.
James Runcie
Impossible things are really rough to do, you know.
Brandon Sanderson
Because it's much more pleasant to be obsessed over how the hero gets out of his predicament than it is over how I get out of mine.
Woody Allen
Only philosophers embark on this perilous expedition to the outermost reaches of language and existence. Some of them fall off, but others cling on desperately and yell at the people nestling deep in the snug softness, stuffing themselves with delicious food and drink. 'Ladies and Gentlemen,' they yell, 'we are floating in space!' But none of the people down there care
Jostein Gaarder
Then we’re just sitting there, staring at each other. Which has been happening a lot lately. It’s likewhatever wall there was between us, however she was holding herself back from me . . . all of thatpretense is gone.“And when you find a soul mate,” Sara says, “it’s undeniable. You have to be together.”“That’s my philosophy.” I look back at her. “You have to go with the flow.”“Exactly. I think the universe guides you to make the right choices.”“Do you believe in fate?”“I guess, but . . . it’s more about creating the life you want so you can make that fate a reality. Youknow?
Susane Colasanti
Kendati batas antara kebebasan dan ketidakpedulian terkadang saru
Dee Lestari
God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Distraction serves evil more than any other mental state.
Stefan Molyneux
Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?
Annie Dillard
In an earlier stage of our development most human groups held to a tribal ethic. Members of the tribe were protected, but people of other tribes could be robbed or killed as one pleased. Gradually the circle of protection expanded, but as recently as 150 years ago we did not include blacks. So African human beings could be captured, shipped to America, and sold. In Australia white settlers regarded Aborigines as a pest and hunted them down, much as kangaroos are hunted down today. Just as we have progressed beyond the blatantly racist ethic of the era of slavery and colonialism, so we must now progress beyond the speciesist ethic of the era of factory farming, of the use of animals as mere research tools, of whaling, seal hunting, kangaroo slaughter, and the destruction of wilderness. We must take the final step in expanding the circle of ethics. -
Peter Singer
Veel van wat aanvankelijk alleen in de verbeelding bestaat, wordt werkelijkheid.
Arthur Japin
You cannot connect with anyone except through reality.
Stefan Molyneux
Believe in the wonderment of life, the magic of love, and the reality of death.
Carroll Bryant
We are creators, and yet we naively play the role of "the created." We see ourselves as helpless sheep buffeted around by the God who made us. We kneel like frightened children, begging for help, for forgiveness, for good luck. But once we realize that we are truly created in the Creator's image, we will start to understand that we, too, must be Creators. When we understand this fact, the doors will burst wide open for human potential.
Dan Brown
If the meaning of life has become doubtful, if one's relations to others and to oneself do not offer security, then fame is one means to silence one's doubts. It has a function to be compared with that of the Egyptian pyramids or the Christian faith in immortality: it elevates one's individual life from its limitations and instability to the plane of indestructability; if one's name is known to one's contemporaries and if one can hope that it will last for centuries, then one's life has meaning and significance by this very reflection of it in the judgments of others.
Erich Fromm
Imagination is not, as some poets have thought, simply synonymous with good. It may be either good or evil. As long as art remained primarily mimetic, the evil which imagination could do was limited by nature. Again, as long as it was treated as an amusement, the evil which it could do was limited in scope. But in an age when the connection between imagination and figuration is beginning to be dimly realized, when the fact of the directionally creator relation is beginning to break through into consciousness, both the good and the evil latent in the working of imagination begin to appear unlimited. We have seen in the Romantic movement an instance of the way in which the making of images may react upon the collective representations. It is a fairly rudimentary instance, but even so it has already gone beyond the dreams and responses of a leisured few. The economic and social structure of Switzerland is noticeably affected by its tourist industry, and that is due only in part to increased facilities of travel. It is due not less to the condition that (whatever may be said about their ‘particles’) the mountains which twentieth-century man sees are not the mountains which eighteenth-century man saw.It may be objected that this is a very small matter, and that it will be a long time before the imagination of man substantially alters those appearances of nature with which his figuration supplies him. But then I am taking the long view. Even so, we need not be too confident. Even if the pace of change remained the same, one who is really sensitive to (for example) the difference between the medieval collective representations and our own will be aware that, without traveling any greater distance than we have come since the fourteenth century, we could very well move forward into a chaotically empty or fantastically hideous world. But the pace of change has not remained the same. It has accelerated and is accelerating. We should remember this, when appraising the aberrations of the formally representational arts. Of course, in so far as these are due to affectation, they are of no importance. But in so far as they are genuine, they are genuine because the artist has in some way or other experienced the world he represents. And in so far as they are appreciated, they are appreciated by those who are themselves willing to make a move towards seeing the world in that way, and, ultimately therefore, seeing that kind of world. We should remember this, when we see pictures of a dog with six legs emerging from a vegetable marrow or a woman with a motorbicycle substituted for her left breast.
Owen Barfield
the body is wiser than its inhabitants. the body is the soul. the body is god’s messenger.
Erica Jong
Normal is over rated, and so is spelling.You want perfection? Go out and buy a spell check, but know this: Spellcheck won't keep you warm at night or love you unconditionaly. I will stick to being abnormal and a bad speller. Makes life more interesting. After all, what fun is there in being normal or perfect?
Cristina Marrero
We do not create life, we create death.
Marie Symeou
Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.
G.K. Chesterton
SCREW CHILDREN! That's the mantra of the world. Instead of burying them with a national debt, shoving them in shitty schools, drugging them if they don't comply, hitting them, yelling at them, indoctrinating them with religion and statism and patriotism and military worship, what if we just did what was right for them? The whole world is built on "screw children", and if we changed that, this would be an alien planet to us.
Stefan Molyneux
The only value of wasted time is knowledge.
Monica Drake
Mathematicians finally developed a financial model to accurately compare apples and oranges. Any two kinds of fruit can be compared, although guavas still cause minor rounding errors.
Graham Parke