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LIFE CHANGING QUOTES

“We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a

journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us,
which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from
which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the
attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias
or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings,
having been influenced by everything evil or commonplace that prevailed
round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory.” – Proust

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can

change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret
Mead

"I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I
am also, much more than that. So are we all." - James Baldwin

"Judge of a man by his questions rather than by his answers." - Voltaire

"The Doer alone learneth" - Nietzsche

"No man is such a conqueror as the man who has defeated himself." -
Henry Ward Beecher

"That's the way we all begin," said Tom Platt. "The boys they make
believe all the time till they've cheated 'emselves into bein' men, an' so till
they die - pretendin' an' pretendin'." - Rudyard Kipling

"To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone

else's." - Fyodor Dostoevsky
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"Too much knowledge had hindered him; too many holy verses, too
many sacrificial rites, too much mortification of the flesh, too much
doing and striving. Now he understood it and realized that the inward
voice had been right, that no teacher could have brought him salvation."
- Hermann Hesse

“Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as

inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the
will or the vision to demand that which is good?” - Rachel Carson

“When you make a mistake, do you punish yourself or can you shake
your head with a smile and learn something in the process?” – Robert
Aitken

“If you reject yourself, you are rejecting the agent of realization. So you
must make friends with yourself. Enjoy yourself. Take comfort in
yourself. Smile at yourself. You are developing confidence.” - Robert
Aitken

"The practice of Zen is forgetting the self in the act of uniting with
something." - Yamada Roshi

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a
habit.” - Aristotle

“Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of
value.” - Albert Einstein

“There is more to life than increasing its speed.” – Gandhi.

“One must know that sorrow, being the means of convincing one of the
need of the religious life, is a guru. - Dvagpo-Lharje (Great Guru
Gampopa)
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“By quitting one's own country and dwelling in foreign lands one should
acquire practical knowledge of non-attachment.” - Dvagpo-Lharje (Great
Guru Gampopa)

“Sometimes when we are generous in small, barely detectable ways it can

change someone else’s life forever.” - Margaret Cho

"Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing

enthusiasm" - Winston Churchill

"The healthiest of all human emotions is gratitude." – Zig Ziglar

Don’t confuse activity with accomplishment – Zig Ziglar (paraphrase)

"Is your fear of failure greater than your desire to succeed? - Zig Ziglar,

“I'll go to the hills when my heart is lonely

I know I will hear what I've heard before” - Oscar Hammerstein II and
Richard Rodgers

"Time is the wisest counselor of all." - Pericles

"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." - Eleanor
Roosevelt

“It is preoccupation with possession, more than anything else, that

prevents men from living freely and nobly.” - Bertrand Russell

“Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are. We are

often like rivers: careless and forceful, timid and dangerous, lucid and
muddied, eddying, gleaming, still....Thoreau wrote: "A man's life should
be as fresh as a river. It should be the same channel but a new water
every instant." '- Gretel Ehrlich
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“Profit maximization is the murderous strategy of global corporation
hierarchies” – Jean Ziegler

“Habits are either the best of servants or the worst of masters.” -

Nathaniel Emmons

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” –
St. Augustine

“Thus the sage knows without traveling, he sees without looking; he

works without doing.” – Lao Tsu

“Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we
fail.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Never mistake activity for progress.” - Bob Topor

"What you are speaks louder than what you say." - Hazrat Inayat Khan

"In a small affair or in a big affair, first consult yourself and find out if
there is any conflict in your own being about anything you want to do.
And when you find no conflict there, then feel sure that a path is already
made for you. You have but to open your eyes and take a step forward,
and the other step will be led by God." - Hazrat Inayat Khan

“Creativity is essentially a lonely art. An even lonelier struggle. To some a

blessing. To others a curse. It is in reality the ability to reach inside
yourself and drag forth from your very soul an idea.” - Lou Dorfsman

“In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for
constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being
alone.” - Rollo May
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“If today was the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about
to do?” – Bill Gates

“Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important?” – Motivational

quote

“i don’t pretend
to have answers
mostly I raise
more questions
I’d like to think
Of myself as
An instigator
Certainly a voyeur
Always seeking to
Know” – Opal Palmer Adisa

“I must continually thirst for knowledge, accept noting short of

excellence, and know that the good of the global society is more
important and larger than I am.” – Anonymous

There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent

people.”
- Howard Zinn

“Consider yourself lightly; consider the world deeply.” - Miyamoto

Musashi

“To create, we need both technique and freedom of technique” –

Stephen Nachmanovitch

“Mundus vult decipi: the world wants to be deceived. The truth is too
complex and frightening; the taste for the truth is an acquired taste that
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few acquire.” - Walter Kaufmann, Introduction to Martin Buber’s I and
Thou

“The world winks at dishonesty. The world does not call it dishonesty.” -
Walter Kaufmann, Introduction to Buber’s I and Thou

“The sacred is here and now. The only Good worth keeping is a God
that cannot be kept. The only God worth talking about is a God that
cannot be talked about. God is no object of discourse, knowledge, or
even experience. He cannot be spoken of, but he can be spoken to; he
cannot be seen, but he can be listened to. The only possible relationship
with God is to address him and to be addressed by him, here and
now….” - Walter Kaufmann, Introduction to Buber’s I and Thou

“In the case of a book, longevity is presumptive evidence of virtue,

although survival usually also owes a good deal to a book’s vices. A lack
of clarity is almost indispensable.” - Walter Kaufmann,

“Innumerable are the ways in which I treat You as a means. I ask your
help, I ask for information, I may buy from you or buy what you have
made, and you sometimes dispel my loneliness.” - Walter Kaufmann,
Introduction to Buber’s I and Thou

“Men love jargon. It is so palpable, tangible, visible, audible; it makes so

obvious what one has learned; it satisfies the craving for results. It is
impressive for the uninitiated. It makes one feel that one belongs. Jargon
divides men into Us and Them.” - Walter Kaufmann, Introduction to
Buber’s I and Thou

“The life of our class, of the wealthy and the learned, was not only
repulsive to me but had lost all meaning. The sum of our action and
thinking, of our science and art, all of it struck me as the overindulgences
of a spoiled child.” - Tolstoy
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“I began to realize that the most profound wisdom of man was rooted in
the answers given by faith and that I did not have the right to deny them
on the grounds of reason; above all, I realized that these answers alone
can form a reply to the question of life.” - Tolstoy

“In order to know what he is, a man must first know what the sum of
this mysterious humanity is, a humanity made up of people who, like
himself, do not understand what they are.” - Tolstoy

“Every time I tried to express my most heartfelt desires to be morally

good I met with contempt and ridicule; and as soon as I would give in to
vile passions I was praised and encouraged. Ambition, love of power,
self-interest, lechery, pride, anger, vengeance-all of it was highly
esteemed.” - Tolstoy

“Often a man goes on for years imaging that the religious teaching that
had been imparted to him since childhood is still intact, while all the time
there is not a trace of it left in him.” - Tolstoy

“If we are to love sincerely, and with simplicity, we must first of all
overcome the fear of not being loved.” – Thomas Merton

“We assume that others are receiving the kind of appreciation we want
for ourselves, and we proceed on the assumption that since we are not
loveable as we are, we must become lovable under false pretenses, as if
we were something better than we are.” – Thomas Merton

“We love the things we pretend to laugh at.” – Thomas Merton

“Sincerity must be bought at a price: the humility to recognize our

innumerable errors, and fidelity in tirelessly setting them right.” –
Thomas Merton
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“People are usually more convinced by reasons they discovered by
themselves than by those found by others.” – Blaise Pascal

“ For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live
there, one cannot live anywhere.” – Alan W. Watts

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before

starting to improve the world." - Anne Frank

"Try not to be a person of success, but rather a person of virtue." -

Albert Einstein

"The man who follows the crowd will usually get no

further than the crowd. The man who walks alone is
likely to find himself in places no one has ever been." - Alan Ashley-Pitt

The Ideal Abode: “A house in the country to find out what’s true/a few
linen shirts, some good art/and you.” – Kate Light

"Without music, life would be a mistake." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have
one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day
difficult." - E.B. White

“Jazz is the sound of God laughing. And I believe in it.” – Colleen

Shaddox, This I believe

“But in time, I came to accept, even embrace, what I called “my

confusion,” and to recognize it as a friend and ally, no apologies needed.
I preferred to listen rather than to speak; to inquire, not crusade. As a
noncombatant, I was welcomed at the tables of even bitterly divided
foes. I came to recognize that I had my own compass and my own
convictions, and if, at times, they took me in circles, at least they
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expanded outward. I had no wish for converts-where would I lead them?
– Ted Gup, This I Believe

“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it
hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are
richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life,
poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious
hours, even in a poor-house.” – Henry David Thoreau

“Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or
friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change.
Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.” – Henry David Thoreau

“But to say it’s a nice day is difficult, and the nice day itself passes on. It’s
up to us to conserve the nice day in a worldly, florid memory, sprinkling
new flowers and new stars over the fields and skies of the empty, fleeting
outer world.” - Pesoa

“Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me. The presence of

another person derails my thoughts; I dream of the other’s presence with
a strange absent-mindedness that no amount of my analytical scrutiny
can define.” - Pesoa

“For it is evident that in some ninety-nine per cent of cases the religion
which an individual professes and to which he or she adheres depends
upon the accidents of birth.” – John Hicks

“The lamps are different, but the Light is the same.” –Rumi

“Mistakes are stepping stones to success” – Charles E. Popplestone

“Whether you think you can or think you can’t – you are right.” - Henry
Ford
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“Reason guides but a small part of man, and…the rest obeys feeling, true
or false, and passion, good or bad.” – Joseph Roux

“Habit is stronger than reason.” – George Santayana

“Man masters nature not by force but by understanding.” – Jacob

Bronowski

“Without self-knowledge, without understanding the working and

functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself
and he will always remain a slave…” – George Gurdjiff

“Do what you fear most and you control fear.” – Tom Hopkins

“Freedom begins as we become conscious of it.” – Vernon Howard

“If you can cultivate the right attitude, your enemies are your best
spiritual teachers because their presence provides you with the
opportunity to enhance and develop tolerance, patience, and
understanding. By developing greater tolerance and patience, it will be
easier for you to develop your capacity for compassion, and through
that, altruism. So even for the practice of your own spiritual path, the
presence of an enemy is crucial.” – Dalai Lama

“A man needs a little madness…or else he never dares cut the rope and
be free.” – Zorba the Greek (film)

“Ignorance may be bliss, but it is also practical. It is imperative that you

learn to ignore or redirect all information and interrupts that are
irrelevant, unimportant, or unactionable.” – Timothy Ferris

“Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative
pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little
falls into lazy habits of thinking.” – Albert Einstein
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“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the

attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a
poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently
among the overabundance of information sources that might consume
it.” – Herbert Simon

“There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.” – William of
Occam

“It is very hard to stay in touch with our true identity because those who
want our money, our time, and our energy profit more from our
insecurity and fears than from our inner freedom.” – Henry Nouwen

“The greatest is to have a tendency to friendship; this is expressed in the

form of tolerance and forgiveness, in the form of service and trust. In
whatever form he may express it this is the central theme: the constant
desire to prove one’s love for humanity, to be the friend of all.” - Inayat
Khan

"Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and
go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." -
Howard Thurman

"Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to
it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our
music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer
relentlessness - and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are
different from the ones we're being brainwashed to believe. The
corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are
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selling -- their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons,
their notion of inevitability." - Arundhati Roy

"The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you
are alive, and die only when you are dead. To love, to be loved. To never
forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable
violence and vulgar disparity of the life around you. To seek joy in the
saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is
complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never
power. Above all to watch. To try and understand. To never look away.
And never, never, to forget." - Arundhati Roy

“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” – Marshall
McLuhan

“In the long term, the economy and the environment are the same thing.
If it’s unenvironmental it is uneconomical. That is the rule of nature.” –
Mollie Beattie

“Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It
takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the
opposite direction.” - Albert Einstein

“A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by

the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of
coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked.” – Anais Nin

"A wise person will make more opportunities than they find." - Francis
Bacon

“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new” -
Albert Einstein
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"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from
mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein

“Once in a while it really hits people that they don’t have to experience
the world in the way they have been told to.” - Alan Keightley

“What our world most requires now is the kind of education that foster
love for humankind, that develops character-that provides an intellectual
basis for realization of peace and empowers learners to contribute to and
improve society.” – Daisaku Ikeda

“Resistance and nonviolence are not in themselves good. There is

another element that must be present in our struggle that then makes our
resistance and nonviolence truly meaningful. That element is
reconciliation. Our ultimate end must be the creation of the beloved
community.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

“You write in order to change the world…. The world changes

according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter,
the way people look at reality, then you can change it.” - James Baldwin

"To myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore,
and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a
prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all
undiscovered before me." - Sir Isaac Newton

“All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what
we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before
we can enter another.” – Anatole France

"Creativity is the greatest rebellion in existence." - Osho

“The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from
setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive.
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You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships,
until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true
gift…It is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any
qualification I ever earned.” - J.K. Rowling

"Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul." - Edward Abbey

"Think globally, act locally" - R. Buckminster Fuller

"If not me, then who? If not now, then when?" - Ancient Jewish
Teaching

"We are the ones we've been waiting for" - Hopi Elder

"The pessimist complains about the wind, the optimist waits for it to
change and the realist adjusts the sails." - William George Ward

“Whatever you dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power
and magic in it. Begin it now.” - Goethe

“The roots of violence: wealth without work, pleasure without

conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality,
science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, politics without
principles.” - Gandhi

“God has no religion.” - Gandhi

“If it weren't for Christians, I'd be a Christian.” -- Mahatma Gandhi

“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of

others.” - Gandhi

“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”
- Gandhi
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“If Christians would really live according to the teachings of Christ, as

found in the Bible, all of India would be Christian today.” – Gandhi

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed

ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet
be determined to make them otherwise.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Simplicity is the keynote of all true elegance." - Chanel

“A good scientist values criticism almost higher than friendship: no, in

science criticism is the height and measure of friendship.” – Francis
Crick

“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live” -Goethe

“We should read other people’s books in order to learn what we feel; it is
our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer’s
thought that help us to do so.” – Alain de Botton

“Afraid of losing her, we forget all the others. Sure of keeping her, we
compare her with those others whom at once we prefer to her.” – Proust
(on men’s fickle love)

“Women who are to some extent resistant, whom one cannot possess at
once, whom one does not even know at first whether one will ever
possess, are the only interesting ones.” – Proust (reflecting on how most
men view women)

“There is no doubt that a person’s charms are less frequently a cause of

love than a remark such as: ‘No, this evening I shan’t be free’.” – Proust
(we don’t appreciate things until they are restricted from us)
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“We only really know what is new, what suddenly introduces to our
sensibility a change of tone which strikes us, that for which habit has not
yet substituted its pale fac-similes.” - Proust

“The reason why life may be judged to be trivial although at certain

moments it seems to us so beautiful is that we form our judgment,
ordinarily, not on the evidence of life itself but of those quite different
images which preserve nothing of life-and therefore we judge it
disparagingly.” - Proust

“Happiness, wisdom and peace are always inside us - we just have to sit
still long enough to notice.” – Anonymous

“Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract

intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to
undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from
which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies
unknown within us.” - Proust

“The problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but rather
that they are superficial articulations of very good ones…If…we are
obliged to create our own language, it is because there are dimensions to
ourselves absent from clichés, which require us to flout etiquette in order
to convey with greater accuracy the distinctive timbre of our thought.” –
Alain de Botton

“We feel something, and reach out for the nearest phrase or hum with
which to communicate, but which fails to do justice to what has induced
us to do so….We stay on the outside of our impressions, as if staring at
them through a frosted window, superficially related to them, yet
estranged from whatever has eluded casual definition.” – Alain de Botton
explaining the thoughts of Proust
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“Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their
power to injure our heart.” - Proust

“Excitement always leads to tears.” – Arundhati Roy

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." - Lao-Tzu

"The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter

their lives by altering their attitudes of mind." - Lee Iacocca

“In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self.
The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers
to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would
perhaps never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the
reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity.”
- Proust

“A vegan in a Hummer has a lighter carbon footprint than a beef eater in

a Prius.” – Michael Pollan

“We’re smothered by images, words and sounds that have no right to

exist, coming from, and bound for, nothingness. Of any artist truly
worth the name we should ask nothing except this act of faith: to learn
silence….If we can’t have everything, true perfection is nothingness. ” -
8 ½ - Fellini

“Power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of

itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own
mechanisms.” - Foucault

“Just what can one of us do against all this money and power trying to
crush us into roaches.
We can’t destroy society in a day unless we change ourselves first from
the inside out.
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We can start by not lying so much and treating other people like dirt.
Its so easy not to base our lives on how much we can scam.
And you know it feels good to lift that monkey from our backs.”
- Jello Biafara, Dead Kennedy’s

“Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is

to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.” -
William Pollard

“Be Content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you
realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.” - Lao
Tzu

"Fear less, hope more; eat less, chew more; whine less, breathe more; talk
less, say more; love more, and all good things will be yours." - Swedish
proverb

“We are happy in proportion to the things we can do without." - Henry

David Thoreau

“The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in
developing the capacity to enjoy less.” - Socrates

"Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished." - Lao Tzu

"Great acts are made up of small deeds." - Lao Tzu

"He who is contented is rich." - Lao Tzu

"Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or

believe to be beautiful." - William Morris

"We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous

parts; which exactly answers its end." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"When you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or

compete, everybody will respect you." - Lao Tzu

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." - Leonardo da Vinci

"Too many people spend money they haven't earned, to buy things they
don't want, to impress people they don't like." - Will Rogers

"If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things, then this is the best
season of your life." - Wu-Men

"Simplicity is the essence of happiness." - Cedric Bledsoe

"Be wary of any enterprise that requires new clothes." - Henry David
Thoreau

“Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity
of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning
reward of art.” - Frederic Chopin

"The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the

necessary may speak." - Hans Hofmann

"Eliminate physical clutter. More importantly, eliminate spiritual clutter."

- D.H. Mondfleur

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more
violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the
opposite direction." - E.F. Schumacker

"Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated." -

Confucius
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"Simplicity, clarity, singleness: these are the attributes that give our lives
power and vividness and joy." - Richard Halloway

"Our life is frittered away by detail... Simplify, simplify, simplify!" - Henry

David Thoreau

"We don't need to increase our goods nearly as much as we need to scale
down our wants. Not wanting something is as good as possessing it." -
Donald Horban

“There is no path to peace. Peace is the path.” - Mahatma Gandhi

“When the world says, ‘Give up,’ hope whispers, ‘Try it one more time’.”
- Anonymous

“Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you

do it.” - Mahatma Gandhi

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” - Samuel Johnson

"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing

himself." -Tolstoy

“I am convinced that there are universal currents of Divine Thought

vibrating the ether everywhere and that any who can feel these vibrations
is inspired.” - Richard Wagner

“We desire truth, and find within ourselves only uncertainty. We seek
happiness, and find only misery and death. We cannot but desire truth
and happiness, and are incapable of certainty or happiness.” – Blaise
Pascal
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“If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but
your own judgment of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that
judgment now.” – Marcus Aurelius

“The most important step in emancipating oneself from social controls is

the ability to find rewards in the events of each moment.” - Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi

“A thoroughly socialized person is one who desires only the rewards that
others around him have agreed he should long for - rewards often
grafted onto genetically programmed desires….A person who cannot
override genetic instructions when necessary is always vulnerable…..The
solution is to gradually become free of societal rewards and learn how to
substitute for them rewards that are under one’s own powers.” - Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi

“Whether we are happy depends on inner harmony, not on the controls

we are able to exert over the great forces of the universe.” - Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi

“The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is

stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something
difficult and worthwhile….Such experiences are not necessarily pleasant
at the time they occur.” - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

“Only direct control of experience, the ability to derive moment-by-

moment enjoyment from everything we do, can overcome the obstacles
to fulfillment.” – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

"But then they danced down the street like dingledodies, and I shambled
after as I've been doing all my life, after people who interest me, because
the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live,
mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time,
the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn,
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burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the
stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody
goes 'Awwww!" - Jack Kerouac

“Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of
throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.” -Buddha

"When the power of love overcomes the love of power - The world will
know peace." - Jimi Hendrix

“The tragedy of our lives is that, while we suffer from the wounds
afflicted on us by those who love us, we cannot avoid wounding those
we want to love.” – Henry Nouwen

“The universe is too great a mystery for there to be only one single
approach to it.” - Symmachus

“The true paradises are the paradises that we’ve lost.” —Marcel Proust

“Know Thyself.” – Oracle of Delphi

“The compassionate nature is awakened precisely when the heart and

mind become as one, when the human will surrenders in absolute trust” -
Henry Miller

“Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains

after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones.” - Benjamin
Franklin

“Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but
coaxed downstairs a step at a time.” - Mark Twain
 23
"The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate,
contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and
unrealistic." - John Fitzgerald Kennedy

“Our most valuable teachers are our enemies….While our friends can
help us in many ways, only our enemies can provide us with the
challenge we need to develop tolerance, patience, and
compassion…three virtues essential for building character, developing
peace of mind, and bringing us true happiness.” - Dalai Lama

“One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.
It…makes you think that after all, your favorite notions may be wrong,
your firmest beliefs ill-founded….Naturally, therefore, common men
hate a new idea, and are disposed more or less to ill-treat the original
man who brings it.” – Walter Bagehot

“A failure ought not to be a disappointment for those who take on the

most extreme challenges and do not settle comfortably in what is
modestly proportioned; it is the calibrated measure of our endeavors that
is not even meant to be referred to our feeling or to be used as evidence
against our achievement, which after all incessantly reconstitutes itself
from a thousand new beginnings.” - Rilke

“Man is small and, therefore, small is beautiful.” – E.F. Schumacher

“Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite

world is either a madman or an economist.” – Kenneth Boulding

“Growth for growth’s sake is a cancerous madness.” – Edward Abbey

“A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which
flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the
firmament of bards and sages.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
 24
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change
something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” -
Richard Buckminster Fuller

"It is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat
the lie!" - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“[GDP] measures everything, in short, except that which makes life

worthwhile.” – John F. Kennedy

“All I wanted was to be a pea of being

inside the green pod of time.” – Billy Collins

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the

fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true
science.” – Albert Einstein

“Art is childhood.” – Rilke

“The strings of sorrow may only be used extensively if one vows to play
on them also at a latter point and in their particular key all of the
joyousness that accumulates behind everything that is difficult, painful,
and that we had to suffer, and without which the voices are not
complete.” - Rilke

“I realize with a sense of dread that one grows numb with regard to even
the most wonderful things when they become part of one’s daily
interactions and surroundings.” - Rilke

“That is why all great men are modest: they consistently measure
themselves not in comparison to other people but to the idea of
perfection ever present in their minds, an ideal infinitely clearer and
greater than any common people have, and they also realize how far they
are from fulfilling their ideal.” – Giacomo Leopardi
 25

“The artist’s conception of his art or the scientist’s of his science is

usually as great as his conception of his own worth is small.”– Giacomo
Leopardi

“The ancient philosopher Bion said that it’s impossible to please the
masses unless you turn yourself into sweet wine and cake.”

“People are ridiculous only when they try to seem or to be that which
they are not.” – Giacomo Leopardi

“Men do not so much hate an evil-doer, or evil itself, as they hate the
man who calls evil by its real name.” – Giacomo Leopardi

“The world laughs at things it would really prefer to admire, and like
Aesop’s fox it criticizes things it covets.” – Giacomo Leopardi

“We remember childhood as the fabulous years of our lives, and nations
remember their childhood as fabulous years.” – Giacomo Leopardi

“Men seldom act from a correct sense of what may be harmful or useful
to them.” – Giacomo Leopardi

“There’s no greater sign of being a poor philosopher and wise man than
wanting all of life to be wise and philosophical.” – Giacomo Leopardi

“I may be wrong, but it seems rare in our age to find a widely praised
person whose own mouth is not the source of that praise.” – Giacomo
Leopardi

“The commonplace expression that life is nothing but a play is verified

above all in this: the world speaks absolutely consistently in one way and
acts absolutely consistently in another.” – Giacomo Leopardi
 26
“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we
stop playing.” - George Bernard Shaw

“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds
discuss people.” – Anonymous

“Read everything, listen to everybody, don’t trust anything unless you

can prove it with your own research.” – William Cooper

“One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you

end up being governed by your inferiors.” - Plato

“You can’t be right, until you’re willing to be wrong.” – Opal Palmer

Adisa

“Chew on the cud longer. Talk about it less.” – Avery E.D. Burns

“Everybody thinks of changing humanity and nobody thinks of changing

himself.” - Leo Tolstoy

“We must ask ourselves how many times others would benefit more
from our silence than from our words.” -Henry Nouwen

“The individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in
eternal bondage to himself.” - Eric Hoffer

"The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to rousing his
conscience, is — not to give him things to think about, but to wake
things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for himself." –
George MacDonald

"Let there be no distance between the words you say and the life you
live." - Senator Paul Wellstone
 27
“The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a
useful plant to its culture.” – Thomas Jefferson

"We are not humans having a spiritual experience but spirits having a
human experience" - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

"It is our duty as men and women to proceed as though the limits of our
abilities do not exist." -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

“To be free, to be happy and fruitful, can only be attained through

sacrifice of many common but overestimated things.” – Robert Henri

“This is the very perfection of a man, to find out his own imperfection.”
– Saint Augustine

“Thanks to the Interstate Highway System (USA), it is now possible to

travel from coast to coast without seeing anything.” – Charles Kuralt,
CBS news reporter

“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.” – George
Bernard Shaw

“The scientific process has two motives: one is to understand the natural
world, the other is to control it.” – C. P. Snow

“As long as a concept is vague and beset by many meanings, it remains

indestructible.” - Proshansky

“The following sentence is false. The preceding sentence is true.” – D. R.

Hofstadter

“Historically speaking all – or very nearly all – scientific theories originate

from myths.” – Karl Popper
 28
“The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.” -
Mohammed

“Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.” – W. Durant.

“Pessimism is a luxury of good times…In difficult times, pessimism is a

self-fulfilling, self-inflicted death sentence.” – Evelin Linder

“To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge.” –

Benjamin Disraeli, Svbil.

"There's a world of difference between insisting on someone's doing

something and establishing an atmosphere in which that person can
grow into wanting to do it." - Mister Rogers

“Talking with quiet confidence will always beat screaming with obvious
insecurity” – Anonymous

"When the student is ready, the teacher will appear." – Buddhist Proverb

"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in
comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage
to stay involved and seemingly happy?”… To be hopeful in bad times is
not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a
history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage,
kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will
determine our lives.” – Howard Zinn

"The most important work of all valiant, ascetic spiritual struggle consists
of entering into one's own heart." - St. Macarius

"We try, and we try, and we fail; and then we go deeper." -Suzuki Roshi
 29
"I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it
endures and knows how to turn to its advantage." - Nietzche

“One of the by-products of being a perfectionist and constantly trying to

improve myself are sobering feelings of low-grade anxiety and a nagging
sense of inadequacy... This anxiety keeps me humble.” – Anthony Fauci,
This I Believe, NPR.

“The real enemies of our life is the “oughts” and the “[what] ifs.” –
Henry Nouwen

"Don't you know that four fifths of all our troubles in this life would
disappear if we would just sit down and keep still?" – Calvin Coolidge

“Reasons for anxiety will never be lacking, whether born of prosperity or

of wretchedness; life pushes on in a succession of engrossments. We
shall always pray for leisure...” – Lucius Seneca

“They lose the day in expectation of the night, and the night in fear of
the dawn.” – Lucius Seneca

“The condition of all who are preoccupied is wretched, but most

wretched is the condition of those who labor at preoccupations that are
not even their own, who regulate their sleep by that of another, their
walk by the pace of another, who are under orders in case of the freest
things in the world—loving and hating. If these wish to know how short
their life is, let them reflect how small a part of it is their own.” - Seneca

“It’s not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.” -
Lucius Seneca

“We don’t beat the Reaper by living longer. We beat the Reaper by living
well.” -Randy Pausch
 30
“Design is the application of intent – the opposite of happenstance, and
an antidote to accident.” – Robert L. Peters.

“The person who doesn’t make mistakes is unlikely to make anything.” -

Anonymous

“I’ll not listen to reason. Reason always means what someone else has
got to say. ” - Elizabeth Gaskell

“Although I will cling to the truth as I know it, experience has taught me
a fuller and more complete understanding of that truth may lie ahead.” –
Anonymous

“The space between certain and almost certain is the valley in which
humility can rest.” - Anonymous

“Ninety-nine percent of who you are is invisible and untouchable.” - R.

Buckminster Fuller

“Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong
reasons.” - R. Buckminster Fuller

“God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or improper.” - R.

Buckminster Fuller

“How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for
somewhere else.” - R. Buckminster Fuller

“Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.”

- R. Buckminster Fuller

“Don't fight forces, use them.” - R. Buckminster Fuller

“Anger is almost always a byproduct of pain.” – Anonymous

 31

“Learn a new language, gain a new soul.” – Czech Proverb

“Truth is sincerity to experience” - Anonymous

“Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live
it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate
and teach it.” - Hermann Hesse – Siddhartha

“Everything is necessary, everything needs only my agreement, my

assent, my loving understanding; then all is well with me and nothing can
harm me.” – Hermann Hesse – Siddhartha

“I believe that happiness wears out in the effort made to recapture it;
that nothing is more fatal to happiness than the remembrance of
happiness.” – Andre Gide

“For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” – T. S.
Elliot

“Home is where one starts from.” – T. S. Elliot

"The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a
thing makes it happen." - Frank Loyd Wright

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have
imagined." - Henry David Thoreau

"The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up." - Paul
Valery

"Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done

without hope and confidence." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
 32
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” – Mark
Twain

“Nothing so liberalizes a man and expands the kindly instincts that

nature put in him as travel and contact with many kinds of people.” –
Mark Twain

“Think of the poorest person you have ever seen and ask if your next act
will be of any use to him [or her]” – Gandhi

“Ads are what we know about the world around us” - James Twitchell

“Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?” – Albert Camus

(everything in life is a choice)

“Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any

intellectual
influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” - John
Maynard
Keynes

"Reality is a cliche from which we escape by metaphor." - Wallace

Stevens

"The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, for the
vast masses of a nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily
deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad. The primitive
simplicity of their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than
a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies, but would be
ashamed to tell big lies." – Hitler (on the tragedy of how people are so
easily manipulated)
 33
“The hardest task needs the lightest hand or else its completion will not
lead to freedom but to a tyranny much worse than the one it replaces.” -
Socrates

“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who
reads nothing, but newspapers.” – Thomas Jefferson

“Since the world never faults a man who refuses to yield…it is generally
recognized that weak men live in obedience to the world’s will, while the
strong obey only their own.” – Leopardi

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.” - Pessoa

“Today we have a temporary aberration called ‘industrial capitalism’

which is inadvertently liquidating its two most important sources of
capital…the natural world and properly functioning societies. No
sensible capitalist would do that.” - Amory Lovins

“Trying to save ecosystems has more to do with changing egosystems.” -

Don Rittner

“Sustainability takes forever. And that's the point.”- William

McDonough

“To live a pure unselfish life, one must count nothing as one's own in
the midst of abundance.” - Buddha

“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest
of the world.” - John Muir

“We cannot command Nature except by obeying her.” - Francis Bacon

“We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.” - Kurt
Vonnegut
 34

"What's the use of a fine house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to
put it on?" - Henry David Thoreau

“The money-powers prey on the nation in times of peace, and conspires

against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more
insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. I see in the near
future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble
for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned and an
era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the
country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the
prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and
the Republic is destroyed.” - Abraham Lincoln

“What improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be

regarded as an inconvenience to the whole. No society can surely be
flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are
poor and miserable.” – Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

“Maximum individuality within maximum community” - Kant

"The secret to being a bore is to tell everything” - Oscar Wilde

“If we do not change our direction, we are likely to end up where we are
headed.” – Ancient Chinese Proverb

"As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people
permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our
presence automatically liberates others." - Written by Marianne
Williamson, spoken by Nelson Mandela

"You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let
the soft animal of your body love what it loves." - Mary Oliver
 35

“No thing is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig.
If you tell me you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be a time. Let
it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.” – Epictetus

"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are
unable to say." - Anais Nin

"It is necessary that one be a light to oneself in a world that is becoming

utterly dark." -Jiddu Krishnamurti

“Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has

spun.” – Clifford Geertz, credited to Max Weber

“The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent
unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group.” – Edward
Sapir

“A world ends when its metaphor dies.” – Archibald Macleish

“No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible, until a great
change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of
thought.” – J. S. Mill

“The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply

indifferent.” – J. H. Holmes

“If everything is imperfect in this imperfect world, love is most perfect in

its perfect imperfection.” – Jons in Bergman’s Seventh Seal

“I shall remember this moment. The silence, the

twilight, the bowls of strawberries and milk,
your faces in the evening light. Mikael
sleeping, Jof with his lyre. I'll try to
 36
remember what we have talked about. I'll carry
this memory between my hands as carefully as
if it were a bowl filled to the brim with fresh
milk. And it will be an adequate sign -- it will be
enough for me.” - Antonius Block in Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal

“For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensure…as the

unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater
than oneself.” – Viktor Frankly

“Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so.” – John
Stuart Mill

“Happiness is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated , and

defended privately by each person.” – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

“It would not be better if men got what they wanted.” - Euripides

“If all the insects on earth disappeared, within 50 years all life on earth
would disappear. If all humans disappeared, within 50 years all species
would flourish as never before.” – Jonas Salk

“If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with
anything original.” – Sir Ken Robinson

“We must ask, not just is it profitable, but is it right.” – Barack Obama

“A wise person is like a jazz musician, using the notes on a page but
dancing around them, inventing combinations that are appropriate for
the situation and people at hand.” – Barry Schwartz

“The secret to happiness is low expectations.” – Barry Schwartz

“The playful search for beauty.” – Eva Zeisel

 37

“If you are low income in the United States, you have a higher chance of
going to jail than getting a 4-year degree.” – Bill Gates

“And strangely enough…the only emotion I ever feel, is what the beaver
must feel, as he bears each stick to his hidden construction, which
creates the tranquil pond and gives the mallards somewhere to paddle,
and the pair of swans a place to conceal their young” – Billy Collins

“Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content
with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with course and rough dress, saying
to yourself the while: ‘Is this the condition that I feared?’” - Seneca

“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made
in a very narrow field.” – Niels Bohr

“People in the state of nature are virtuous because they do not know
what virtue is. Moral virtues are called forth due to the loss of
nature....The important thing is to preserve the original wholeness. Then
all will be well.” – Ellen Chen – Commentary on the Tao Te Ching

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed
corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of
strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country" - Thomas
Jefferson, 1816

“Not doing and yet nothing is not done” – Tao Te Ching

"True knowledge is knowledge of why things are as they are, and not
merely what they are."- Isaiah Berlin

"It may be true that the unexamined life is not worth living, but neither is
the unlived life worth examining." - Dan Millman
 38
"We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see
an imperfect person perfectly." - Anonymous

"Ships are safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for. So set sail on
the stormy sea of love. You're going to get soaked at times, but at least
you'll know you're alive." - Dan Millman

"A word of encouragement during failure is worth more than an hour of

praise after success." - Anonymous

"Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of

thought. A theory however elegant must be rejected and revised if it is
untrue; likewise laws and institutions must be reformed or abolished if
they are unjust." - John Rawls

"Reasoning at every step one takes, one yet mistakes one's way, yet
meager things, which instinct leads, are rarely known to stray." - William
Cowper

"When we long for a life without difficulties, remind us that oaks grow
strong in contrary winds and diamonds are made under pressure." - Peter
Marshall

"For peace of mind, resign as general manager of the universe." - Larry

Eisenberg

"The smallest good deed is greater than the grandest good intention." -
Anonymous

"Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one." -

Malcolm Forbes

"Say what you want and be who you are because those who mind don't
matter and those who matter don't mind." - Dr. Seuss
 39

"Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward
justice."
- Martin Luther King Jr.

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to

pause and reflect." - Mark Twain

“The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed but that
he cannot believe anyone else.” - George Bernard Shaw

"I know that history will be kind to me, for I intend to write it." -
Winston Churchill

“Aut viam inveniam aut faciam" (Either I will find a way or I will make
one) - Latin proverb

“You cannot shake hands with a closed fist.” - Mahatma Gandhi

“The first and best victory is to conquer self.” - Plato

“It is not enough to have great qualities. We should also have the
management of them.” - Francois La Rochefoucauld.

“The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.” -

Eric Hoffer

“It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood
backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be
lived- forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean
that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible,
precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the
backward-looking position.” - Soren Kierkegaard
 40
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they
are free." - Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."

- Albert Einstein

"Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative." - Oscar Wilde

“Music speaks what cannot be expressed,

Soothes the mind and gives it rest.
Seals the heart and makes it whole,
Flows from heaven and into the soul.” - Anonymous

“He is no fool that gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot
lose.”
Jim Elliot

“Absence diminishes little passions and increases great ones, as the wind
extinguishes candles and fans a fire.” - Francois Duc de la Roche
Foucauld

“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in time of great
moral crises maintain their neutrality.” – Dante

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m
not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein

"We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out." - Decca
Recording Company, rejecting the Beatles, in 1962

"I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.
Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories instead of theories to
suit facts." - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
 41
"Friendship is like peeing on yourself: everyone can see it, but only you
get the warm feeling that it brings."- Anonymous

“Well done is better than well said” – Benjamin Franklin

“My way of telling a joke is to tell the truth. Its the funniest joke in the
world." - George Bernard Shaw

"We live in constant danger of coming apart. The mystery of why we do

not always come apart is the animating tension of all art.” – Virginia
Wolfe

“I press to my centre, and find there is something there." – Virginia

Wolfe

“The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.” – G. K.

Chesterton

"There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real
labor of thinking.” - Sir Joshua Reynolds

“One should live outside of passions, beyond emotions in that harmony

you find in completed artworks, in that enchanted order. We should
learn to love each other so much to live outside of time, detached.
Detached.” – Steiner, La Dolce Vita

“A more miserable life is better, believe me, than an existence protected

by an organized society where everything is calculated and everything is
perfect.” – Steiner, La Dolce Vita

“The Tao that can be named is not the real (eternal) Tao.” – Lao-Tzu
 42
“Ah, if I could realize, if I could forget myself and devote my
meditations to the freeing, the awakening and the blessedness of all living
creatures everywhere I’d realize what there is, is ecstasy.” – Jack Kerouac

“It takes more courage to dig deep in the dark corners of your own soul
and the back alleys of your society than it does for a soldier to fight on
the battlefield.” – WB Yeats

“Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can

perform without thinking about them.” – Alfred North Whitehead

"Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing...after they

have exhausted all other possibilities." - Winston Churchill

“The fruit of love’s great tree is poverty; Whoever knows this knows
humility.” – Farid ud-Din Attar

“When first you enter Wisdom’s sea, beware-A wave of indecision floods
you there.” – Farid ud-Din Attar

“One draws a magic circle around oneself to keep everything out that
doesn’t fit one’s secret games. Each time life breaks through the circle,
the game becomes puny and ridiculous. So one draws a new circle and
builds new defenses. “ –David in the film Through a Glass Darkly
(Ingmar Bergman)

“The one thing that fills me with enthusiasm is to try, despite everything,
to get nearer to those visions that seem so hard to express.” – Alberto
Giacometti

"Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life." -Omar Khayyam

“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in
solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst
 43
of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude”
– Emerson.

“But when I say ‘God,’ it is poetry and not theology.” – John Haynes
Holmes, A Modern Faith

“By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is

noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience,
which is the bitterest.” - Confucius

“To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what
we do not know, that is true knowledge.” - Confucius

“Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the life-long attempt to

acquire it.” - Albert Einstein

“I love to travel, but hate to arrive.” - Albert Einstein

“Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own

loveliness.” - George Jean Nathan

“We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or
fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyfull of words and do not
know a thing. The things taught in schools and colleges are not an
education, but the means of education.” - Emerson

“Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been
forgotten.” - B. F. Skinner

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” - Mark

Twain
 44
“If you are planning for a year, sow rice; if you are planning for a decade,
plant trees; if you are planning for a lifetime, educate people.” - Chinese
proverb

“There are two types of education....One should teach us how to make a

living, And the other how to live.” - John Adams

“Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there
were only walls.” – Joseph Campbell

“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it
will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks
finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.” – Jesus, Bible, Matthew
7:7-8

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought.” – Buddha

"Do you love me? Means at last do you see the same truth I see? If you
do, we are happy together; but when presently one of us passes into the
perception of a new truth, we are divorced and the force of all nature
cannot hold us to each other." -Emerson

“To live for self, a thing has to contend against others, in not living for
self, a thing will be that which all things return.” – Wang Pi

“Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment. Full effort is full
victory.” - Gandhi

“I have no other self than the totality of the things of which I am aware.”
– Alan Watts

“Man is rotten with perfection.” – Kenneth Burke

“We are always getting ready to live but never living.” - Emerson
 45

"When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably

selfish to be lonely alone." - Tennessee Williams

“The most incomprehensive thing about the world is that it is

comprehensible” – Albert Einstein

“Either you think -- or else others have to think for you and take power
from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize
you.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

“War is a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.” - Thomas Mann

"Not all those that wonder are lost." - J.R.R. Tolkien

“At most, recognizing that our history was inspired by many tales we
now recognize as false should make us alert, ready to call to constantly
into question the very tale we believe true, because the criterion of the
wisdom of the community is based on constant awareness of the
fallibility of our learning.” – Umberto Eco

“After all, the cultivated person’s first duty is to be always prepared to

rewrite the encyclopedia.” – Umberto Eco

“Naturally, everything depends on one’s background books and on what

one is looking for.” – Umberto Eco

"Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the

curious attractiveness of others" - Oscar Wilde

“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely
rearranging their prejudices.” - William James
 46
“As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has
never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should
sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more
lovingly, our own.” -Margaret Mead

"You, you only, exist.

We pass away, till at last,
our passing is so immense
that you arise: beautiful moment,
in all your suddenness,
arising in love, or enchanted
in the contraction of work.
To you I belong, however time may
wear me away. From you to you
I go commanded. In between
the garland is hanging in chance; but if you
take it up and up and up: look:
all becomes festival!" - Rilke

"The only way to comprehend what mathematicians mean by Infinity is

to contemplate extent of human stupidity." - Voltaire

"The past cannot remember the past. The future can't generate the
future. The cutting edge of the instant right here and now is always
nothing less than the totality of everything there is." - Robert Pirsig

"The real University, he said, has no specific location. It owns no

property, pays no salaries, and receives no material dues. The real
University is a state of mind. It is a that great heritage of rational
thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and
which does not exist at any specific location. ...The real University is
nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself." – Robert Pirsig
 47
"If you are lonely when you are alone, you are in bad company" - John
Paul Sartre

"If billions of dollars spent on security, military campaigns and troop

movement were instead spent on investment and assistance for poor
countries, promotion of health, combating different diseases, education
and improvement of mental and physical fitness, assistance to the victims
of natural disasters, creation of employment opportunities and
production, development projects and poverty alleviation, establishment
of peace, mediation between disputing states and distinguishing the
flames of racial, ethnic and other conflicts, where would the world be
today? Would not your [United States] government and people be
justifiably proud? Would not your administration’s political and
economic standing have been stronger? And I am sorry to say, would
there have been an ever increasing global hatred of the American
governments?" - Mahmood Ahmadi-Najad - President of the Islamic
Republic of Iran

"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more
useful than a life spent in doing nothing." - George Bernard Shaw

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick
themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened." - Sir Winston
Churchill

“Means are ends in the making” - Gandhi

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let

alone.” - Henry David Thoreau

"The way things appear to me, in that way they exist for me; and the way
things appears to you, in that way they exist for you" - the Sophist
Protagoras, as quoted by Plato
 48
"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial
element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since
the days of Andrew Jackson." - Franklin D. Roosevelt, U.S. President
(1933)

“Read not to contradict, nor to believe, but to weigh and consider.” –

Francis Bacon The Essays

“Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.” – Anonymous

“The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what
I have words for.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein

“If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat

different world.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein

“A confession has to be part of your new life.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein

“For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Reflection on the infinite seems to call, almost by definition, for infinite

reflection.” – Daniel Taylor

“The unhealthiness of our world today is in direct proportion to our

inability to see it as a whole.” – anonymous

“Dialogue starts with the willingness to challenge our own thinking, to

recognize that any certainty we have is, at best, a hypothesis about the
world.” – Peter Senge

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” –
Thomas Merton
 49
"Happiness is not a possession to be prized; it is a quality of thought, a
state of mind." - Daphne Du Maurier

"Make use of time, let not advantage slip; Beauty within itself should not
be wasted." - William Shakespeare
“Poverty and slavery are thus only two forms of…the same thing, the
essence of which is that a man’s energies are expended for the most part
not on his own behalf but on that of others.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

"All truth passes through three stages: first it is ridiculed; second, it is

violently opposed; third, it is accepted as being self-evident."- Arthur
Schopenhauer

“You take my life when you do take the means whereby I live.” - Shylock

“Nothing to hide, nothing to fear, nothing to regret, and nothing to

prove.” – Troy Harris

“sometimes you need a little guilt to make you realize what you truly
have” – a friend named Andrea

“you can't give to the world what you don't feel within yourself”- a
friend named Andrea

“don't cloud the present trying to impress the future” – a friend named
Andrea

“…the word that seems best to summarize the desire of the human heart
is ‘communion.’ …wherever we look it is communion that we seek.” –
Henri Nouwen

“Critiquing relieves you of the responsibility of doing integrative

thinking.” – Deborah Tannen
 50
“But if you parry individuals points – a negative and defensive enterprise
– you never step back and actively imagine a world in which a different
system of ideas could be true – a positive act.” – Deborah Tannen

“False dichotomies are often at the heart of discord.” – Deborah

Tannen

"I must have justice, or I will destroy myself. And not justice in some
remote and infinite time and space, but here on Earth...I want to see with
my own eyes the lamb lie down with the lion and the victim rise up and
embrace his murderer. I want to be there when everyone suddenly
understands what it has all been about. All the religions of the world are
built on this longing, and I am a believer." - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Efficiency obliterates identity” – William Greider

“…one thing I am ready to fight for as long as I can, in word and act:
that is, that we shall be better, braver and more active men if we believe
it right to look for what we don't know than if we believe there is no
point in looking because what we don't know we can never discover.” -
Socrates

“An artist is never poor.” – Babette in the film Babette’s Feast

“Let us be silent that we may hear the whisper of God.” - Ralph Waldo
Emerson

"Restlessness and discontent are the first necessities of progress." -

Thomas Edison

"Beauty is an omnipresence of death and loveliness, a smiling sadness

that we discern in nature and all things, a mystic communion that the
poet feels." - Charlie Chaplin
 51
“Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.” –
John Lennon

“Once you label me, you negate me” – Soren Kierkegaard

“Wisdom is asking the questions for which there are no answers” -

Harrell Beck

“We do not choose between a life of difficulty and a life of ease. We

simply choose for what purpose we will work, sometimes suffer, and
hopefully endure.” – Daniel Taylor

“Nothing worthwhile is easy…” – Daniel Taylor

“No one is so terribly deceived as he who does not himself suspect it.” –
Soren Kirkegaard

“Seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be

pitied.” – Blaise Pascal

“We are worthy of being believed only as we [are] aware of our

unworthiness.” – Karl Barth

“I cannot imagine a stronger affirmation from a more credible source of

the significance of the inner life in the external affairs of our time:
‘consciousness precedes being” and ‘the salvation of this human world
lies nowhere else than in the human heart.” - Vaclav Havel

“You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours.
When you truly possess all you have been and done…you are fierce with
reality.” - Florida Scott Maxwell

“Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places. I have
been dissolved and shaken, worn other people’s faces…” - May Sarton
 52

“We are here not only to transform the world but also to be
transformed” – Parker Palmer

“One of the hardest things we must do sometimes is to be present to

another person’s pain without trying to “fix” it, to simply stand
respectfully at the edge of that person’s mystery and misery.” - Parker
Palmer

“Here, I think, is another clue to finding true self and vocation: we must
withdraw the negative projections we make on people and situations –
projections that serve mainly to mask our fears about ourselves- and
acknowledge and embrace our own liabilities and limits.” – Parker
Palmer

“In the coming world, they will not ask me: ‘Why were you not Moses?’
they will ask me: ‘Why were you not Zusya?’” – A Hasidic tale about
Rabbi Zusya

“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult
of our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all
other work is but preparation.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

“Live with the questions so one day we may grow into the answers.” –
Rilke

“Bishey bish khai” – Only poison delivers us from poison (metaphor of

antidotes)

"Beauty, however, must here be understood in its original meaning: as

the glow of the true and the good irradiating from every ordered state of
being, and not in the patent significance of immediate sensual appeal." -
Josef Pieper
 53
"I don't think of all the misery, but of all the beauty that still remains." -
Anne Frank

“Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with

what happens to him.” - Aldous Huxley

“The supreme happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved.” -

Victor Hugo

“He who angers you conquers you.” - Elizabeth Kenny

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path
and leave a trail.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.” - George Eliot

“Friends are those rare people who ask how we are and then wait to hear
the answer.” - Ed Cunningham

“Think for yourself and let others enjoy the privilege of doing so too.” -
Voltaire

"He that judges without informing himself to the utmost that he is

capable, cannot acquit himself of judging amiss." - John Locke

"Beware so long as you live, of judging men by their outward

appearance." - Jean de La Fontaine

"The number of those who undergo the fatigue of judging for

themselves is very small indeed." - Richard Brinsley Sheridan

“He who doubts, knows - knows as much as can be known.” – Giacomo

Leopardi
 54
“Fact is only what you believe and fact and fiction work as a team.” –
Jack Johnson, “It’s All Understood”

“A question is wiser than an accusation.” – Doug Schaupp

“If content with himself and mankind, a man is never harsh or curt.” –
Giacomo Leopardi

“No human trait is more intolerable in everyday life, or in fact less

tolerated, than intolerance.” – Giacomo Leopardi

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that
matter." – Martin Luther King Jr.

“He is not poor that hath not much, but he that craves much.” –
Thomas Fuller

“Remembering the past gives power to the present.” – Fae Myenne Ng

"When unhappy, one doubts everything; when happy, one doubts

nothing." -Joseph Roux

“I find it awfully difficult to determine if the habit of talking about

oneself at length runs contrary to the basic rules of propriety, or if
instead the man exempt from this vice is rare.” – Giacomo Leopardi

“A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine
picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate
the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.”
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in,
where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.” - John Muir
 55
“Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites
the sensitive soul to tears.” - Edgar Allen Poe

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the

source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a
stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as
good as dead: his eyes are closed.” - Albert Einstein

“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it
with us or we find it not.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even
touched - they must be felt with the heart.” - Hellen Keller

“Keep your faith in all beautiful things; in the sun when it is hidden, in
the Spring when it is gone.” - Roy R. Gilson

“A soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.” - Johann von
Goethe

“Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.” - Kahlil Gibran

"The love of beauty in its multiple forms is the noblest gift of the human
cerebrum." - Alexis Carre

“Let the beauty we love be what we do.” - Rumi

“If you truly love Nature, you will find beauty everywhere.” - Vincent
Van Gogh

“If we are to find our way back to that point of wholeness and
belonging, we must do so in the place where we had begun to lose it.” –
John Okada (adapted quote)
 56
“Those…who insist that there are some moral limits that they will not
violate, are forever surprising themselves.” – David Simon and Edward
Burns

"Beware of no man more than of yourself; we carry our worst enemies

within us." - Charles H. Spurgeon

"The past isn't dead; it isn't even past." - William Faulkner

"There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has

always been, and we solve nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves in
technological glory." - Neil Postman

"To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone

else's." - Fyodor Dostoevsky

“The people you have to lie to, own you. The things you have to lie
about, own you.” - Michael Ventura

“The total history of almost anyone would shock almost everyone.” -

Mignon McLaughlin

"Humility is the only true wisdom by which we prepare our minds for all
the possible changes of life." - George Arliss

“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” - E.E.
Cummings

“It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies.” – Thomas

Huxley

“Every race and every nation [and every person] should be judged by he
best it has been able to produce, not by the worst.” – James Weldon
Johnson
 57

“Man is doomed either squander his youth, which is the only time he has
to store provisions for the coming years and provide for his own well-
being, or to spend his youth procuring pleasures in advance for that time
of life when he will be too old to enjoy them.” – Giacomo Leopardi.

“Nothing in the world is so rare as a person one can always put up with.”
– Giacomo Leopardi

“The surest way to conceal from others the limits of one’s own
knowledge is by not overstepping them.” – Giacomo Leopardi

“It’s interesting to observe that almost all truly worthy men have simple
manners, and that simple manners are almost always taken as a sign of
little worth” –Giacomo Leopardi

“As long as we have our stories there is hope.” – Henri Nouwen

“Life is not a problem to be solved; it is a mystery to be lived.” –

Thomas Merton

“We must be willing to cultivate humility along with certainty, to practice

tolerance along with devotion, to seek patience along with piety.” –
Robert Benson

“The trouble with really seeing and really hearing is that then we really
have to do something about what we have seen and heard.” – Frederick
Beuchner

“When one has seen something of the world and human nature, one
must conclude, after all, that between people in like stations of life there
is very little difference the world over.” – James Weldon Johnson

“We must all learn to live together as brothers. Or we will all perish
 58
together as fools…For some strange reason I can never be what I ought
to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you
ought to be until I am what I ought to be.” – Dr. martin Luther King, Jr.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge” – Albert Einstein

"Show me who makes a profit from war, and I'll show you how to stop
the war." - Henry Ford

“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” -
Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Give a man a fish and he east for a day; teach him to fish, and he east
for a lifetime.” - Chinese proverb

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes but
in having new eyes.” - Marcel Proust

“Beloved Pan and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty
in the inward soul; and may the outward and the inward man be one.” -
Socrates

“Beauty is truth and truth beauty – that is all ye know on earth and all ye
need to know.” – John Keats

“Every passing minute is another chance to turn it all around.” – Sophia

from the film Vanilla Sky

“To a mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.” - Chuang Tzu

“There are only people doing their imperfect best at doing their
imperfect jobs” – Stephen Nachmanovitch
 59
"The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is
the one that sings." - Stephen Nachmanovitch

“Whispered words can be devastatingly effective.” – Stephen

Nachmanovitch

“Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad

judgment.” – Tom Watson (head of IBM for many years)

“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that is

troublesome.” – Isaac Asimov

“Life is a long lesson in humility.” – James Matthew Barrie

“Change is not merely necessary to life, it is life.” – Alvin Toffler

“There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the
things that come out are what defile.” – Jesus (Mark 7:15)

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.” - Anais Nin

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection" –

Anais Nin

“What is forgotten cannot be healed, and that which cannot be healed

easily becomes the cause of greater evil.” - Henri Nouwen

“You may be through with the past but the past ain’t through with you”
– the film Magnolia

"I believe in free will. I have no choice." - Bashevis Singer.

“The heart has its reasons, which reason can not know.” – Blaise Pascal
 60
“A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but
its lowest ones.” - Nelson Mandela

As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically

liberates others.” - Nelson Mandela

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change
the world.” - Nelson Mandela

“For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way
that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” - Nelson Mandela

“Money won't create success, the freedom to make it will.” - Nelson

Mandela

“We must use time wisely and forever realize that the time is always ripe
to do right.” - Nelson Mandela

“The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every
time we fall.” - Nelson Mandela

“It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.”-
Rene Descartes

“Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your

temper” - Robert Frost

"Beware you be not swallowed up in books...an ounce of love is worth a

pound of knowledge." - John Wesley

“Whoever wants to be free, therefore, let him not want or avoid anything
that is up to others. Otherwise he will necessarily be a slave.” - Epictetus
 61
"He is wise who knows the sources of knowledge -- where it is written
and where it is to be found." - A.A. Hodge

“Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and
attended to with diligence.” - Abigail Adams

“The wisest mind has something yet to learn.” - George Santayana

“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look
so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been
opened for us.” – Helen Keller

“Never seem more learned than the people you are with. Wear your
learning like a pocket watch and keep it hidden. Do not pull it out to
count the hours, but give the time when you are asked.” - Lord
Chesterfield

“It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already
knows.” - Epictetus

“Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to

acquire it.” - Albert Einstein

"The important thing is not to stop questioning." - Albert Einstein

"The only dumb question is the question you don't ask." - Paul
MacCready

"The highest result of education is tolerance." - Helen Keller

“Children find everything in nothing; men find nothing in everything.” -

Giacomo Leopardi
 62
"The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves,
and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the
reflection of ourselves we find in them." - Thomas Merton

“The psychological impotence of our enraged generation must be traced

to the overwhelming accusation of insincerity which every man and
woman has to confront, in the depths of his own soul, when he seeks to
love merely for his own pleasure….And yet the men of our time do not
love with enough courage to risk even discomfort or inconvenience.” –
Thomas Merton

“But if we seek paradise outside ourselves, we cannot have paradise in

our hearts. If we have no peace within ourselves, we have no peace with
what is all around us.” – Thomas Merton

"The art of love...is largely the art of persistence." - Albert Ellis

“It is useless to teach those who do not expect to be transformed” –

Rosenstock Heussy

"Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it." -
Andre Gide

"If the truth is worth telling, it is worth making a fool of yourself to tell
it." - Frederic Buechner

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."

-Soren Kierkegaard.

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought

without accepting it."- Aristotle

"That which is impossible to prove and probable is better than that

which is possible to prove and improbable" – Aristotle
 63

"God is more truly imagined than expressed, and He exists more truly
than He is imagined." -Saint Augustine

"Those who see only themselves in others find only themselves and talk
only to themselves." - Harold Barrett

"Create like a god, command like a king, work like a slave." -Constantin
Brancusi

"College is a secluded life of scholastic vegetation" - Vera Brittain

"Be not a slave of words." - Thomas Carlyle

"No man's really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be..." -
G.K. Chesterton

"Man must suffer to be wise." – Cicero

"Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live
for, great enough to die for." – Dag Hammarskjold

"The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in time of great
moral crises maintain their neutrality." - Dante Aleghieri

“If you are neutral in a situation of injustice, you have chosen the side of
the oppressor.” – Desmond Tutu

"But there is suffering in life, and there are defeats. No one can avoid
them. But it's better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your
dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you're fighting
for." - Paulo Coelho

"The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation." - Don DeLillo

 64

"Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough." - Emily
Dickinson

"When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma,

we become automatons. We cease to grow." - Anais Nin

"For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the
more grief." - Ecclesiastes 1:18, Bible

"It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our
humanity." - Albert Einstein

"The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues." - Ralph Waldo

Emerson

"It's how you deal with failure that determines how you achieve success."
- David Feherty

"Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. There is nothing in its
nature to produce happiness. The more a man has, the more he wants.
Instead of filling a vacuum, it makes one." - Benjamin Franklin

"Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak,

pawned a part of their narcissism." – Sigmund Freud

“The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the
founder of civilization.” - Sigmund Freud

"For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy
neighbor as thyself" - Galatians 5:14, Bible

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live

forever."-- Mahatma Gandhi
 65

"It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be

reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err." -
Mahatma Gandhi

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world." – Mahatma
Gandhi

"The incessant struggle of the mind to be true to itself, to absorb new

truths, to grow, to overcome pressures--these are the painful portion of
the independent thinker. Almost his sole reward is the satisfaction of
integrity." - Howard Mumford Jones

"The highest of all is not to understand the highest but to act upon it." -
Soren Kierkegaard

"...if all we mean by our love is a craving to be loved, we are in a very

deplorable state." - C.S. Lewis

"Let a fool hold his tongue and he will pass for a sage." —Publilius Syrus

"We should never pretend to know what we don't know, we should not
feel ashamed to ask and learn from people below, and we should listen
carefully to the views of the cadres at the lowest levels. Be a pupil before
you become a teacher; learn from the cadres at the lower levels before
you issue orders." - Mao Tse-tung

"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the
barriers within yourself that you have built against it." - Djalal ad-Din
Rumi

"Love not only prefers the good of another to my own, but it does not
even compare the two." - Thomas Merton
 66
“Naturally, the common people don't want war, but after all, it is the
leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple
matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist
dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no
voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.
This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and
denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and expose the country to
danger. It works the same in every country. - Herman Goring, Nazi
leader (though I disagree with him, he reveals the reality of political
power over the masses)

"A person's true wealth is the good he or she does in the world." -
Mohammed

"Fidgeting and boredom are the symptoms of fear of emptiness, which

we try to fill up with whatever we can lay our hands on." - Stephen
Nachmanovitch

"We find other people's vanity contrary to our taste only when it is
contrary to our vanity." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"People in the secular world have too much to live with, too little to live
for." - Os Guiness

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from

religious conviction." - Blaise Pascal

"We must know where to doubt, where to feel certain, where to submit.
He who does not do so, understands not the force of reason." - Blaise
Pascal

"The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he is unable to sit quietly in

his own room." - Blaise Pascal
 67
"Every man goes down to his death bearing in his hands only that which
he has given away." - Persian Proverb

"The learning and knowledge that we have, is, at the most but little
compared with that of which we are ignorant." - Plato

"In for ever knowing, we are for ever blessed; but to know all were the
curse of a fiend" - Edgar Alan Poe

"Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dreamed before." - Edgar
Allan Poe

"Many people have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is

not attained through self- gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy
purpose." - Helen Keller

"Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with

themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." -Susan Ertz

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes
on." -Robert Frost

"If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we aren't really

living." - Gail Sheehy

"The unexamined life is not worth living." - Socrates

“True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing. And in

knowing that you know nothing, that makes you the smartest of all.” -
Socrates

"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth" - Henry David
Thoreau
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"All this worldly wisdom was once the amiable heresy of some wise
man." - Henry David Thoreau

"Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for

it has not profited so much as it has lost." – Henry David Thoreau

“Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.
What a man thinks of himself, that is which determines, or rather
indicates, his fate.” – Henry David Thoreau

“All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking

place every instant.” – Henry David Thoreau

"Difference of opinion leads to inquiry, and inquiry to truth." - Thomas

Jefferson

"A person who lives only in the present and has not a full consciousness
of what lies behind his back is not fully human." - Tulia Zevi

"Never let school interfere with your education." - Mark Twain

“If each of the many things in the world were taken as distinct, unique, a
thing in itself unrelated to any other thing, perception of the world
would disintegrate into complete meaninglessness.” – Eviatar Zerubavel

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do, with your one wild and precious life?
- Mary Oliver

“The incessant struggle of the mind to be true to itself, to absorb new

truths, to grow, to overcome pressures – these are the painful portion of
the independent thinker. Almost his[/her] sole reward is his[/her]
satisfaction of integrity.” - Howard Mumford Jones
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“Service is the rent we pay to be living. It is the very purpose of life and
not something you do in your spare time.” Marian Wright Edelman

"Man really attains the state of complete humanity when he produces,

without being forced by physical need to sell himself as a commodity." –
Che Guevara

"Beauty is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind

which contemplates them" - David Hume

"Truth springs from argument amongst friends." - David Hume

“If you judge people, you have no time to love them.” - Mother Teresa

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one." - Albert

Einstein

"At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet." - Plato

"Courage is knowing what not to fear." - Plato

"All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind." - Aristotle

"I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers
his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self." - Aristotle

"No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness." –
Aristotle

For more information about me, please visit my blog:

A Chance to See Beyond Oneself