Quotes
“Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.” ~ Albert Camus
“Don’t force your children into your ways, for they were created for a time different from your own.” ~ Plato
Reality Is
“Reality is the #1 cause of insanity among those who are in contact with it”
~ Edgar Allan Poe
Hating People
“Hating people is like burning down your own house to get rid of a rat.”
~ Harry Emerson Fosdick
“Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are our own fears.” ~Rudyard Kipling
The Opposite Of Love
“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”
~ Elie Wiesel
“Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it.” ~ Marian Wright Edelman
“If man is not fit to govern himself, how can he be fit to govern someone else?” ~James Madison
“Leadership Is A Privilege
“Leadership is a privilege to better the lives of others. It is not an opportunity to satisfy personal greed.”
~ Mwai Kibaki
Merely Observing
“I learn a great deal by merely observing you, and letting you talk as long as you please, and taking note of what you do not say.”
~ T. S. Eliot
“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.” ~Winston Churchill
Destination
“The journey, Not the destination matters.”
~ T. S. Eliot
A Mother’s Love
“A mother’s love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity, it dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.”
~ Agatha Christie
“Books are a habit-forming drug.” ~ Agatha Christie
“If you chase two rabbits,you catch none.” ~ Confucius
Are We Human
“A philosopher once asked, “Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human?” Pointless, really…”Do the stars gaze back?” Now that’s a question.”
~ Neil Gaiman
To Be A Philosopher
“To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust.”
~ Henry David Thoreau
“Life is just one cup of coffee after another, and don’t look for anything else.” ~Bertrand Russell
“Sex: the thing that takes up the least amount of time and causes the most amount of trouble.” ~ John Barrymore
“I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.” ~ J. D. Salinger
Implementing Ideas
“You don’t make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.”
~ Shirley Chisholm
“Blues is easy to play, but hard to feel.” ~ Jimi Hendrix
“We go through life. We shed our skins. We become ourselves.” ~ Patti Smith
The Wonder Remains
“Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.”
~ Alfred North Whitehead
“There are no whole truths: All truths are half-truths.” ~Alfred North Whitehead
To think is to differ. ~Clarence Darrow
Living In The Past
“Too many people live too much in the past. The past must be a springboard, not a sofa.”
~ Harold MacMillan
“A person is able to understand only when he solves the problem by himself.” ~Peter Deunov
Peter Deunov, Bulgarian Philosopher – July 11, 1864 – December 27, 1944
The World We See
“The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.”
~ William James
Time Heals
“It has been said, ‘time heals all wounds.’ I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone.”
~ Rose Kennedy
Bad Poetry
For even bad poetry has relevance for what it does not say for what it leaves out.
~Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The Greatest Adventure
“The greatest adventure is what lies ahead.
Today and tomorrow are yet to be said.
The chances, the changes are all yours to make.
The mold of your life is in your hands to break.”
~ J. R. R. Tolkien
We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one. ~Jacques Yves Cousteau
We Need To Write
“We need to write because so many of our stories are not being heard. Where could they be heard in this era of fear and media monopolies? Writing allows us to transform what has happened to us and to fight back against what’s hurting us. While not everyone is an author, everyone is a writer and I think that the process of writing is deeply spiritual and liberatory.”
~Sandra Cisneros
Natural Healing Force
“Everyone has a doctor in him or her; we just have to help it in its work. The natural healing force within each one of us is the greatest force in getting well. Our food should be our medicine. Our medicine should be our food. But to eat when you are sick, is to feed your sickness.”
~ Hippocrates
“Why should things be easy to understand?” ~ Thomas Pynchon
Novels Are Fictions
“Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.”
~ Paul Auster
Read What You Want To Read
“Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.”
~ Joyce Carol Oates
“The death of rock was not a natural death. Rock did not die of old age. It was murdered.” ~Gene Simmons
“Remember tonight… for it is the beginning of always.” ~Dante Alighieri
Learning never exhausts the mind. ~Leonardo da Vinci
“You just can’t beat the person who never gives up.” ~ Babe Ruth
“It is a tragedy that we live in a world where physical courage is so common, and moral courage is so rare.” ~ Claude Monet
Leadership
“A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be.”
~ Rosalynn Carter
Three Friends
“We should always have three friends in our lives-one who walks ahead who we look up to and follow; one who walks beside us, who is with us every step of our journey; and then, one who we reach back for and bring along after we’ve cleared the way.”
~ Michelle Obama
The Wise Man
“The wise man doesn’t give the right answers, he poses the right questions.”
~ Claude Levi-Strauss
We think to much and feel to little. ~Charlie Chaplin
“Be comforted, dear soul! There is always light behind the clouds.” ~Louisa May Alcott
“I’m only myself when I have a guitar in my hands.” ~George Harrison
Nothing In Nature
“Nothing in nature is by chance… Something appears to be chance only because of our lack of knowledge.”
~ Baruch Spinoza
“Our freedom can be measured by the number of things we can walk away from.” ~ Vernon Howard
Climate Change
We have to face the reality of climate change. It is arguably the biggest threat we are facing today.
~William Hague
Sports and politics don’t mix. ~Eric Heiden
Endangered Species
What is a fish without a river? What is a bird without a tree to nest in? What is an Endangered Species Act without any enforcement mechanism to ensure their habitat is protected? It is nothing.
~Jay Inslee
“The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.” ~Aldous Huxley
Who You Are
“To me, clothing is a form of self-expression – there are hints about who you are in what you wear.”
~ Marc Jacobs
Human Conception
“Life is life – whether in a cat, or dog or man. There is no difference there between a cat or a man. The idea of difference is a human conception for man’s own advantage.”
~ Sri Aurobindo
Human Rights
“The humanity of all Americans is diminished when any group is denied rights granted to others.”
~ Julian Bond
The Rule of Fools
“If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools.”
~ Plato
Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other. ~Ann Landers
Equal Right
“All men by nature are equal in that equal right that every man hath to his natural freedom, without being subjected to the will or authority of any other man; being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.”
~ John Locke
Be Who You Are
“About all you can do in life is be who you are. Some people will love you for you. Most will love you for what you can do for them, and some won’t like you at all.”
~ Rita Mae Brown
Coffee and love are best when they are hot. ~German Proverb
Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify. ~Henry David Thoreau
Wisdom Is Everywhere
Learning sleeps and snores in libraries, but wisdom is everywhere, wide awake, on tiptoe.
~ Josh Billings
Wisdom And Learning
Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life.
~ Sandra Carey
Learn By Doing
“You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.”
~ Richard Branson
Sublime Natural Beauty
To experience sublime natural beauty is to confront the total inadequacy of language to describe what you see. Words cannot convey the scale of a view that is so stunning it is felt.
~ Eleanor Catton
“Diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions.” ~ Winston Churchill
Vain And Inspiring Men
“If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin.”
~ Samuel Adams
Life isn’t a matter of milestones, but of moments. ~ Rose Kennedy
What Is
“The ‘what should be’ never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no ‘what should be,’ there is only what is.”
~ Lenny Bruce
Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings. ~Salvador Dali
Voting
The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don’t have to waste your time voting.
~Charles Bukowski
Reading Is The Key
“Reading is the key that opens doors to many good things in life. Reading shaped my dreams, and more reading helped me make my dreams come true.”
~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them. ~Mark Twain
“The majority of men…
“The majority of men… are not capable of thinking, but only of believing, and… are not accessible to reason, but only to authority.”
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
You Were Meant To Be
“Sometimes, you have to step outside of the person you’ve been and remember the person you were meant to be. The person you want to be. The person you are.”
~ H. G. Wells
Elections Belong To The People
“Elections belong to the people. It’s their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.”
~ Abraham Lincoln
Your life story would not make a good book. Don’t even try. ~Fran Lebowitz
Octopus On Roller Skates
Talent without discipline, is like an octopus on roller skates. There’s plenty of movement, but you never know if it’s going to be forward, backwards, or sideways.
~ H. Jackson Brown Jr.
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage. ~Anais Nin
Talk about a dream, try to make it real. ~Bruce Springsteen
“Nobody knows what another person is thinking. They may imagine they do, but they are nearly always wrong.” ~ Agatha Christie
“The path to paradise begins in hell.” ~ Dante Alighieri
A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it. ~ Edgar Allan Poe
Herd Mentality
The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are.
~ David Icke
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.” ~ Harper Lee
Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do. ~Potter Stewart
Ethics must begin at the top of an organization. It is a leadership issue and the chief executive must set the example. ~ Edward Hennessy
“We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.” ~ Chuck Palahniuk
He is happiest, be it king or peasant, who finds peace in is home. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. ~Martin Luther King Jr.
Only ignorance excuses stupidity. ~ Nalini Singh
3 3 3. Only half evil. ~ Cheyenne McCray
Self-Control
Self-control means wanting to be effective at some random point in the infinite radiations of my spiritual existence.
~ Franz Kafka
