It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.
If you don’t behave as you believe, you will end by believing as you behave.
A painting is more than the sum of its parts,’ he would tell me, and then go on to explain how the cow by itself is just a cow, and the meadow by itself is just grass and flowers, and the sun peeking through the trees is just a beam of light, but put them all together and you’ve got magic.
What a waste my life would be without all the beautiful mistakes I’ve made.
What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money … but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth … In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are coins for real things.
Challenges are gifts that force us to search for a new center of gravity. Don’t fight them. Just find a new way to stand.
For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.
Learned we may be with another man’s learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own.
Words do not express thoughts very well; every thing immediately becomes a little different, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom of one man seems nonsense to another.
When you realize there is something you don’t understand, then you’re generally on the right path to understanding all kinds of things.
Do you know what punishments I’ve endured for my crimes, my sins? None. I am proof of the absurdity of men’s most treasured abstractions. A just universe wouldn’t tolerate my existence.
Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
Living well is an art that can be developed: a love of life and ability to take great pleasure from small offerings and assurance that the world owes you nothing and that every gift is exactly that, a gift.
I suppose therefore that all things I see are illusions; I believe that nothing has ever existed of everything my lying memory tells me. I think I have no senses. I believe that body, shape, extension, motion, location are functions. What is there then that can be taken as true? Perhaps only this one thing, that nothing at all is certain.
Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future too.
Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle.
I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.
No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness.If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.
Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.
I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage
Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.
Even a soul submerged in sleep is hard at work and helps make something of the world.
Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.
I have gained this by philosophy; I do without being ordered what some are constrained to do by their fear of the law.
He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.
Perhaps not one religion contains all of the truth of the world. Perhaps every religion contains fragments of the truth, and it is our responsibility to identify those fragments and piece them together.
In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill… we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one.
The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather, we should thank God that such men lived.
We are the hollow menWe are the stuffed menLeaning togetherHeadpiece filled with straw. Alas!Our dried voices, whenWe whisper togetherAre quiet and meaninglessAs wind in dry grassOr rats’ feet over broken glassIn our dry cellarShape without form, shade without colour,Paralysed force, gesture without motion;- The Hollow Men
If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin.
Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class – whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.- Politics as Repeat Phenomenon: Bene Gesserit Training Manual
My desire and wish is that the things I start with should be so obvious that you wonder why I spend my time stating them. This is what I aim at because the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.
The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution!
The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.
Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.
The evil that is in the world almost always comes from ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.
It’s no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You’ve got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they’ve got to come. You can’t force them.
If you place your head in a lion’s mouth, then you cannot complain one day if he happens to bite it off.
The seed of suffering in you may be strong, but don’t wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy.
No one should ever ask themselves that: why am I unhappy? The question carries within it the virus that will destroy everything. If we ask that question, it means we want to find out what makes us happy. If what makes us happy is different from what we have now, then we must either change once and for all or stay as we are, feeling even more unhappy.
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding… And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy
If it turns out that there is a God…the worst that you can say about him is that basically he’s an underachiever.
When another blames you or hates you, or people voice similar criticisms, go to their souls, penetrate inside and see what sort of people they are. You will realize that there is no need to be racked with anxiety that they should hold any particular opinion about you.
It takes three to make love, not two: you, your spouse, and God. Without God people only succeed in bringing out the worst in one another. Lovers who have nothing else to do but love each other soon find there is nothing else. Without a central loyalty life is unfinished.
Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory and the second philosophy.
Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep