Last Modified: 2023-09-11
If someone does not want me it is not the end of the world. But if I do not want me, the world is nothing but endings.
[Nayyirah Waheed]
[Nayyirah Waheed]
Whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.
[E.E.Cummings]
Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
[George Orwell]
Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.
[George Carlin]
I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.
[Jorge Luis Borges]
Understand me.
I'm not like an ordinary world.
I have my madness,
I live in another dimension
and I do not have time for things
that have no soul.
[Charles Bukowski]
What a terrible mistake to let go of something wonderful for something real.
[Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You]
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
[Simone Weil]
What are temples of stone and clay to the soul? Learn to build eternal mansions of dreams and visions!
[Selma Lagerlof]
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
[Corinthians 13, Blue]
It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
[Corinthians 13, Blue]
I nearly forgot, you must close your eyes otherwise you won't see anything.
[Lewis Carrol]
[Lewis Carrol]
Free yourself from the simple complacency of the mind that thinks to put all things in order and hopes to subdue phenomena. Free yourself from the terror of the heart that seeks and hopes to find the essence of things. Conquer the last, the greatest temptation of all: Hope
[Nikos Kazantzakis]
… I do not know whether behind appearances there lives and moves a secret essence superior to me. Nor do I ask; I do not care. I … paint with a full palette a gigantic and gaudy curtain before the abyss. Do not say, ‘Draw the curtain that I may see the painting.’ The curtain is the painting.
[Nikos Kazantzakis]
There is a huge abyss within every mind. When we belong, we have an outside mooring to prevent us from falling into ourselves.
[John O’Donohue]
The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.
[Einstein]
[Einstein]
I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. For, if it lies in the nature of indifference and of the crowd to recognize no solitude, then love and friendship are there for the purpose of continually providing the opportunity for solitude. And only those are the true sharings which rhythmically interrupt periods of deep isolation.
[Rilke]
“Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.”
[Kahlil Gibran]
The biologist can push it back to the original protist, and the chemist can push it back to the crystal, but none of them touch the real question of why or how the thing began at all. The astronomer goes back untold million of years and ends in gas and emptiness, and then the mathematician sweeps the whole cosmos into unreality and leaves one with mind as the only thing of which we have any immediate apprehension. Cogito ergo sum, ergo omnia esse videntur. All this bother, and we are no further than Descartes. Have you noticed that the astronomers and mathematicians are much the most cheerful people of the lot? I suppose that perpetually contemplating things on so vast a scale makes them feel either that it doesn't matter a hoot anyway, or that anything so large and elaborate must have some sense in it somewhere.
[Dorothy L. Sayers, The Documents in the Case, 1930]
...one of the Buddha's disciples went to him and asked to be shown Heaven. The Buddha said, "If you want to see Heaven, you will have to see Hell first." The disciple agreed. The Buddha took them to Hell, when an enormous banquet table was set up, piled high with fabulously delicious food. Unfortunately, all of the diners had, instead of hands, enormously long forks on the end of their wrists, and they kept trying to get the food into their mouths, but could not reach them. They wailed and gnashed their teeth in misery. The Buddha then took his disciple to Heaven. Heaven was exactly the same situation -- diners at a sumptuous banquet table, with long forks on their wrists instead of hands. The only difference was that, in Heaven, everyone was feeding each other.
[Daniel Pinchbeck, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl pg 330-1]
[Daniel Pinchbeck, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl pg 330-1]
Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.
[Eleanor Roosevelt]
[Eleanor Roosevelt]
I am crippled in this effort by the factor that real life is rarely plausible - we believe that people would or could do these things only because we have documentation. Fiction, lacking that documentation, dares not be half as implausible. On the other hand, we can do what history never can - we can assign motive to human behavior, which cannot be refuted by any witness or evidence. So, despite doing my utmost to be truthful about how history happens, in the end I must depend on the novelist's tools. Do you care about this person, or that one? Do you believe such a person would do the things I say they do, for the reasons I assign?
[Orson Scott Card]
[Orson Scott Card]
No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of it to anyone else.
[Charles Dickens]
[Charles Dickens]
You think, therefore I am.
[Alana Conner, Hazel Rose Markus]
[Alana Conner, Hazel Rose Markus]
It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.
[P. G. Wodehouse]
[P. G. Wodehouse]
People change and forget to tell each other.
[Lillian Hellman]
[Lillian Hellman]
All enchantments die; only cowards die with them.
[Charles Morgan]
[Charles Morgan]
It’s not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it’s because we do not dare that things are difficult.
[Seneca]
[Seneca]
Flattery won't hurt you if you don't swallow it.
[Kin Hubbard]
[Kin Hubbard]
One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.
[Samuel Johnson]
[Samuel Johnson]
The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.
[Muhammad Ali]
[Muhammad Ali]
Looking to the past for guidance on how to make a new beginning is like asking an echo to show you where it got started.
[Guy Finley]
[Guy Finley]
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood or assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
[Antoine de Saint Exupery]
[Antoine de Saint Exupery]
Mad, adj.: Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence.
Debt, n.: An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slave-driver.
Faith, n.: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
Heathen, n.: A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something that he can see and feel.
Corporation: an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
Admiration, n.: Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.
[Ambrose Bierce]
Debt, n.: An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slave-driver.
Faith, n.: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
Heathen, n.: A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something that he can see and feel.
Corporation: an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
Admiration, n.: Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.
[Ambrose Bierce]
I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.
[George Bernard Shaw]
[George Bernard Shaw]
There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there's only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there's no reason why you shouldn't have a fairly good time.
[Edith Wharton]
[Edith Wharton]
Science Fiction is something that could happen - but usually you wouldn't want it to. Fantasy is something that couldn't happen - though often you only wish that it could.
[Arthur C. Clarke]
[Arthur C. Clarke]
Sophistication might be described as the ability to cope gracefully with a situation involving the presence of formidable menace to one's poise and prestige.
[James Thurber]
[James Thurber]
I was't kissing her, I was whispering in her mouth.
[Chico Maroc]
[Chico Maroc]
The death of love is as tragic as death itself.
[Unknown]
[Unknown]
Descended from apes? Dear me, let us hope it is not true. But if it is true, let us hope it does not become widely known.
[Bishop of Worcester, Wife]
[Bishop of Worcester, Wife]
In Plane Geometry that afternoon, I got into an argument with Mr Shull, the teacher, about parallel lines. I say they have to meet. I'm beginning to think everything comes together somewhere.
[William Wharton], "Birdy"
[William Wharton], "Birdy"
Failed? - Why, we haven't failed, we only know the thousands of ways that won't work.
[Thomas Edison]
[Thomas Edison]
For us, believing physicists, the distinction between the past, the present, and the future is only an illusion.
[Albert Einstein]
[Albert Einstein]
You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific minds without a religious feeling of his own.
[Albert Einstein]
[Albert Einstein]
Laughter is the lightning rod of play, the eroticism of conversation.
[Eva Hoffman], "Lost In Translation"
[Eva Hoffman], "Lost In Translation"
We have to laugh. Because laughter, we already know, is the first evidence of freedom.
[R. Castellanos], "If not poetry, then what?"
[R. Castellanos], "If not poetry, then what?"
Laughter isn't even the other side of tears. It is tears turned inside out.
[Alice Walker], "By the light of my father's smile"
[Alice Walker], "By the light of my father's smile"
The first thing I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.
[John Cage]
[John Cage]
She said a mystery of life isn't a problem to be solved, but a reality to experience.
[Frank Herbert], "Dune"
[Frank Herbert], "Dune"
Flames of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error
[T.S.Eliot], "Little Gidding", 1942
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error
[T.S.Eliot], "Little Gidding", 1942
The process is directed towards analyzing and separating the material into a collection of discrete counters, with which the detached intellect can make, observe, and enjoy a series of abstract, detailed, artificial patterns of words and images (you may be reminded of the New Criticism)...
[E.Sewell], "Lewis Carol and T.S.Eliot as Nonsense Poets", 1958
[E.Sewell], "Lewis Carol and T.S.Eliot as Nonsense Poets", 1958
What you don't own, he said, they can't easily take away from you.
[Lawrence Block], "Everybody Dies"
[Lawrence Block], "Everybody Dies"
A man said to the universe: "Sir I exist!". "However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me a sense of obligation."
[Stephen Crane]
[Stephen Crane]
IT doesn't matter how big a ranch ya' own, or how many cows ya' brand, the size of your funeral is still gonna depend on the weather.
[Harry Truman]
[Harry Truman]
Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass....
[Dale Earnhardt], 1997
[Dale Earnhardt], 1997
Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
[G.K. Chesterton]
[G.K. Chesterton]
The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.
[Michelangelo]
[Michelangelo]
With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion.
[Steven Weinberg]
[Steven Weinberg]
Denn was ist Freiheit? Dasz man den Willen zur Selbstverantwortlichkeit hat. (Then what is freedom? It is the will to be responsible to ourselves.)
[Friedrich Neitzsche, 1844-1900]
[Friedrich Neitzsche, 1844-1900]
Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
[Alan Kay]
[Alan Kay]
Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.
[Alan Perlis]
[Alan Perlis]
The art of handling university students is to make oneself appear, and this almost ostentatiously, to be treating them as adults....
[Arnold Toynbee, Experiences]
[Arnold Toynbee, Experiences]
.
We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
[Einstein]
[Einstein]
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
[Thomas A. Edison, US inventor (1847 - 1931)]
[Thomas A. Edison, US inventor (1847 - 1931)]