In the art of living, man is both the artist and the object of his art; he is the sculptor and the marble; the physician and the patient.
- Erich Fromm (Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics)
The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid ones are full of confidence.
- Charles Bukowski, or this version:
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
- Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
- John W. Gardner
The greatest tragedy for any human being is going through their entire lives believing the only perspective that matters is their own.
- Doug Baldwin
If you're a right-fighter, somebody who never apologizes or changes her mind, you don't have the fluid nature to twig to the deep river of truth when the spirt draws your forked stick.
- Mary Karr
The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at the future.
- Claudia Rankine
Always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormenter, never the tormented.
- Elie Wiesel, Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor
Aging seems to be the only available way to live a long life.
- Kitty O’Neill Collins
Idealogical certainty easily degenerates into an insistence upon ignorance.
- Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan
"Philosophy is questions they may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned."
- Anonymous
Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.
- Dalai Lama XIV
Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
- H. L. Mencken (1925)
You must give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you.
- Joseph Campbell
Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.
--Eleanor Roosevelt
We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers.
-- Carl Sagan
We need magic, and bliss, and power, myth, and celebration and religion in our lives, and music is a good way to encapsulate a lot of it.
- Jerry Garcia
The first step [to extraordinary golf/life] is to create a future that inspires and enlivens you. But the real skill comes in re-creating this future in the face of the inevitable upsets that we encounter.... At any moment we have the choice of either letting the past continue or living in the possibility of a new future ... [the art is] distinguishing possibilities from expectations,
accepting what happens with grace and maturity while keeping all possibilities open is one of the most courageous and worthwhile things that a [golfer/person] can do.
- Fred Shoemaker, Extraordinary Golf
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
- Philip K. Dick
Aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person that you always should have been.
- David Bowie
You can easily judge the character of a man by the way
he treats those who can do nothing for him.
- Goethe
Racism exacts a toll on those who are racist, distorting their humanity and hindering their ability to be fully self-reflective beings. [Dr. Pauker's findings confirm Baldwin's thesis]
- James Baldwin
The opposite of poverty is not wealth. In too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice.
- Bryan Stevenson
Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
- John Steinbeck
He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.
- Aeschylus, in Agamemnon
Work is the greatest thing in the world, so we should always save some of it for tomorrow.
- Don Herold
You can tell you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people that you do.
- Anne Lamott
Resume virtues are professional and oriented toward earthly success. They require comparison with others. Eulogy virtues are ethical and spiritual, and require no comparison. ... As in: He was kind and deeply spiritual, not He made senior vice president at an astonishingly young age and had a lot of frequent-flier miles.
- Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic
Trying to be popular in high school is like trying to be mayor of a city that won't exist in 4 years.
- Jenny Holzer
The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the
business known as gambling.
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
-- biologist Thomas Huxley
Somehow the people who made tennis shoes knew what boys needed and wanted. They put marshmallows and coiled springs in the soles and they wove the rest out of grasses bleached and fired in the wilderness. Somewhere deep in the soft loam of the shoes the thin hard sinews of the buck deer were hidden. The people that made the shoes must have watched a lot of winds blow the trees and a lot of rivers going down to the lakes. Whatever it was, it was in the shoes, and it was summer.
- Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
What humanities education provides that these [programs with a more strictly utilitarian bent] don't... is a handle on what we value (philosophy), what mistakes we've learned from (history), how to understand other cultures (comparative literature) and how to interpret and describe what we encounter from day to day (English). You know, how to be a successful human. The humanities are great investments for the long term. They teach you to think critically, measure nuance, calibrate tradeoffs and make a persuasive argument.
-Kevin Cool, https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=57542
We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.
- Carl Sagan
Life is a field of corn. Literature is the shot glass it distills down into.
- Lorrie Moore
Speech is conveniently located midway between thought and action,
where it often substitutes for both.
- John Andrew Holmes
To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason ... is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.
- Thomas Paine, The American Crisis
She always rose above,
she'd see things with the eyes of love.
- Archer Prewitt
A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.
- Granville Hicks
Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.
- Dalai Lama XIV, The Art of Happiness
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
- Socrates
If we poison our children with hatred
then the hard life is all that they'll know.
- Nanci Griffith (from It's A Hard Life Wherever You Go)
John W. Gardner:
The things you learn in maturity aren't simple things such as acquiring information and skills. You learn not to engage in self-destructive behavior. You learn not to burn up energy in anxiety. You discover how to manage your tensions. You learn that self-pity and resentment are among the most toxic of drugs. You find that the world loves talent but pays off on character.
You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you; they are thinking about themselves. You learn that no matter how hard you try to please, some people in this world are not going to love you, a lesson that is at first troubling and then really quite relaxing.
...
Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you. ... You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life.
Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over,
pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.
- Matt Groening (who attributed it to Nietzsche in a cartoon)
Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on
the roof and gets stuck.
-- George Carlin
"If the gods wanted us to vote, they'd have given us candidates."
- Jim Hightower
...the [Iraq] war plan was built on the mistaken strategic goal of capturing Baghdad,
and it confused removing Iraq's reqime with the far more difficult task of
changing the entire country. The result was that the U.S. effort resembled
a banana republic coup d'etat more than a full-scale war plan that reflected
the ambition of a great power to alter the politics of a crucial region
in the world.
- Thomas Ricks, Fiasco
Science
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. - E. W. Dijkstra
Sanity is, in its essence, nothing more
than the ability to live in harmony with nature's laws.
- Freeman Dyson, 1979, Disturbing the Universe
In 1913 Lee de Forest, inventor of the auditon tube, was brought to trial on charges of fraudulently using the US mails to sell the public stock in the Radio Telephone Company. The District Attorney charged that:
'De Forest has said in many newspapers and over his signature that it would be possible to transmit the human voice across the Atlantic before many years. Based on these absurd and deliberately misleading statements, the misguided public ... has been pursuaded to purchase stock in his company.'
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.
- Prospero, The Tempest
And this our life, exempt from public haunts
Finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
-As You Like It
Oh how thy worth with manners may I sing, when thou art all the better part of me. [Sonnet39]
Sweet love, renew thy force. Be it not said thy edge should blunter be than appetite. [Sonnet56]
My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep.
The more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite. [Juliet; Romeo and Juliet]
- Shakespeare, Oberon speech apologizing to Titania, from BBC Shakespeare Redone television production of A Midsummer Nights Dream.
A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool. -Shakespeare.
Religion
God [the Self of the World] ... likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear.
Now when God plays hide-and-seek and pretends that he is you and I,
he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and
how he hid himself. But that's the whole fun of it - just what he
wanted to do.
- Alan Watts (see quote.watts)
God made the world, but the Dutch made Holland.
- traditional Dutch saying
Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking...
those who preach faith ... are intellecutal slaveholders,
keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned
and justified so much lunacy and destruction.
Religion ... allows humans beings who don't know all the answers to think that they do.
... the solace and comfort that religion brings you actually comes at a terrible price
-- Bill Maher
True love is made of understanding -- understanding the other person,
the object of your love, understanding their suffering, their
difficulties, and their true aspiration. Out of understanding
there will be kindness, there will be compassion, there will be
an offerring of joy. There will also be a lot of space, because
true love is a love without possessiveness. You love and still
you are free, and the other person is also free. The kind of
love that has no joy is not true love. If both parties cry every
day, then that's not true love. There must be joy and freedom
and understanding in love.
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Agnostic prayer: God, if you exist, save my soul, if I have one, if you can.
Tom Robbins
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
Religion was an attempt to pin down the Divine. ... The Divine was beyond description, beyond knowing, beyond comprehension. ... [religion] went so far as to attribute petty human emotions (anger, jealousy, etc.) to it ... Thus, since religion bore false witness to the Divine, religion was blasphemy. And once it entered into its unholy alliance with politics, it became the most dangerous and repressive force that the world has ever known.
Everybody's got to figure it out for themselves. ... Even though the great emotions, the great truths, were universal; even though the mind of humanity was ultimately one mind, still, each and every single individual had to establish his or her own special, personal, particular, unique, direct, one-on-one, hands-on relationship with reality, with the universe, with the Divine
p6 As anyone who knows anything about the Unknowable well knows, "God" and "gods" are interchangeable. try [not] to impose human limitations or narrow definitions of uniformity on the Divine Principle.
A zen priest on Christian missionaries:
p20 The blue-eyed ones can attain neither wisdom nor tranquility,
because they're too busy clapping their hands in glee over the
suffering of the damned.
. . . very rarely we see a man who seems to have met all the demands,
challenged all the implaccable averages, spurned the mere luck. He has
defied baseball, even altered it, and for a time at least the game is truly his.
One thinks of Willie Mays, in the best of his youth, . . . running so hard and
so far that the ball itself seems to stop in the air and wait for him.
- Roger Angell
Like one's own children, golf has an uncanny way of endearing itself
to us while at the same time evoking every weakness of mind and
character, no matter how well hidden.
- Timothy Gallwey
Miscellaneous
The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which
we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have
guided missiles and misguided men.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm."
- Winston Churchill
"We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give."
- Winston Churchill
Women might be able to fake orgasms. But men can fake whole
relationships.
- Sharon Stone
You can always tell who isn't doing anything,
because they never make a mistake.
- Anon
It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.
- Abraham Lincoln
"Happiness is a way station between too much and too little."
- Channing Pollack
If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude
greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in
peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the
hand that feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you; and may
posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.
- Samuel Adams
A mind is like a parachute.
It doesn't work if it is not open.
-Frank Zappa
"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing
that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not
just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become real."
"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.
"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When
you are Real, you don't mind being hurt."
"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up?" he asked, "or bit by bit?"
"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse, "you become.
It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people
who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully
kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been
loved off, and your eyes drop out, and you get loose in the joints and
very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, 'cuz once you are
Real, you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."
-Margery Williams
The most important way of remembering someone is by being the person they made us – at least in part – and living the life they have helped shape.... being someone they have helped fashion and living a life they have helped forge are not only how we remember them; they are how we honor them.
– Mark Rowlands, The Philosopher and the Wolf
Poetry
Brown and agile child, the sun which forms the fruit
and ripens the grain and twists the seaweed
Has made your happy body and your luminous eyes
and given your mouth the smile of water
- Pablo Neruda
We now return our souls to the creator
as we stand on the edge of eternal darkness;
Let our chant fill the void
so that others may know
In the land of the night
the ship of the sun
is drawn by the grateful dead.
-An ancient Egyptian text
To The Foot From Its Child
The child's foot still doesn't know it's a foot,
it wants to be a butterfly or apple.
Later, the stones, bits and pieces of glass,
streets, stairways,
the packed earth of the road,
go on teaching the foot it can't fly,
can't be round as a fruit on a branch.
The child's foot,
defeated, went down
in battle,
a casualty
condemmed to live in a shoe.
- Neruda
And there in the silence they search for
the balance between this fear that they feel
and a love that has graced their lives
-- Michael Timmins, Cowboy Junkies, Ring on the Sill
And a man said, speak to us of Self-Knowledge.
And he answered, saying:
Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and nights.
But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart's knowledge.
You would know in words that which you have always known in thought.
You would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams.
- Kahlil Gibran
Oh life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporania.
Oh love is a thing that will never go wrong,
And I am the queen of Rumania.
- Dorothy Parker
To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness, ere he is aware.
- William Cullen Bryant "Thanatopsis"
Lawyers
Never ever will lawyers relent 'till all of their client's
money is spent.
- Anna Russell
Only lawyers can tell legal from illegal any more, and they can't tell right from wrong.
- Niven and Pournelle
Psychology
The art of living . . . consists in being completely sensitive to each
moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind
open and wholly receptive.
- Alan Watts
Things turn out best for those who make the best of the way things turn out.
- John Wooden
The present is the only thing that has no end.
- Erwin Schrodinger
Nothing is left to you at this moment but to have a good laugh
- Chinese Zen master (143)
My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither,
but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.
- Thornton Wilder
The highest to which man can attain is wonder.
- Goethe
. . .to be at this moment is pure miracle.
- Alan Watts
What is the purpose of life? To thicken the plot.
- from On the Verge
If I reveal myself without worrying about how others will respond,
then some will care, though others may not. But who can love me, if
no one knows me? I must risk it, or live alone.
- Sheldon Kopp
Ego Quotes with Narcissistic Tendencies
Big egos are big shields for lots of empty space. - Diana Black
The one who overcomes egotism rids themselves of the most stubborn obstacle that blocks the way to all true greatness and all true happiness. - Coltvos
An inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing right conclusions about the future. It is hypnotized by itself and therefore cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must strike it dead. - Dr Carl Jung
Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity. - Frank Leahy
The only thing that shatters dreams is compromise.
There's not a prayer you'll listen before you get flattened by the Great Steamroller of Experience.
(following attributed to Leslie Parrish:)
It's not as important to be alike as it is to be curious.
You're being the very best person you know how to be; you have to live with that until you change and no one is going to make that happen except you. Anyone you want to keep in your life: never take them for granted.
If you didn't need to fight in order to learn, you wouldn't create so many problems.
When we feel safe [with someone] our truest selves step out and we can be completely and honestly who we are; we can be loved for who we are and not who we're pretending to be. Each unveils the best part of the other. No matter what else goes wrong around us, with that person we're safe in our own paradise.
I was in Bogota and waiting for a lady friend. I was in love, a long time ago. I waited three days. I was hungry but could not go out for food, lest she come and I not be there to greet her. Then, on the third day, I heard a knock. I hurried along the old passage and there, in the sunlight, there was nothing. Just a butterfly, flying away.
Miscellaneous
The DEA hates LSD because it epitomizes many of the best
characteristics of the alternative drug culture: it is non-
addictive, rarely causes crime or violence, and often begets
strong spiritual feelings. Moreover, it is distributed by people
who have a strong ethical sense that is difficult for narcotics agents to penetrate.
-- Dale Gieringer, California Drug Policy Reform Coalition
LSD has an unfortunate, but unavoidable side-effect. It makes rich
white Republicans look like fascist toads.
-- Barry Smith
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the
continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a
manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes
me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know
for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
- John Donne
If you smile at me, I will understand.
Because that is something everybody everywhere does in the same language.
- David Crosby
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
[Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound]