So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.
Henry David ThoreauI want to know all Gods thoughts; all the rest are just details.
Albert EinsteinBoth in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.
Bertrand RussellThe call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.
Hermann HessePhilosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.
Galileo GalileiNature cannot be tricked or cheated. She will give up to you the object of your struggles only after you have paid her price.
Napoleon HillChange alone is unchanging.
HeraclitusThe unnatural, that too is natural.
Johann Wolfgang von GoetheNecessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.
Friedrich NietzscheWe don’t thrive on military acts. We do them because we have to, and thank God we are efficient.
Golda MeirBelief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.
Blaise PascalWho is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.
Benjamin FranklinI draw from the Absurd three consequences: my revolt, my liberty, my passion.
Albert CamusI don’t suffer of anything that I’ve lost.
Arnold SchwarzeneggerHappy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.
Ralph Waldo EmersonI do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.
Jean-Paul SartreNon-violence is not a garment to be put on and off at will. Its seat is in the heart, and it must be an inseparable part of our being.
Mahatma GandhiJudging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.
Albert CamusIt is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
Carl SaganNo one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.
Steve JobsMan will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.
Winston ChurchillA man who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary.
Lucius Annaeus SenecaAll truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Arthur SchopenhauerI give the name of cosmic sense to the more or less confused affinity that binds us psychologically to the All which envelops us. The existence of this feeling is indubitable, and apparently as old as the beginning of thought… The cosmic sense must have been born as soon as man found himself facing the forest, the sea and the stars.
Pierre Teilhard de ChardinReligions get lost as people do.
Franz KafkaIf you can feel that Mother Earth is in you, and you are Mother Earth, then you are not any longer afraid to die because the earth is not dying. Like a wave appears and disappears and appears again.
Thich Nhat HanhDon’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.
Tennessee WilliamsWhere love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
Carl JungNothing can be divided into more parts than it can possibly be constituted of. But matter (i.e. finite) cannot be constituted of infinite parts.
Isaac NewtonThe first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.
Huey NewtonParadise was made for tender hearts; hell, for loveless hearts.
VoltaireIn fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth – often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.
HypatiaTemperance is a mean with regard to pleasures.
AristotleCourage is a mean with regard to fear and confidence.
AristotleThe heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.
Helen KellerThere is an orderliness in the universe, there is an unalterable law governing everything and every being that exists or lives. It is no blind law; for no blind law can govern the conduct of living beings.
Mahatma GandhiThe infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.
Bertrand RussellThinking: the talking of the soul with itself.
PlatoNothing in life is promised except death.
Kanye WestThe proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.
Jack LondonI make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.
Christopher HitchensThere is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge – that is everywhere.
Hermann HesseThought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
Aldous HuxleyScience is but an image of the truth.
Francis BaconWe are symbols, and inhabit symbols.
Ralph Waldo EmersonIt is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly. And it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living a pleasant life.
EpicurusA novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.
Jim RohnTo appreciate the noble is a gain which can never be torn from us.
Johann Wolfgang von GoetheNothing can have value without being an object of utility.
Karl MarxMankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
Thomas JeffersonThe good opinion of mankind, like the lever of Archimedes, with the given fulcrum, moves the world.
Thomas JeffersonThe real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.
C. S. LewisI can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.
Blaise PascalThe spiritual is the parent of the practical.
Thomas CarlyleJudgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms – in themselves such judgments are stupidities.
Friedrich NietzscheEvery existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.
Jean-Paul SartreReason is the enemy of faith.
Martin LutherNever in any case say I have lost such a thing, but I have returned it. Is your child dead? It is a return. Is your wife dead? It is a return. Are you deprived of your estate? Is not this also a return?
EpictetusI do not know what I may appear to the world, but 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.
Isaac NewtonIf there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.
Franz Kafka