• Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of a law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.

                          –Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures

 

• Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another's money. Idiots!

                          –Arthur Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life

 

• Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.

                          –W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up

   

• Every time I begin to worry that people have become too ironic, I discover that people aren't nearly ironic enough.

                          –JJM

   

• Men cause evil by wanting heroically to triumph over it, because man is a frightened animal who tries to triumph, an animal who will not admit his own insignificance, that he cannot perpetuate himself and his group forever, that no one is invulnerable no matter how much of the blood of others is spilled to try to demonstrate it.

                          –Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil

 

• Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.
  Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;
  For love is sufficient unto love.

                          –Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

 

• To be genuinely civilized means to be able to walk straightly and to live honorably without the props and crutches of one or another of the childish dreams which have so far supported men. That such a life is likely to be ecstatically happy I will not claim. But that it can be lived in quiet content, accepting resignedly what cannot be helped, not expecting the impossible, and being thankful for small mercies, this I would maintain. That it will be difficult for men in general to learn this lesson I do not deny. But that it will be impossible I would not admit since so many have learned it already.

                          –W.T. Stace, Man Against Darkness

 

• It is a fact that man is an animal, but it is not a fact that he is nothing but an animal.

                          –George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution

 

• God sleeps in stone; God grows in plants; God walks in animals; and God thinks in man.

                          –anonymous Mayan Priest, The Ancient Spirituality of the Modern Maya

 

• By the time we grow up we become masters at dissimulation, at cultivating a self that the world cannot probe.  But we pay a price.  After years of turning people away, of protecting our inner self, of cultivating it by living in a different world, of furnishing this world with our fantasies and dreams—lo and behold we find that we are hopelessly separated from everyone else.  We have become victims of our own art.  We touch people on the outsides of their bodies, and they us, but we cannot get at their insides and cannot reveal our insides to them.  This is one of the great tragedies our interiority—it is utterly personal and unrevealable.  

                          –Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning

 

• Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.  

                          –Jiddhu Krishnamurti, Dissolution Speech

 

• Religion, since it has its source in terror, has dignified certain kinds of fear, and made people think them not disgraceful. In this it has done mankind a great disservice: all fear is bad, and ought to be overcome not by fairy tales, but by courage and rational reflection. I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young, and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is none the less true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold: surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man's place in the world. Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own. 

                          –Bertrand Russell, What I Believe

 

• We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe. 

                          –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

 

• Don't you know there ain't no devil.  That's just God when he's drunk. 

                          –Tom Waits

 

• ...anyone who has no culture, other than this global monoculture, is completely screwed. Anyone who grows up watching TV, never sees any religion or philosophy, is raised in an atmosphere of moral relativism, learns about civics from watching bimbo eruptions on network TV news, and attends a university where postmodernists vie to outdo each other in demolishing traditional notions of truth and quality, is going to come out into the world as one pretty feckless human being. 

                          –Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning...

 

• If you want to walk fast, walk alone.  If you want to walk far, walk together.

                              –African Proverb (quoted in Dark Star Safari)

 

• ...the act that restores the integrity of the self also helps restore the integrity of the world. 

                         –Steven Parish, Subjectivity and Suffering...

 

• Everything that used to be a sin is now a disease. 

                         –Bill Maher

 

• Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge.

                         –Kahlil Gibran

 

• Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.

                         –Jacob Bronowski

 

• We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

                         –Oscar Wilde

 

• Seven Blunders of the World:

  • Wealth without work

  • Pleasure without conscience

  • Knowledge without character

  • Commerce without morality

  • Science without humanity

  • Worship without sacrifice

  • Politics without principle

            –Mahatma Gandhi

 

• The reason why we must boldly and honestly face the truth that the universe is non-spiritual and indifferent to goodness, beauty, happiness, or truth is not that it would be wicked to suppress it, but simply that it is too late to do so, so that in the end we cannot do anything else but face it.  Yet we stand on the brink, dreading the icy plunge.  We need courage.  We need honesty.

                         –W.T. Stace, Man Against Darkness

 

• People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.

                         –Epictetus, Enchiridion

 

• The majority of human beings are only too ready to follow a leader who professes complete conviction, since such a course relieves them from the anxiety inseparable from uncertainty, and from the effort of thinking for themselves.

                         –Anthony Storr, Freud

 

• No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes.  He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking.

                             –Ruth Benedict

 

• Every creature is driven to pasture with a blow.

                             –Heraclitus

 

• If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how.

                             –Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

 

• Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.

                       –Epicurus

   

• Life is too important to be taken seriously.

                       –Oscar Wilde

   

• If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you will be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life.

                       –Abraham Maslow

   

• Religion is the frozen thought of men out of which they build temples.

                       –Jiddhu Krishnamurti

   

• Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.

                       –Thomas Paine

   

• Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.

                       –Antoine de Saint Exupéry

   

• If it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say that the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.

                      –George Carlin

   

• He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

                      –Samuel Johnson

   

• …the truth is that my work—my mission, I was about to say—is to shatter the faith of men, left, right, and center, their faith in affirmation, their faith in negation, their faith in abstention, and I do so from faith in faith itself.  My purpose is to war on all those who submit, whether to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to agnosticism.  My aim is to make all live a life of restless longing.

                      –Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life

   

• No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.  Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it.

                      –Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

   

• If a way to the better there be, it lies in taking a full look at the worst. 

                      –Thomas Hardy

   

• I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible. 

                      –Joseph de Maistre

   

• I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand then lead him to a quiet place and kill him.

                      –Mark Twain

   

• The essence of this achievement [wisdom] is a maximal relinquishment of narcissistic delusions, including the acceptance of death, without an abandonment of cognitive and emotional involvements.  The ultimate act of cognition, i.e., the acknowledgment of the limits and of the finiteness of the self, is not the result of an isolated intellectual process, but is the victorious outcome of a lifework of the total personality in acquiring broadly based knowledge and in transforming archaic modes of narcissism into ideals, humor, and a sense of suprainvidual participation on the world.

                      –Heinz Kohut, Forms and Transformations of Narcissism

 

• Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home.

                          –David Frost

 

• In the Iliad the brevity of life is no objection to the world but an incentive to relish its pleasures, to live with zest, and to die gloriously.  The shadow death casts does not stain the earth with a slanderous gloom; it is an invitation to joy and nobility.

                          –Walter Kaufmann, Tragedy and Philosophy

 

• The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist knows it.

                     –J. Robert Oppenheimer

 

• It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes.

                     –Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands

   

• Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there stands a mighty ruler, an unknown sage—whose name is self.  In your body he dwells; he is your body.  There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom.  And who knows why your body needs precisely your best wisdom?

                      –Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

 

• Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.  And when you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

                     –Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil

   

• Nature has given men one tongue, but two ears, that we may hear from others twice as much as we speak.

                     –Epictetus

   

• ’What is my unique gift, my authentic talent?’  As the great Carlyle saw, this is the main problem of a life, the only genuine problem, the one that should bother and preoccupy us all through the early years of our struggle for identity; all through the years when we are tempted to solve the problem of our identity by taking the expedient that our parents, the corporation, the nation offer us; and it is the one that does bother many of us in our middle and later years when we pass everything in review to see if we really had discovered it when we thought we did.  Very few of us ever find our authentic talent—usually it is found for us, as we stumble into a way of life that society rewards us for.  The way things are set up we are rewarded, so to speak, for not finding our authentic talent. The result is that most of our life is in large part a rationalization of our failure to find out who we really are, what our basic strength is, what thing it is that we were meant to work upon the world.

                     –Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

 

• He (Philip) did not know how wide a country, arid and precipitous, must be crossed before the traveler through life comes to an acceptance of reality.  It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded.  It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life.  They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.  

                     –W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

   

• Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person.  Having neither to weigh thought nor measure words but pouring them all right out just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness blow the rest away.

                          –Anonymous, Shoshone Tribe

 

• We're not primarily put on this earth to see through one another, but to see one another through.

                          –Peter de Vries, Let Me Count the Ways

 

• People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life.  I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking.  I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

                     –Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

   

• The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred ‘Yes.’  For the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred ‘Yes’ is needed: the spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world.

                     –Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

 

• For ‘Is’ and ‘Is-not’ though with Rule and Line,

  And ‘Up’-And-Down’ by Logic I define,

              Of all that one should care to fathom, I

  Was never deep in anything but—Wine.

                     –Omar Khayyám, Rubáiyát

   

• To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.  Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.

                          –George Orwell, 1984