I am prone to envy. It is one of my three default emotions, the others being greed and rage. I have also experienced compassion and generosity, but only fleetingly and usually while drunk, so I have little memory.
I hugged him without any kind of fear or self-consciousness, fiercely, with a rush of emotion that almost brought tears to my eyes.I could kiss you! Chubs cried.Please don’t! I gasp out, feeling his arms tighten around my ribs to the point of cracking them.
Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.
Please go for your dreams. Whatever your ideals, you can become whatever you want to become.
What you are is God’s gift to you, what you become is your gift to God.
One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.
In all the world, there is no heart for me like yours.
In all the world, there is no love for you like mine.
About no subject is there less philosophizing than about philosophy.
As the bones, flesh, entrails and blood vessels are enclosed by a skin that renders the aspect of men endurable, so the impulses and passions of the soul are enclosed by vanity: it is the skin of the soul.
If you think life is magical or life is hard, either way you are right. Your thoughts are the source of reality.
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
There are times when wisdom cannot be found in the chambers of parliament or the halls of academia but at the unpretentious setting of the kitchen table.
If I behave as though this is a completely normal situation, then maybe it will be …
Fine! I’ll throw on some clothes. Turn around. I’m in my pj’sI’m a guy. That’s like asking a kid not to glance at the candy counter.
Everyone has his own reality in which, if one is not too cautious, timid or frightened, one swims. This is the only reality there is.
It’s very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed at twenty-two, you’d always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s also the positive that you understand you’re going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.
People took such awful chances with chemicals and their bodies because they wanted the quality of their lives to improve. They lived in ugly places where there were only ugly things to do. They didn’t own doodley-squat, so they couldn’t improve their surroundings. so they did their best to make their insides beautiful instead.
I am beginning to understand,” said the little prince. “There is a flower… I think that she has tamed me…
You have a… remarkable memory.”
“I remember everything about you. You’re the one who wasn’t paying attention.
Teaching the layperson (divulgare) is not distorting (tergiversare) the subject, but educating the public; and it is our duty as scientists to educate without distorting the essence of the scientific knowledge attained by humanity. The future of our society depends upon this premise.
Only a philosopher’s mind grows wings, since its memory always keeps it as close as possible to those realities by being close to which the gods are divine.
No living creature is naturally greedy, except from fear of want – or in the case of human beings, from vanity, the notion that you’re better than people if you can display more superfluous property than they can.
Sex is a powerful intent to create: the creation of pleasure, creation of love, and ultimately the creation of life. It connects and syncs two beings emotionally, physically, and mentally and is one of the strongest expressions of love that exists in this World.
I had a dream about you last night… you were a giant slinky and I watched you fall down the stairs.
Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy’s Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day’s work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city’s reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.
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.
If the only prayer you say throughout your life is “Thank You,” then that will be enough.
I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how a man could look up into the heavens and say there is no God.
Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it’s made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.
I would never want to be a member of a group whose symbol was a man nailed to two pieces of wood.
Whatever you want in life, other people are going to want it too. Believe in yourself enough to accept the idea that you have an equal right to it.
I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.
Don’t be afraid of enemies who attack you. Be afraid of the friends who flatter you.
To understand just one life you have to swallow the world … do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?
We wanted the freedom to love. We wanted the freedom to choose. Now we have to fight for it.
Challenges are what make life interesting and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful.
No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.
Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.
Olivier took a deep breath, then turned and bowed in farewell. Gersonides nodded in return, then thought of something.The manuscript you brought me, by that bishop. It argues that understanding is more important than movement. That action is virtuous only if it reflects pure comprehension, and that virtue comes from the comprehension, not the action.Olivier frowned. So?Dear boy, I must tell you a secret.What?I do believe it is wrong.
Philosophers, for example, often fail to recognize that their remarks about the universe apply also to themselves and their remarks. If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so.
What we cannot bear removes us from life; what remains can be borne.
All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist.
Men are all the same, they think that because they came out of the belly of a woman they know all there is to know about women.
I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.
Just as love is an orientation which refers to all objects and is incompatible with the restriction to one object, so is reason a human faculty which must embrace the whole of the world with which man is confronted.
Do you remember all of your audiences?” Marco asks.
“Not all of them,” Celia says. “But I remember the people who look at me the way you do.”
“What way might that be?”
“As though they cannot decide if they are afraid of me or they want to kiss me.”
” I am not afraid of you,” Marco says.
I think when I was two years old in the sandbox. I think I formulated my basic philosophy there, and I haven’t really had to alter it very much ever since.
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.
All names disappear. Children should be taught that in elementary school. But we’re afraid to teach them.
I didn’t think about being king,” he said, his voice hoarse.Eddis stared. “Your capacity to land yourself in a mess because you didn’t think first, Eugenides, will never cease to amaze me. What do you mean you didn’t think about being king? Is Attolia going to marry you and move into my library?
No one in the world gets what they want and that is beautiful.
The moment you have in your heart this extraordinary thing called love and feel the depth, the delight, the ecstasy of it, you will discover that for you the world is transformed.