Hi everyone. These are some quotes that i've collected over the years. I realize that each of you will disagree with some of them, but perhaps others will prove insightful for you. ------- "When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall. Think of it... *always*." - Mohandas Gandhi "It's better to learn wisdom late than never to learn it at all." - Anne Bradstreet "Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little coarse, and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice. Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble." - Ralph Waldo Emerson "Not all who wander are lost." - J.R.R. Tolkien "Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding." - Albert Einstein "Patience will achieve more than force." - Edmund Burke "Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will be powerless to vex your mind." - Leonardo da Vinci "Should you shield the valleys from the windstorms, you would never see the beauty of their canyons." - Elisabeth Kubler-Ross "Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." - T. S. Eliot "The truth knocks on the door and you say, 'Go away, I'm looking for the truth,' and so it goes away. Puzzling..." - Robert Pirsig "Many people suffer with their thoughts, not knowing that revealing them on paper, continuously over a two hour period, removes the stinging bitterness which they are tightly wrapped within." - Asmos "Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness." - Chuang-tzu "Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful." - Albert Schweitzer "... the purpose of your life, and each life, is in its being. That being may include certain actions, but the acts themselves are only important in that they spring out of the essence of your life, *which simply by being* is bound to fulfill its purposes." - Seth "Whatever it is, if it doesn't make you happy, walk away, give it away to someone else who wants it. Let it be THEIR next dream; let it flee from you. You're emptying out your limitations when you do that. Then you have ROOM to grow, to allow magnificent things to fill the vacuum of those seemingly empty places. When you hold onto yesterday, when you hold onto dead and dying adventures, you have no room in your box for greatness." - Unknown "Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages." - Thomas Edison "As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy." -- Christopher Dawson "The thinking man must oppose all cruelties no matter how deeply rooted in tradition or surrounded by a halo." - Albert Schweitzer "I would daily throw out crumbs for the sparrows in the neighborhood. I noticed that one sparrow was injured, so that it had difficulty getting about. But I was interested to discover that the other sparrows, apparently by mutual agreement, would leave the crumbs which lay nearest their crippled comrade, so that he could get his share, undisturbed." - Albert Schweitzer "People who let their dogs and cats have litters in order to show their children the 'miracle of birth' should come witness the 'miracle of death' performed in the back rooms of animal shelters all over the country." - Phyllis Wright, Humane Society "It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt." - Mark Twain "The tongue weighs practically nothing, but so few people can hold it." - Unknown "If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut." - Albert Einstein "To be yourself, in a world that tries, night and day, to make you just like everybody else - is to fight the greatest battle there ever is to fight, and never stop fighting..." - e.e. cummings "If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome." - Anne Bradstreet "Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of their heart, and that depends upon how much they have polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more - more unseen forms become manifest to them." - Rumi "A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day." - Emily Dickinson "People living deeply have no fear of death." - Anais Nin "Laughter is a tranquillizer with no side effects." - Arnold Glasgow "I will work my own way, according to the light that is in me." - Lydia Maria Child "The strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that many people actually worship them." - P.D. Ouspensky "The best mind-altering drug is truth." - Lily Tomlin "On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow." - Friedrich Nietzsche "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how." - Friedrich Nietzsche "Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise: seek what they sought." - Basho "Whenever you have truth it must be given with love, or the message and the messenger will be rejected." - Gandhi "If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility." - Longfellow "Adversity causes some men to break; others to break records." - William A. Ward "Our own life is the instrument with which we experiment with truth." - Thich Nhat Hanh "I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity." - Gilda Radner "Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Louis Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein." - Unknown "Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be." - Abraham Lincoln "The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth." - Niels Bohr "There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction." - Salvador Dali "The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible, and achieve it, generation after generation." - Pearl S. Buck "He that never changes his opinions, never corrects his mistakes, will never be wiser on the morrow than he is today." - Tryon Edwards "Do what you can, with what you have, with where you are." - Theodore Roosevelt "Never let a problem to be solved become more important than a person to be loved." - Barbara Johnson "It is not neccessary to change. Survival is not mandatory." - W. Edwards Deming "The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common." - Ralph Waldo Emerson "We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak." - Epictetus "Look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time. Then your time on earth will be filled with glory." - Betty Smith "To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance." - Oscar Wilde "Don't let school interfere with your education." - Mark Twain "The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education." - Albert Einstein "Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts." - Henry Adams "Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire." - William Yeats "Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school." - 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 "What is a weed? A weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered." - Ralph Waldo Emerson "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatsoever that it is not entirely absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible." - Bertrand Russell "I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." - Martin Luther King, Jr. "The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud." - Coco Chanel "Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great." - Mark Twain "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." - Henry David Thoreau "Some trees grow very tall and straight and large in the forest close to each other, but some must stand by themselves or they won't grow at all." - Oliver Wendell Holmes "What a lovely surprise to finally discover how unlonely being alone can be." - Ellen Burnstyn "...solitude is such a potential thing. We hear voices in solitude, we never hear in the hurry and turmoil of life; we receive counsels and comforts, we get under no other condition..." - Amelia Barr "Not all people are called to be hermits, but all people need enough silence and solitude in their lives to enable the deep inner voice of their own true self to be heard at least occasionally." - Thomas Merton "Leaders are like eagles - they don't flock, you find them one at a time." - Unknown "'One can't believe impossible things.' said Alice. 'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'" - Lewis Carroll "Feeling crazy may be a mark of sanity in my situation." - Anne Wilson Schaef "Dying is a wild night and a new road." - Emily Dickinson "Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live." - Ruth Rendell "You can preach a better sermon with your life than with your lips." - Goldsmith "If you want to make an enemy, try to change someone." - Robert Anthony "The true secret of giving advice is, after you have honestly given it, to be perfectly indifferent whether it is taken or not and never persist in trying to set people right." - Hannah Whitall Smith "If you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work." - Kahlil Gibran "The thing you set your mind on is the thing you ultimately become." - Nathaniel Hawthorne "There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion." - Carl G. Jung "Mysticism occurs whenever a human being sees the separation between the natural and the supernatural, the temporal and the eternal, as overcome." - Albert Schweitzer "We are all cells in the same body of humanity." - Peace Pilgrim "If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other." - Mother Teresa "He who experiences the unity of life sees his own Self in all beings, and all beings in his own Self, and looks on everything with an impartial eye." - Bhagavad Gita "He is enlightened, liberated, who sees all things as One - Unseparated." - Angelus Silesius "Every experience that comes to you is an opportunity to birth your Divinity." - Richard Levy "Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." - Martin Luther King Jr. "If you stand straight do not fear a crooked shadow." - Chinese Proverb "'There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.' said Sherlock Holmes." - Arthur Conan Doyle "If a person's mind becomes pure, their surroundings will also become pure." - Buddha "To see your drama clearly is to be liberated from it." - Ken Keyes, Jr "Consciously or unconciously, every one of us does render some service or other. If we cultivate the habit of doing this service deliberately, our desire for service will steadily grow stronger and we will make not only our own happiness, but that of the world at large." - Gandhi "Only that in you which is me can hear what I'm saying." - Baba Ram Dass "When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this... you haven't." - Unknown "In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond; And like seeds dreaming beneath the snow - your heart dreams of spring. Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity." - Kahlil Gibran "At the center of your being you have the answer; You know who you are and you know what you want." - Lao-tzu "Youth is a quality, not a matter of circumstances." - Frank Lloyd Wright "Paradise is always where love dwells." - Richter "Integrity has no need of rules." - Albert Camus "When it's cold, water freezes into ice; when it's warm, ice melts into water. Similarly, when you are confused, essence freezes into mind; when you are enlightened, mind melts into essence." - Muso Kokushi "The more talking and thinking, the farther from the Truth." - Seng-Ts'an "It is always there, right where you are; if you seek it, obviously you do not see it." - Muso Kokushi "In an infinite cosmos, all dreams are true." - Unknown "As I lived up to the highest light I had, higher and higher light came to me." - Peace Pilgrim "If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us." - Hermann Hesse "The water a cow laps turns into milk; the water a snake licks changes into poison." - Zen saying "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 "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new." - Albert Einstein "...one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought." - Albert Einstein "To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms, this knowledge, this feeling, is at the centre of true religiousness." - Albert Einstein "The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are there." - Yasutani Roshi "If the mind be fixed on the acquirement of any object, that object will be attained." - Buddha "Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm." - Disraeli "When the mind is silent, beyond weakness or non-concentration, then it can enter into a world which is far beyond the mind: the highest End." - Upanishads
"Don't let ethics get in the way of doing what is right" - Unknown "I certainly can't see any sensible position to assume aside from that of complete scepticism tempered by a leaning toward that which existing evidence makes most probable. All I say is that I think it is damned unlikely that anything like a central cosmic will, a spirit world , or an eternal survival of personality exist. They are the most preposterous and unjustified of all the guesses which can be made about the universe, and I am not enough of a hair-splitter to pretend that I don't regard them as arrant and negligble moonshine. In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of rational evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist. The chance's of theism's truth being to my mind so microscopically small, I would be a pedant and a hypocrite to call myself anything else." "We all know that any emotional bias -- irrespective of truth or falsity -- can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely without evidential value.... If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honourable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction." H.P. Lovecraft "Whatever women do, they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult." Charlotte Whitton "Fuck conformity" Me "Reach me down my Tycho Brahe, I would know him when we meet, When I share my later science, sitting humbly at his feet; He may know the law of all things, yet be ignorant of how We are working to completion, working on from then to now. Pray remember that I leave you all my theory complete, Lacking only certain data for your adding, as is meet, And remember men will scorn it, 'tis original and true, And the obliquy of newness may fall bitterly on you" Sarah Williams "We also know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether delusion is not more consoling." Henri Poincare "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn" H.P.Lovecraft Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! "It is morally as bad not to care whether as thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as not to care where you get your money, as long as you have it" Edmund Teale (?) "Sanity is not statistical" George Orwell
"Tenderness and kindness are not signs of weakness but signs of strength." - Khalil Gibran "Faith is an oasis in the heart which can never be reached by the caravan of thinking." - also Khalil Gibran "Humanity is a river of light running from extremity to eternity." - Khalil Gibran too "I sought solitude because I never obtained kindness from a human unless I paid the full price with my heart." - again, Khalil Gibran
"All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force... We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter." Max Planck Nobel Prize-winning father of quantum theory
Good threads Likan, I have a thread on insightful quotes too (eventhough many people posted some... other quotes there)... I always enjoy your threads! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! You seem very wise. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Love, Nelson
Two government philosophies: "If it ain't broken, fix it 'til is is!" -a bumper sticker "Find the hardest way to do something, and make it standard procedure." -me
"If fate closes the door, climb in through the window." - Anonymous "I won't say our school was tough, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like: What I'm going to be if I grow up." - Lenny Bruce
