I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it’s the effect or vice versa
You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible.
The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.
Non est ad astra mollis e terris via – There is no easy way from the earth to the stars
He suddenly recalled from Plato’s Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say that you’ve wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.
Expect everything, I always say, and the unexpected never happens.
Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.
Often father and daughter look down on mother (woman) together. They exchange meaningful glances when she misses a point. They agree that she is not bright as they are, cannot reason as they do. This collusion does not save the daughter from the mother’s fate.
It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when they have lost their way.
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you but answer, He was ignorant of my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone.
It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.
Sometimes I lie awake at night and I ask, Is life a multiple choice test or is it a true or false test? …Then a voice comes to me out of the dark and says, We hate to tell you this but life is a thousand word essay.
Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person’s essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?
Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.
Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.
Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them
It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;Man got to sit and wonder ‘why, why, why?’Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;Man got to tell himself he understand.
Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.
You only live twice:Once when you are bornAnd once when you look death in the face
We are addicted to our thoughts. We cannot change anything if we cannot change our thinking.
Let’s think the unthinkable, let’s do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.
A truth that’s told with bad intentBeats all the lies you can invent.
You’re not to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.
We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!
You do not write your life with words…You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do.
There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.
The desire to love someone always exceeds the desire to be loved by someone & that’s exactly why we end up loving the person who doesn’t deserve that LOVE.
You see, doing one thing differently is very often the same as doing everything differently.
I’m sort of… coming off a bad relationship”
“When did it end?”
“Slightly before it started.
The way I define happiness is being the creator of your experience, choosing to take pleasure in what you have, right now, regardless of the circumstances, while being the best you that you can be.
The past can teach us, nurture us, but it cannot sustain us. The essence of life is change, and we must move ever forward or the soul will wither and die.
You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
Love yourself. Forgive yourself. Be true to yourself. How you treat yourself sets the standard for how others will treat you.
Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
The best use of life is love. The best expression of love is time. The best time to love is now.
Life is like an onion; you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.
There is something incredibly nostalgic and significant about the annual cascade of autumn leaves.
Contrary to what you may assume, I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist- that is, I don’t make the mistake of thinking that the… cosmos… gives a damn one way or the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitoes, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy.
She cracked a smile. “So what’s your poison?”
He sighed dramatically, and let the truth tumble off his tongue. “Life.”
“Ah,” she said ruefully. “That’ll kill you.
I simply regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world created therein has different rules than my regular human world.
If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you’ll spend your life completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing thing you don’t like doing, which is stupid.
I can’t really act the way I want to act, or say what I want to say all the time. And a lot of times, I cover that up with a smile.