Famous Quotes

To sum it all up, the [Ayn] Rand belief system looks like this:1. Facts are facts: things can be absolutely right or absolutely wrong, as determined by reason.2. According to my reasoning, I am absolutely right.3. Charity is immoral.4. Pay for your own fucking schools.

~ Matt Taibbi

Observe the movements of the stars as if you were running their courses with them, and let your mind constantly dwell on the changes of the elements into each other. Such imaginings wash away the filth of life on the ground.

~ Marcus Aurelius

See the moon? It hates us.

~ Donald Barthelme

Theology, philosophy, metaphysics, and quantum physics are merely ways for God to have his smart people believe in him

~ Jeremy Aldana

Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.

~ Peter Singer

Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

In the liquid amber within the ivory porcelain, the initiated may touch the sweet reticence of Confucius, the piquancy of Laotse, and the ethereal aroma of Sakyamuni himself.

~ Kakuzō Okakura

A scientist may not be sure of the answer, but he's often sure he can find one. And that's a condition which is clearly not enjoyed by philosophy.

~ B.f. Skinner

I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object.

~ Henry Miller

You cannot be buried in obscurity: you are exposed upon a grand theater to the view of the world. If your actions are upright and benevolent, be assured they will augment your power and happiness.

~ Cyrus The Great

Civilization is only possible for deeply unpleasant animals. It is only an ape that can be truly civilized.

~ Mark Rowlands

In my heart's most secret place,I pity them as angels do.

~ Sara Teasdale

Action is the activity of the rational soul, which abhors irrationality and must combat it or be corrupted by it. When it sees the irrationality of others, it must seek to correct it, and can do this either by teaching or engaging in public affairs itself, correcting through its practice. And the purpose of action is to enable philosophy to continue, for if men are reduced to the material alone, they become no more than beasts.

~ Iain Pears

It is suicide to be abroad. But what it is to be at home, ... what it is to be at home? A lingering dissolution.

~ Samuel Beckett

Words are made for a certain exactness of thought, as tears are for a certain degree of pain. What is least distinct cannot be named; what is clearest is unutterable.

~ René Daumal

Islam deals not only with what man must and must not do, but also with what he needs to know. In other words, Islam is both a way of acting and doing things and a way of knowing.

~ Osman Bakar

Laughter is the antidote to existential pain

~ S. Spencer Baker

In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg.Shall I swallow cave-phantoms?

~ Samuel Beckett

Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoretically they are very confused, and one easily makes the obscurest assumptions in this science without realizing, until challenged, what internal difficulties they involve.

~ William James

The best of humanity's recorded history is a creative balance between horrors endured and victories achieved, and so it was during the Harlem Renaissance.

~ Aberjhani

To the untutored sage, the concentration of population was the prolific mother of all evils, moral no less than physical. He argued that food is good, while surfeit kills; that love is good, but lust destroys; and not less dreaded than the pestilence following upon crowded and unsanitary dwellings was the loss of spiritual power inseparable from too close contact with one's fellow-men.

~ Charles Alexander Eastman

Ideas and philosophies have a shelf-life. They must be kept fresh and renewed or they will spoil. If left unattended, the same ideas and philosophies that once nourished you and helped you grow can poison you and make you sick. Become aware of new ideas that can refresh your way of life and be open to the fact that your old ideas and philosophies can work for you for some time, but when the shelf-life has passed, those ideas and philosophies could also harm you.

~ Steve Maraboli

Quando ouvimos os sinos, ouvimos aquilo que já trazemos em nós mesmos como modelo. Sou da opinião que não se deverá desprezar aquele que olhar atentamente para as manchas da parede, para os carvões sobre a grelha, para as nuvens, ou para a correnteza da água, descobrindo, assim, coisas maravilhosas. O génio do pintor há-de se apossar de todas essas coisas para criar composições diversas: luta de homens e de animais, paisagens, monstros, demónios e outras coisas fantásticas. Tudo, enfim, servirá para engrandecer o artista.

~ Leonardo Da Vinci

[T]he concern of man is not his future but his present, not the world but his soul. We must be just, we must strive, we must engage ourselves with the business of the world for our own sake, because through that, and through contemplation in equal measure, our soul is purified and brought closer to the divine. ... Thought and deed conjoined are crucial. ... The attempt must be made; the outcome is irrelevant. Right action is a pale material reflection of the divine, but reflection it is, nonetheless. Define your goal and exert reason to accomplish it by virtuous action; successs or failure is secondary.

~ Iain Pears

Marriage can be made to work if both the partners can see beyond themselves and understand the limitations,needs and abilities of the other person and are willing to embrace the positive and negative aspects of each other in their understanding.But it never happens that way. We expect others to understand and comply with us while we fail to do the same.Thus marriage loses all it's sheen by the time the couple reaches middle age.

~ Chitralekha Paul

The line between him and the enemy had simultaneously blurred and solidified. Somehow, while perhaps it shouldn't have, this thought provided a strange sense of peace.

~ Kristina Mcmorris

This primary question of life organization is immensely important. If making money is the main goal, a person can often forget what his or her true interests are or how he or she wants to deserve recognition from others. It is much more difficult to add on other values to a life that started out with just making money in mind than it is to make some personally interesting endeavor financially possible or even profitable.

~ Pekka Himanen

If you think fate is fickle, try tempting it

~ S. Spencer Baker

Man is not born to solve the problem of the universe, but to find out what he has to do; and to restrain himself within the limits of his comprehension.

~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Every country has the government it deserves.

~ Joseph De Maistre

No one species shall make the life of the world its own.' … That's one expression of the law. Here's another: 'The world was not made for any one species.

~ Daniel Quinn

Communism is the final logic of the dehumanization of man.

~ Fulton J. Sheen

Time (again, Time) like the soul, wears many faces, many bodies and climates and attitudes. The past is one face, the present a second and the future yet another.

~ Aberjhani

A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling effect of ephemerality. All knowledge is transient linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes, whereas wisdom, true wisdom is eternal immutable. To be philosophical one must love wisdom for its own sake, accept its permanent validity and yet its perpetual irrelevance. It is the fate of the wise to understand the process of history and yet never to shape it.

~ Shashi Tharoor

By the time we began to understand enough about what the world to ask the right questions, our visit is over, and someone else is visiting, asking the same questions.

~ D.k. Levick

Faith is not belief in spite of evidence but a life in scorn of the consequences.

~ Clarence Jordan

If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert

~ Peter Watts

The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.

~ Jonathan Haidt

This law … defines the limits of competition in the community of life. You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war.

~ Daniel Quinn

[People] ask themselves, what is suitable for my position? What is usually done by persons of my station and percuniary circumstances? Or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstances superior to mine? I do not mean that they choose what is customary in preference to what suits their own inclinations. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things that are commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature they have no nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved: they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own.

~ John Stuart Mill