Philosophical Quotes

Maybe God left it up to people to develop the ability to bring back Christ into their lives. Maybe God wanted us to invent our own savior when we were ready. When we need it most. Denny says maybe it's up to us to create our own messiah. To save ourselves.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

If you think like others, how can you be sure you're thinking at all?

~ Daniel Delgado F

Life is science.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Night sometimes lends such tragic assistance to catastrophe.

~ Victor Hugo

Don't think about the things that made you to think and think and think...

~ Self

The Prayer of the Middle-Aged ManAmid the doctors in the Temple at twelve, between mother & host at Cana implored too soon, in the middle of disciples, the midst of the mob, between High-Priest and Procurator, among the occupiers,between the malefactors, and 'stetit in medio, et dixit, pax vobis' and 'ascensit ad mediam Personarum et caelorum,' dear my Lord,mercy a sinner nailed dead-centre too, pray not to late,-for also Ezra stood between the seven & the six, restoring the new Law.

~ John Berryman

I... a universe of atoms, an atom in the universe.

~ Richard Feynman

There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed.

~ Bertrand Russell

Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw.

~ Victor Hugo

If there were no thunder, men would have little fear of lightning.

~ Jules Verne

It is better to burn than to disappear.

~ Albert Camus

Where men can't live gods fare no better.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

Deep down, all the while, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she kept casting desperate glances over the solitary waster of her life, seeking some white sail in the distant mists of the horizon. She had no idea by what wind it would reach her, toward what shore it would bear her, or what kind of craft it would be – tiny boat or towering vessel, laden with heartbreaks or filled to the gunwhales with rapture. But every morning when she awoke she hoped that today would be the day; she listened for every sound, gave sudden starts, was surprised when nothing happened; and then, sadder with each succeeding sunset, she longed for tomorrow.

~ Gustave Flaubert

We look not at the things which are what you would call seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal. But the things that are not seen are eternal.

~ Madeleine L'engle

For other people, I can't speak - but, personally, I haven't gotten wise on anything. Certainly, I've been through this and that; and when it happens again, I say to myself, Here it is again. But that doesn't seem to help me. In my opinion, I, personally, have gotten steadily sillier and sillier - and that's a fact.

~ Christopher Isherwood

If you make a deal with a fool, don't be surprised when they act foolishly.

~ Jeffrey Archer

They called themselves the Munrungs. It meant The People, or The True Human Beings.It's what most people call themselves, to begin with. And then one day the tribe meets some other People or, if it's not been a good day, The Enemy. If only they'd think up a name like Some More True Human Beings, it'd save a lot of trouble later on

~ Terry Pratchett

there are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion; and what remains but to take it ready-made from others, instead of forming opinions for himself?

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

A man who discovers his pants are on fire tends to have very little time to worry about somebody else's box of matches

~ Jeff Lindsay

Lead the people with administrative injunctions and put them in their place with penal law, and they will avoid punishments but will be without a sense of shame. Lead them with excellence and put them in their place through roles and ritual practices, and in addition to developing a sense of shame, they will order themselves harmoniously

~ Confucius

Aures habent et non audient` - `They have ears but hear not

~ Jules Verne

It is absurd to hold that a man should be ashamed of an inability to defend himself with his limbs, but not ashamed of an inability to defend himself with speech and reason; for the use of rational speech is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs.

~ Aristotle

The chief proof of man's real greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

We Are The Sum Total Of Our Choices...

~ Woody Allen

But if I decide to decide there’s a different, less selfish, less lonely point to my life, won’t the reason for this decision be my desire to be less lonely, meaning to suffer less overall pain? Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?

~ David Foster Wallace

Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm; great good fortune comes to failure in the end. All is change; all yields its place and goes; to persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man. The coward despairs.

~ Euripides

Intelligence is being intelligent enough to know you're not so intelligent as you intelligently once thought.

~ Carroll Bryant

She was starting to think that it might be fun to be in control of the universe.

~ Nicki Elson

...in the absence of will power, the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless.

~ Aleister Crowley

The world's a headmaster who works on your faults. I don't mean in a mystical or Jesus way. More how you'll keep tripping over a hidden step, over and over, till you finally understand: Watch out for that step! Everything that's wrong with us, if we're too selfish or too Yessir, Nosir, Three bags full sir or too anything, that's a hidden step. Either you suffer the consequences of not noticing your fault forever or, one day, you do notice it, and fix it. Joke is, once you get it into your brain about that hidden step and think, Hey, life isn't such a shithouse after all again, then BUMP! Down you go, a whole new flight of hidden steps.There are always more.

~ David Mitchell

Life has always been a matter of putting one's feet down carefully

~ Isobelle Carmody

We spend so much time creating a façade of what we want to project to the world, we almost forget what we ourselves are truly about in the process.

~ Jason R. Thrift

Poverty makes a slave out of men. In order to eat he will accept work that gives no pleasure.

~ André Gide

Apprentices Needed, Not DisciplesFor many, the knowledge of a Jesus, a Lao-tzu, a Buddha, or a Gandhi is complete and unassailable. But we do them and their vision a disservice when we follow them rather than using what they have taught to build upon as we strive toward our goal of a better society.

~ William Coperthwaite

Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.

~ Italo Calvino

No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing. Wars and revolutions, kings and Robespierres, are history's organic agents, its yeast. But revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track mind, geniuses in their ability to confine themselves to a limited field. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days, the whole upheaval takes a few weeks or at most years, but the fanatical spirit that inspired the upheavals is worshiped for decades thereafter, for centuries.

~ Boris Pasternak

The individual soul touches upon the world soul like a well reaches for the water table. That which sustains the universe beyond thought and language, and that which is at the core of us and struggles for expression, is the same thing. The finite within the infinite, the infinite within the finite.

~ Yann Martel

I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever, I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

This is the story of a man named Eddie and it starts at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It may seem strange to start a story with and ending, but all endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time.

~ Mitch Albom

There is a coherence in things, a stability; something... is immune from change and shines out... in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby.

~ Virginia Woolf