My Favorite Quotes

[Table of Primary Quote Topics]
Use "Command/Control" + "F" to initiate find/search.  Type "//" and one of the following topical keywords:

Reality
Knowledge & Wisdom
Truth
Music
Life
Love
Human Nature
Society
War


//Reality//
"What is real? How do you define 'real'? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain." — 'Morpheus' ["The Matrix"]

"I have a feeling Virtual Reality will further expose the conceit that 'reality' is a fact. It will provide another reminder of the seamless continuity between the world outside and the world within, delivering another major hit to the old fraud of objectivity. 'Real,' as Kevin Kelly put it, 'is going to be one of the most relative words we'll have.'" — John Perry Barlow

"Spoon boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Spoon boy: There is no spoon.
Neo: There is no spoon?
Spoon boy: Then you'll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself." — ["The Matrix"]

"Matter acts, but there are no actors behind the actions; the verbs are verbing all by themselves without a need to introduce nouns. Actions act upon other actions. Properties are all of there is. Indeed: there are no things." — David Mermin

"Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was, in nature, no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude." — Friedrich Nietzsche [as quoted in The Puzzle Instinct]

"Things derive their being and nature by mutual dependence and are nothing in themselves."
— Nagarjuna

"Nothing ever exists entirely alone; everything is in relation to everything else." — Buddha

"True emptiness in any location in space-time is impossible, for relational continuity demands that there is either total existence OR total nonexistence throughout the 'universe'.  A 'space of nonexistence' is, by definition, without form, and therefore cannot geometrically coincide with/within an 'existent space' characterized by infinitely-interconnected structure." — WiseFromWithin

"If we all didn't assuredly simultaneously exist as much in the past and the future as the present, we wouldn't exist in the first place." — WiseFromWithin

"In each atom of the realms of the universe, There exist vast oceans of world systems." —  [The Great Flower Ornament (An Ancient Buddhist Scripture)]

"Not only our experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we may have had, and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, though it is past; we have brought it into being." — Viktor E. Frankl [Man's Search for Meaning]

"There is infinite potential in a space of silence/darkness.  (Such is the foundation of all dreams, fantasy, and meditations.)  Whenever illuminated, all its potentiality is replaced by a specific certainty." — WiseFromWithin

"Everything is a remix." — Kirby Ferguson

"Oracle: I'd ask you to sit down, but, you're not going to anyway. And don't worry about the vase.
Neo: What vase?
[Neo turns to look for a vase, and as he does, he knocks over a vase of flowers, which shatters on the floor]
Oracle: That vase.
Neo: I'm sorry...
Oracle: I said don't worry about it. I'll get one of my kids to fix it.
Neo: How did you know?
Oracle: Ohh, what's really going to bake your noodle later on is, would you still have broken it if I hadn't said anything?" — ["The Matrix"]

"Neo: But if you already know, how can I make a choice?
The Oracle: Because you didn't come here to make the choice, you've already made it. You're here to try to understand why you made it. I thought you'd have figured that out by now." — ["The Matrix Reloaded"]

"The arc of complexity and open-ended creation in the last 4 billion years is nothing compared to what lies ahead." — Kevin Kelly

"Just as the biosphere stands above the world of nonliving matter, so in 'abstract kingdom' rises above the biosphere. The denizens of this kingdom? Ideas." — James Gleick


//Knowledge & Wisdom//
"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them." — Galileo

"Wisdom begins in wonder." — Socrates
Variant: "Wonder is the beginning of wisdom." — Socrates
"No wonder many adults are 'smart' but deeply unwise; wonder has been deadened in them." — WiseFromWithin

"Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere." — Albert Einstein.

"A trip into the unknown requires improvisation. Machines can't improvise well because you can't program a fear of death. The survival instinct is our single greatest source of inspiration." ― 'Dr. Mann' ["Interstellar"]

"No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that created it. We need to see the world anew." — Albert Einstein

“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” ― Thomas A. Edison

"For this, indeed, is the true source of our ignorance – the fact that our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite." — Karl Popper

"With money you can't buy wisdom, you can't buy inner peace. Wisdom and inner peace must be created by yourself." — Dalai Lama

"In reality, most care little about 'the truth' and more about what they can safely go on believing. A corrupted, fragile 'peace of mind' lies in the keeping of secrets." — WiseFromWithin

"People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others." — Blaise Pascal

"The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge." — Elbert Hubbard

"A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition." — José Bergamín

"Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level." — Ernest Becker

"An idea is like a virus, resilient, highly contagious. The smallest seed of an idea can grow. It can grow to define or destroy you." — 'Cobb' ["Inception"]

"Man's mind, stretched by a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions." — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

"Here juxtaposition is revealed as the basic formal operation of synchronicity, as two apparently unrelated events or elements suddenly form a secret link that strikes, in the mind of the perceiver, an evanescent lightning bolt of meaning." — Erik Davis


//Truth//
"All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them." — Galileo

"There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth: not going all the way, and not starting." — Buddha

"The truth is incontrovertible; malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is." — Winston Churchill

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." — George Orwell

"Truth is by nature self-evident. As soon as you remove the cobwebs of ignorance that surround it, it shines clear. "— Gandhi

"The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic." — John F. Kennedy

"Respect for the Truth is the necessary foundation for a simple and empowering human morality (instead of our confusing and confining one)." — WiseFromWithin

"People can't change the truth, but the truth can change people." — [Unknown]

"If you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup." — [Turkish Proverb]

"It takes two to speak truth — one to speak, and another to hear." — Henry D. Thoreau

"If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things." — Descartes

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened." — Winston Churchill

"I am a firm believer that the naked truth looks 100 times better than the best dressed lie." — Royce da 5'9" ["Legendary"]

"We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth." — Picasso

"The Artist takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it, he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art." — Ernest Becker


//Music//
"Artists are uniquely placed to... creatively participate in the larger cultural process of re-engineering subjectivity, of pushing the envelop of experience." — Erik Davis

"Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent." — Victor Hugo

"...music is the most profound, magical form of communication there is." — Lesley Garrett

"The true beauty of music is that it connects people. It carries a message, and we, the musicians, are the messengers." — Roy Ayers

"You remind me of a Papercut; I just need to Bleed It Out until i'm Numb so there will be No More Sorrow because i'm Waiting For The End while I'm Lost In The Echo. I just want to Runaway from What I've Done and Leave Out All The Rest because it's Easier To Run on the Roads Untraveled to find Somewhere I Belong because I'm slowly Lying From You and it's Pushing Me Away from The Little Things That Give You Away. I feel like I'm One Step Closer from the New Divide between us so Don't Stay or else I might Faint. While i'm gone i'll try and find A Place For My Head even though it's In Pieces. And even though you're Guilty All The Same you think you have the highest Points Of Authority. Standing here in this Castle Of Glass I remember how you took everything From the Inside of me and I remembered how I'd Given Up. I have much hate for you; Until It's Gone I will be Breaking The Habit of missing you because In The End i'm just going to take our friendship and Burn It Down until there's nothing left but a Shadow Of The Day." — Alyssa Luna (using Linkin Park song titles to express her loss as a comment on the Linkin Park 'Castle of Glass' YouTube video)

"Beauty is a dynamic event that occurs between you and something else. Beauty is thus an altered state of consciousness, an extraordinary moment of poetry in grace." — [Imaginary Foundation]

"Playing music is the brain’s equivalent of a full-body workout… Playing an instrument engages practically every area of the brain at once - especially the visual, auditory, and motor cortices. And, as in any other workout, disciplined, structured practice in playing music strengthens those brain functions, allowing us to apply that strength to other activities… Playing music has been found to increase the volume and activity in the brain’s corpus callosum - the bridge between the two hemispheres - allowing messages to get across the brain faster and through more diverse routes. This may allow musicians to solve problems more effectively and creatively, in both academic and social settings.
Because making music also involves crafting and understanding its emotional content and message, musicians also have higher levels of executive function - a category of interlinked tasks that includes planning, strategizing, and attention to detail, and requires simultaneous analysis of both cognitive and emotional aspects.
This ability also has an impact on how our memory systems work. And, indeed, musicians exhibit enhanced memory functions - creating, storing, and retrieving memories more quickly and efficiently. Studies have found that musicians appear to use their highly connected brains to give each memory multiple tags, such as a conceptual tag, an emotional tag, an audio tag, and a contextual tag - like a good internet search engine." — [Short animation from TED-Ed, written by Anita Collins and animated by Sharon Colman Graham]

"Music is a safe kind of high." — Jimi Hendrix

"One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain." — Bob Marley

"Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness." — Maya Angelou

"I didn't have nothin' going for me... school, home... until I found something I loved, which was music, and that changed everything." — 'Eminem' (Marshall Bruce Mathers III)

"[When] you’re right in the work, you lose your sense of time, you’re completely enraptured, you’re completely caught up in what you’re doing, and you’re sort of swayed by the possibilities you see in this work. If that becomes too powerful, then you get up, because the excitement is too great. You can’t continue to work or continue to see the end of the work because you’re jumping ahead of yourself all the time. The idea is to be so... so saturated with it that there’s no future or past, it’s just an extended present in which you’re, uh, making meaning. And dismantling meaning, and remaking it. Without undue regard for the words you’re using. It’s meaning carried to a high order. It’s not just essential communication, daily communication; it’s a total communication. When you’re working on something and you’re working well, you have the feeling that there’s no other way of saying what you’re saying." — Mark Strand

"I hope people half my age and twice my age will listen to my music - I want it to live forever and for my audience to feel like they have a friend in my music. Music is a spirit. It heals. It's an amazing thing to be loved and appreciated, and sometimes, music has not just been my best friend, it's been my only friend." — Hunter Hayes

"I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me - like food or water." — Ray Charles

"If people take anything from my music, it should be motivation to know that anything is possible as long as you keep working at it and don't back down." — 'Eminem' (Marshall Bruce Mathers III)

"If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music." — Thomas Carlyle

"Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend." — Ludwig van Beethoven

"This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before." — Leonard Bernstein

"About myself I have no great illusions. I know what I am. I know what I'm good at. I know what I ain't. I'm always hoping to surprise myself. But I do have a love of music and I do love to communicate it, and that's the best I can do, really. And I can raise a good family, too." — Keith Richards

"My music will go on forever. Maybe it's a fool say that, but when me know facts me can say facts. My music will go on forever." — Bob Marley

"The spiral in a snail's shell is the same mathematically as the spiral in the Milky Way galaxy, and it's also the same mathematically as the spirals in our DNA. It's the same ratio that you'll find in very basic music that transcends cultures all over the world." — Joseph Gordon-Levitt


//Life//
"Variety's the very spice of life,
That gives it all its flavour." — William Cowper [The Timepiece, The Task II, 1785, lines 606–7]

"We’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention. In some ways, this is getting far afield. I mean, we are – as far as we know – the only part of the universe that’s self-conscious. We could even be the universe’s form of consciousness. We might have come along so that the universe could look at itself. I don’t know that, but we’re made of the same stuff that stars are made of, or that floats around in space. But we’re combined in such a way that we can describe what it’s like to be alive, to be witnesses."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"The unexamined life is not worth living." — Socrates

"You cannot Know the Light without Recognizing the Dark." — WiseFromWithin

"To philosophize with the real wisdom of the serpent and the real harmlessness of the dove it is not necessary to exhaust one’s brain upon riddles which are likely enough eternally insoluble. What is necessary, is to experiment with ordinary life; to adjust one’s appreciative and analytical powers to all the natural human sensations which are evoked by the recurrences of the seasons, by birth and death, by good and evil, by all those little diurnal happenings which make up our life upon earth… To isolate them, as they form and re-form in the calm-flowing stream of the deeper reality, to contemplate them, to assimilate them, as they pass, this is the true philosophical art.
[...]
A cultured man is... one for whom the diurnal magic-mirror, whether its fleeting images catch the sun or sink into shadow, offers a vision of the world that becomes steadily more and more his own. To philosophize is not to read philosophy; it is to feel philosophy… None can call himself a philosopher whose own days are not made more intense and dramatic by his philosophizing."
— John Cowper Powys

"Any path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you… Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and your self alone, one question… Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use." — Carlos Castaneda [The Teachings of Don Juan]

"One must balance meditation/introspection with harmonious outward conduct. Action is chaos without wisdom; wisdom is useless without implementation." — WiseFromWithin

"We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life.... Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct." — Viktor E. Frankl [Man's Search for Meaning]

"All great things are simple, and many can be expressed in single words: Freedom, Justice, Honor, Duty, Mercy, Hope." — Winston Churchill

"The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge." — Bertrand Russell

"Achieving ever-greater harmony and happiness in life first requires an ever-greater degree of genuine wisdom about one's self and world." — WiseFromWithin

"Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor." — Sholom Aleichem

"A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life." — Charles Darwin

"If you wrestle with dreams, you have tarried with trifles.
If you contend with shadows, your life has been stolen.
If you move about as if asleep, time has slipped away from you.
If any of such is the case, you are a victim of your own folly." — [Adapted from Dune]

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow; learn as if you were to live forever." — Gandhi

"When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life." — Viktor E. Frankl [Man's Search for Meaning]

"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how." — Friedrich Nietzsche

"...everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. ...any man can... decide what shall become of him - mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity.... ...the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom - which cannot be taken away - that makes life meaningful and purposeful. ...there is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man's attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces. ...not only creativeness and enjoyment are meaningful. If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete." — Viktor E. Frankl [Man's Search for Meaning]

"Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it." — Lou Holtz

"The true nature of the Self can only be remembered in your life if you choose to #transcend the self-chosen fiction of an ego/personhood." — WiseFromWithin

"The two most important days in your life are the day you were born and the day you find out why." — Mark Twain

"Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself." — George Bernard Shaw

"'The Way' is knowing (confronting fully) your true Self, achieving inner-peace with your life's particular purpose/destiny/karma." — WiseFromWithin

"The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to." — Alain de Botton

"Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile." — Albert Einstein

"There is nothing more beautiful than someone who goes out of their way to make life beautiful for others." — Mandy Hale

"A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives." — Jackie Robinson

"Even a small act of compassion grants meaning and purpose to our lives." — Dalai Lama

"How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these." — George Washington Carver

“When humility enters the room, unity enters the atmosphere." — [Unknown]

10 Pieces Of Wisdom & Quotes From Native American Elders

10 Quotes From a Sioux Indian Chief That Will Make You Question Everything About Our Society

"Life is purposeful, death is optional, God is technological, and love is essential." — [Terasem Philosophy]


//Love//
"When you recognize that pain – and response to pain – is a universal thing, it helps explain so many things about others, just as it explains so much about yourself. It teaches you forbearance. It teaches you a moderation in your responses to other people's behavior. It teaches you a sort of understanding. It essentially tells you what everybody needs. You know what everybody needs? You want to put it in a single word?
Everybody needs to be understood.
And out of that comes every form of love.
If someone truly feels that you understand them, an awful lot of neurotic behavior just disappears – disappears on your part, disappears on their part. So if you're talking about what motivates this world to continue existing as a community, you've got to talk about love... And my argument is it comes out of your biology because on some level we understand all of this. We put it into religious forms. It's almost like an excuse to deny our biology. We put it into pithy, sententious aphorisms, but it's really coming out of our deepest physiological nature." — Dr. Sherwin Nuland (in an interview by Krista Tippett entitled 'The Biology of the Spirit')

"You have attachments. I'm not supposed to, but even without family, I can promise you that the yearning to be with other people is massively powerful. Our instincts, our emotions, are at the foundation of what makes us human. They're not to be taken lightly." — 'Dr. Mann' ["Interstellar"]

"There is a universal urge for intimacy, for trading subjectivities, in communication -- for telepathy. Our desire for it tells us about what we wish to be: truly intersubjective beings." — David Porush

"Who, being loved, is poor?" — Oscar Wilde

"A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge." —Thomas Carlyle

"Love is the cause of unity in all things." — Aristotle

"Evolution has yet to transcend that simple barrier. We can care deeply - selflessly - about those we know, but that empathy rarely extends beyond our line of sight." — 'Dr. Mann' ["Interstellar"]

"It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor." — Eric Hoffer

"Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within." — James A. Baldwin

"Giving laws, wanting improvements, making things easier, has all become wrong and evil. May each one seek out his own way, the way leads to mutual love in community. Men will come to see and feel the similarity and communality of their ways." — Carl Jung [The Red Book]

"Love is my gift to the world. How others treat me is their path... how I react is mine". — Dr. Wayne Dyer

"Brand: So listen to me when I say love isn't something that we invented. It's observable. Powerful. It has to mean something.
Cooper: Love has meaning, yes. Social utility, social bonding, child rearing.
Brand: You love people who died. Where's the social utility in that?
Cooper: None.
Brand: Maybe it means something more - something we can't yet understand. Maybe it's some evidence, some artifact of a higher dimension that we can't consciously perceive. I'm drawn across the universe to someone I haven't seen in a decade who I know is probably dead. Love is the one thing that we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can't understand it." — 'Interstellar'

"Love at first sight is always spoken in the past tense. The scene is perfectly adapted to this temporal phenomena: distinct, abrupt, framed, it is already in memory..." — Roland Barthes

"Love is the crowning grace of humanity, the holiest right of the soul, the golden link which binds us to duty and truth, the redeeming principle that chiefly reconciles the heart to life, and is prophetic of eternal good." — Petrarch

"...love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. ...The salvation of man is through love and in love." — Viktor E. Frankl [Man's Search for Meaning]

"Love is a force more formidable than any other. It is invisible - it cannot be seen or measured, yet it is powerful enough to transform you in a moment, and offer you more joy than any material possession could." — Barbara de Angelis

"Love is when the other person's happiness is more important than your own." — H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

"Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.'" — Erich Fromm


//Human Nature//
"How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it." — Adam Smith [The Theory Of Moral Sentiments, Part I, Section I, Chapter I, p. 9, para.1]

"I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul." — William Ernest Henley ["Invictus"]

"The wisest men follow their own direction." — Euripides

"The one who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The one who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been before." — Albert Einstein

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." — [Source Debated]

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit." — Aristotle

"Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well." — Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (in a letter to his son dated March 10, 1746)

"Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value." — Albert Einstein

"Do not go gentle into that good night; old age should burn and rave at close of day. Rage, rage against the dying of the light." — Dylan Thomas

"Better a risk-laden leap of faith than a certain, graceless fall into the pits of hell and madness we create for ourselves." — WiseFromWithin

"Let no feeling of discouragement prey upon you, and in the end you are sure to succeed." — Abraham Lincoln

"Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be." — Abraham Lincoln

"No one talks more passionately about his rights than he who in the depths of his soul doubts whether he has any. By enlisting passion on his side he wants to stifle his reason and its doubts: thus he will acquire a good conscience and with it success among his fellow men." — Friedrich Nietzsche [Human, All Too Human, I.597]

"What occurs in the world is that everyone who is born, is born, in some manner of speaking, a poet, the creator of something that did not exist in the world before, till they were born. It is entirely individual.
Man is not born to work, Man is born to create, to be that poet at random. And give to the world his own particular message, to realize the work that can be done and because he is unique, his work will be the only one of the kind in the world." — Agostinho da Silva

"To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift." — Steve Prefontaine

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat." — Theodore Roosevelt

"A person is a person only through other people. When we diminish others, we diminish ourselves. When we label, we dehumanize." — Dr. N.N. Tutu

"We've always defined ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible. And we count these moments. These moments when we dare to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make the unknown known. We count these moments as our proudest achievements. But we lost all that. Or perhaps we've just forgotten that we are still pioneers. And we've barely begun. And that our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us, because our destiny lies above us." — 'Cooper' ["Interstellar"]

"To deny our own impulses is to deny the very thing that makes us human." — 'Mouse' ["The Matrix"]

"Of all things, good sense is the most fairly distributed: everyone thinks he is so well supplied with it that even those who are the hardest to satisfy in every other respect never desire more of it than they already have." — Descartes

"'People', Geralt turned his head, 'like to invent monsters and monstrosities. Then they seem less monstrous themselves. When they get blind-drunk, cheat, steal, beat their wives, starve an old woman, when they kill a trapped fox with an axe or riddle the last existing unicorn with arrows, they like to think that the Bane entering cottages at daybreak is more monstrous than they are. They feel better then. They find it easier to live.'" — [The Last Wish]

"A man who can fool chiefs, and even gods, must still face the monsters he himself created." — [Maori Proverb (New Zealand)]

"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you..." — Friedrich Nietzsche [Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146]

"Thus the man who is responsive to artistic stimuli reacts to the reality of dreams as does the philosopher to the reality of existence; he observes closely, and he enjoys his observation: for it is out of these images that he interprets life, out of these processes that he trains himself for life. It is not only pleasant and agreeable images that he experiences with such universal understanding: the serious, the gloomy, the sad and the profound, the sudden restraints, the mockeries of chance, fearful expectations, in short the whole 'divine comedy' of life, the Inferno included, passes before him, not only as a shadow-play—for he too lives and suffers through these scenes—and yet also not without that fleeting sense of illusion; and perhaps many, like myself, can remember calling out to themselves in encouragement, amid the perils and terrors of the dream, and with success: 'It is a dream! I want to dream on!' Just as I have often been told of people who have been able to continue one and the same dream over three and more successive nights: facts which clearly show that our innermost being, our common foundation, experiences dreams with profound pleasure and joyful necessity." — Friedrich Nietzsche [The Birth of Tragedy, p.15]

"I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet." — 'Agent Smith' ["The Matrix"]

"…Descartes' famous sentence 'Cogito ergo sum' – 'I think, therefore I exist' – has led Westerners to equate their identity with their mind, instead of with their whole organism. … This inner fragmentation mirrors our view of the world 'outside' which is seen as a multitude of separate objects and events. The natural environment is treated as if it consisted of separate parts to be exploited by different interest groups. The fragmented view is further extended to society which is split into different nations, races, religions, and political groups. The belief that all these fragments – in ourselves, in our environment and in our society – are really separate can be seen as the essential reason for the present series of social, ecological, and cultural crises. It has alienated us from nature and from our fellow human beings. It has brought a grossly unjust distribution of natural resources creating economic and political disorder; an ever rising wave of violence, both spontaneous and institutionalized, and an ugly, polluted environment in which life has often become physically and mentally unhealthy." — Fritjof Capra [The Tao of Physics]

"To be a hero, you have to learn to be a deviant, because you're always going against the conformity of the group. Heroes are ordinary people whose social actions are extraordinary—who act.
The key to heroism is two things. A: you've got to act when other people are passive. B: you have to act socio-centrically, not egocentrically.
And I want to end with the story that some of you know, about Wesley Autrey, New York subway hero. Fifty-year-old African-American construction worker. He's standing on a subway in New York. A white guy falls on the tracks. The subway train is coming. There's 75 people there. You know what? They freeze. He's got a reason not to get involved. He's black, the guy's white, and he's got two little kids. Instead, he gives his kids to a stranger, jumps on the tracks, puts the guy between the tracks, lies on him, the subway goes over him. Wesley and the guy -- 20 and a half inches height. The train clearance is 21 inches. A half an inch would have taken his head off. And he said, 'I did what anyone could do,' no big deal to jump on the tracks. And the moral imperative is 'I did what everyone should do.'
And so one day, you will be in a new situation. Take path one, you're going to be a perpetrator of evil. ...Path two, you become guilty of the evil of passive inaction. Path three, you become a hero. The point is, are we ready to take the path to celebrating ordinary heroes, waiting for the right situation to come along to put heroic imagination into action? Because it may only happen once in your life, and when you pass it by, you'll always know, I could have been a hero and I let it pass me by." — Philip Zimbardo ["The Psychology of Evil" - TED2008]

"If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."
— [Exodus 34:14]

"Be the change that you wish to see in the world." — Mahatma Gandhi

"A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is a reality." — John Lennon


//Society//
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music." — Friedrich Nietzsche

"We need to give each other the space to grow, to be ourselves, to exercise our diversity. We need to give each other space so that we may both give and receive such beautiful things as ideas, openness, dignity, joy, healing, and inclusion." — Max de Pree

"The path towards social prosperity and harmony, which benefits us all in the end, must begin with a thorough, objective self-evaluation of the quality of one's own rational and moral reasoning and knowledge-base which forms one's established worldview, belief systems, and values." — WiseFromWithin

"Just as you grow into the world, the world grows into you. Not only do you occupy a certain place, but that place, in turn, occupies you..." — Costica Bradatan

"We humans have indeed always been adept at dovetailing our minds and skills to the shape of our current tools and aids. But when those tools and aids start dovetailing back - when our technologies actively, automatically, and continually tailor themselves to us, just as we do to them - then the line between tool and user becomes flimsy indeed." — Andy Clark

"What is so intriguing about this interplay between technology and the human imagination is that here we are dealing with the equation 'As I imagine, so I become' -- and this is the very essence of magic." — Nevill Drury

"Because we can imagine, we are free." — Sartre

"Our destiny is to become what we think, to have our thoughts become our bodies and our bodies become our thoughts." — Terence McKenna

"Limited in his nature, infinite in his desire, man is a fallen god who remembers heaven." — Alphonse de Lamartine

"Long ago man formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods. Whatever seemed unattainable to his desires – or forbidden to him – he attributed to these gods... Now he has himself approached very near to realizing this ideal, he has nearly become a god himself." — Sigmund Freud

"We are as gods and might as well get good at it." — Stewart Brand

"We design our world, while our world acts back on us and designs us." — Anne-Marie Willis

"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind." — George Orwell

"Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one." — Malcolm Forbes

"Unfortunately, we find systems of education today which have departed so far from the plain truth, that they now teach us to be proud of what we know and ashamed of ignorance. This is doubly corrupt. It is corrupt not only because pride is in itself a mortal sin, but also because to teach pride in knowledge is to put up an effective barrier against any advance upon what is already known, since it makes one ashamed to look beyond the bonds imposed by one's ignorance. To any person prepared to enter with respect into the realm of his great and universal ignorance, the secrets of being will eventually unfold, and they will do so in measure according to his freedom from natural and indoctrinated shame in his respect of their revelation. ...To arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behaviour of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is one needs to know. And yet those with the courage to tread this path to real discovery are not only offered practically no guidance on how to do so, they are actively discouraged and have to set about it in secret, pretending meanwhile to be diligently engaged in the frantic diversions and to conform with the deadening personal opinions which are being continually thrust upon them. In these circumstances, the discoveries that any person is able to undertake represent the places where, in the face of induced psychosis, he has by his own faltering and unaided efforts, returned to sanity. Painfully, and even dangerously, maybe. But nonetheless returned, however furtively." — George Spencer Brown [The Laws of Form, Appendix 1]

"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently." — Friedrich Nietzsche [The Dawn, Sec. 297]

"Until the lion can tell his own story, the tale will continue to glorify the hunter." — [African Proverb]

"What improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable." — Adam Smith [The Wealth Of Nations, Book I, Chapter VIII, p.96, para. 36]

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." — John F. Kennedy (1962)

"Democracy is in an imperfect way of steering between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny, with the least violence you can get away with. So I don't think it's a triumph, but it's the best option we have found." — Steven Pinker

"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." — Benjamin Franklin

"If [justice] is removed, the great, the immense fabric of human society... must in a moment crumble into atoms. — Adam Smith [The Theory Of Moral Sentiments, Part II, Section II, Chapter III, p. 86, para.4]

"Whoever told you this was a land of the free is your enemy!" — Rage Against the Machine

"This country's constitution was designed and ratified under secret debate, by 38-55 very well-educated white men, generally experienced politicians, who were themselves delegates appointed by state legislatures filled with similar demographics.  'We the People' is a hollow phrase when signed by such a delegation. It flies in the face of the facts, especially in a time of slavery and no political voice for anyone who wasn't an educated white man.  The true 'People', who have suffered ever more under government corruption, corporate clout, and the social decline attributable to the former two, deserve an opportunity to be the actual architects of their own future, and not have it hijacked by politicians pocketing corporate money and perks, voting on behalf of party instead of constituents, and establishing 'quid pro quo' relationships behind the scenes. I know the diverse, resourceful, information-saturated American People can do better than a 'Republic' established by affluent whites.  To endure and not 'perish from this earth', these great people across America must grasp hold of actual 'Democracy', in order to save the Union from the destructive forces of arrogance and greed left unchecked." — Matthew Lee Morgan

"Liberty lies in the hearts and minds of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it...." — [Unknown]

"To meet the challenges of this century, human beings will have to develop a greater sense of universal responsibility." — Dalai Lama

"It is in the shelter of each other that the people live." — [Irish Proverb]

"One rarely knows where to begin the search for meaning, though by necessity, we can only start where we are... It somehow has to do with sticking together as we try to make sense of chaos, and that seems a way to begin.
...A great truth, attributed to Emily Dickinson, is that 'hope inspires the good to reveal itself.' This is almost all I ever need to remember. Gravity and sadness yank us down, and hope gives us a nudge to help one another get back up or to sit with the fallen on the ground, in the abyss, in solidarity.
...It is most comfortable to be invisible, to observe life from a distance, at one with our own intoxicating superior thoughts. But comfort and isolation are not where the surprises are. They are not where hope is... Only together do we somehow keep coming through unsurvivable loss, the stress of never knowing how things will shake down, to the biggest miracle of all, that against all odds, we come through the end of the world, again and again – changed but intact (more or less)... Insofar as I have any idea of 'the truth,' I believe this to be as true as gravity and grace." — Anne Lamott ["Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope, and Repair"]

"Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product ... if we should judge America by that — counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans." — Robert F. Kennedy [Address, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, March 18, 1968]

"Every aspect of your life, and even your death, have been monetized. The fact that this truth disturbs practically no one, disturbs me greatly." — Matthew Lee Morgan

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages." — Adam Smith [The Wealth Of Nations, Book I, Chapter II, pp. 26-7, para 12]

"The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything." — Albert Einstein

"...a very terrifying aspect of our society, and other societies, is the equanimity and the detachment with which sane, reasonable, sensible people can observe [war and human suffering]. I think that's more terrifying than the occasional Hitler ...or other that crop up — these people would not able to operate were it not for this apathy and equanimity — and therefore I think that it is in some sense the sane and reasonable and tolerant people who should share a very serious burden of guilt, that they very easily throw on the shoulders of others who seem more extreme and more violent." — Noam Chomsky


//War//
"It is fortunate that war is so terrible, lest we become too fond of it." — Robert E. Lee

"Only the dead have seen the end of war." — Plato

"It is only for the greed and lies, of the fleeting flies, that we learn to die, 'for our country' — why? (The answers lie in Truth alive!)" — Matthew Lee Morgan

"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets." — Voltaire

"I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity." — Dwight D. Eisenhower

"The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting." — Sun Tzu

"War does not determine who is right - only who is left." — Bertrand Russell

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." — Albert Einstein