Philosophical Quotes

Hayt felt suddenly that he existed in a dream controlled by some other mind, and that he might momentarily forget this to become lost in the convolutions of that mind.

~ Frank Herbert

Moments like this occurred more and more frequently, and I think that was the biggest difference between us. That we could look at the same stars in the same sky, but not have the same questions. Not want the same answers.

~ Stephanie Oakes

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

How do I know that what I see as blue and what you see as blue are the same thing? Answer: We don't. We take it on faith.

~ Barry Lyga

Would that we could choose the last image we see before death closes our eyes forever to this world.

~ Nick Hirst

Sometimes, one needs another pair of eyes to see things clearly.

~ Aguidon

The only difference between a prayer and a curse is the one who stands to profit.

~ Paula Wall

Some women barter their bodies like whores with wedding bands. Some use sex like a sword. But some women can touch a man and heal like Jesus.

~ Paula Wall

It was––how shall I put it?––a painfully solitary building. Let me explain. Say we have a concept. It goes without saying that there will be slight exceptions to that norm. Now, over time these exceptions spread like stains until finally they form a separate concept. To which other exceptions crop up. It was that kind of building, some ancient life form that had evolved blindly, toward who knows what end.

~ Haruki Murakami

I think about celestial junk. Like, maybe every planet in this solar system is discarded by giant hands. Each star a crumpled ball of paper, a love letter lit on fire, a smoldering bit of cigarette ash.

~ Maria Dahvana Headley

People should not confuse opinions and rules with egocentric interests.

~ Duop Chak Wuol

God bless the lawn mower, he thought. Who was the fool who made January first New Year’s Day? No, they should set a man to watch the grasses across a million Illinois, Ohio, and Iowa lawns, and on that morning when it was long enough for cutting, instead of ratchets and horns and yelling, there should be a great swelling symphony of lawn mowers reaping fresh grass upon the prairie lands. Instead of confetti and serpentine, people should throw grass spray at each other on the one day each year that really represents Beginning!

~ Ray Bradbury

I existed from all eternity and, behold, I am here; and I shall exist till the end of time, for my being has no end.

~ Kahlil Gibran

Even a cockroach can be legendary by being killed by a legend.

~ Munia Khan

If you're going to buy a castle, make sure you get on the property extension ladder.

~ Benny Bellamacina

What remains? Our children? Homer touched the flame of the candle with his fingers. The answer wasn’t easy to find for him,Achmed’s words still hurt him. He himself had been damned to be without children, unable for this kindof immortality, so he couldn’t do anything but choose another path to immortatlity. Again he reached for his pen. They can look like us. In their reflection we mirror ourselves in a mysterious way. United withthose we had loved. In their gestures, in their mimics we happily find ourselves or with sorrow. Friends confirm that our sons and daughters are just like us. Maybe that gives us a certainextension of ourselves when we are no more. We ourselves weren’t the first. We have been made from countless copies that have beenbefore us, just another chimera, always half from our fathers and mothers who are again the half oftheir parents. So is there nothing unique in us but are we just an endless mixture of small mosaic parts that never endingly exist in us? Have we been formed out of millions of small parts to a completepicture that has no own worth and has to fall into its parts again? Does it even matter to be happy if we found ourselves in our children, a certain line that hasbeen traveling through our bodies for millions of years? What remains of me?

~ Dmitry Glukhovsky

The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.

~ Mila Kundera

The sky was almost black and then it started hailing. It was so beautiful and scary, I wondered about the science of storms and how sometimes it seemed that a storm wanted to break the world and how the world refused to break.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

The same way a compact disk isn't responsible for what's recorded on it, that's how we are. You're about as free to act as a programmed computer. You're about as one-of-a-kind as a dollar bill

~ Chuck Palahniuk

This Self is never born, nor does It die. It did not spring from anything, nor did anything spring from It. This Ancient One is unborn, eternal, everlasting. It is not slain even though the body is slain.

~ The Upanishads

Be not afraid life with all its despair, pain and unhappiness is just a crucible wherein your brighter dreams are conceived, shaped and born

~ Rassool Jibraeel Snyman

At the railroad station he noted that he still had thirty minutes. He quickly recalled that in a cafe on the Calle Brazil (a few dozen feet from Yrigoyen's house) there was an enormous cat which allowed itself to be caressed as if it were a disdainful divinity. He entered the cafe. There was the cat, asleep. He ordered a cup of coffee, slowly stirred the sugar, sipped it (this pleasure had been denied him in the clinic), and thought, as he smoothed the cat's black coat, that this contact was an illusion and that the two beings, man and cat, were as good as separated by a glass, for man lives in time, in succession, while the magical animal lives in the present, in the eternity of the instant.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

For there is a general desire to be endlessly remembered and endlessly repeatable.

~ Vilém Flusser

...something important is lost if this man has been forced to deny his own nature.

~ Veronica Roth

I’ve always been driven, unfortunately not always in the right direction.

~ Benny Bellamacina

I must have missed the fine print disclaimer in my school textbooks while learning about the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution. It must have read: Warning – by learning this material it will make you a future enemy of the state.

~ Libertasintel

Conscience is the most sacred of all property in which our contemporary government of criminals aspires to plunder from our compatriots by the means of unconstitutional surveillance.

~ Libertasintel

Alternately in our lives come black and white.Nothing is visible through the silent dark hole:no light, no life, no meandering respitein the tunnel of death, journeys the eternal soul.

~ Taranum

The moon shines in my body, but my blind eyes cannot see it:The moon is within me, and so is the sun.The unstruck drum of Eternity is sounded within me; but my deaf ears cannot hear it.So long as man clamors for the I and the Mine, his works are as naught:When all love of the I and the Mine is dead, then the work of the Lord is done.For work has no other aim than the getting of knowledge:When that comes, then work is put away.The flower blooms for the fruit: when the fruit comes, the flower withers.The musk is in the deer, but is seeks it not within itself: it wanders in quest of grass.

~ Kabir

It is better to make an irrational noise in a bush than in a desert.

~ Duop Chak Wuol

Shukhov stared at the ceiling and said nothing. He no longer knew whether he wanted to be free or not...it had gradually dawned on him that people like himself were not allowed to go home but were packed off into exile. And there was no knowing where the living was easier – here or there. The one thing he might want to ask God for was to let him go home. But they wouldn't let him go home.

~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The secret is...good and evil are a myth. There is only the selfish, selfless, and those in between.

~ Belart Wright

I am doubtful myself about the undertaking. Part of the attraction of the L.R. is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed. Also many of the older legends are purely 'mythological', and nearly all are grim and tragic: a long account of the disasters that destroyed the beauty of the Ancient World, from the darkening of Valinor to the Downfall of Numenor and the flight of Elendil.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

You cannot create the life you need unless you pass through the death of the life you no longer want … it's just not possible. Deconstruction always comes before reconstruction.

~ Alan Forrest Smith

I had everything summed up in a nutshell unfortunately I lost the nut.

~ Benny Bellamacina

If you knew in advance that something momentous and terrible would happen you’d make an effort to imprint it all in your mind, wouldn’t you, every detail. But of course you don’t know. And perhaps that’s just as well.

~ Kathy Shuker

Cheap things are real. Cheap things are accessible. Cheap things are made for us because we don’t have any money, and even though we’d like to think we’ll have it someday, we know we don’t now.

~ Nate Ragolia

We are, now, just as valuable, intelligent, and real as Eliot or any of his contemporaries. Our ideas and experiences are just as sound and true. Our passion to save our world from what we see it becoming is just as authentic. We are always the Lost Generation, but with different accoutrements.

~ Nate Ragolia

Doing something once can be addicting. Doing it twice is admitting it.

~ Paul Morabito

The mentality of who is your uncle—an ethnocentric way of thinking, is one of the leading causes of South Sudan’s internal conflicts.

~ Duop Chak Wuol