Quotes
Emotion
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that gives value to survival.
- C.S. Lewis
The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings – words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.
- Stephen King
Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.
- Gautama Buddha
Those who are free of resentful thoughts surely find peace.
- Gautama Buddha
Oh, can I really believe the poet’s tales, that when one first sees the object of one’s love, one imagines one has seen her long ago, that all love like all knowledge is remembrance, that love too has its prophecies in the individual.
- Soren Kierkegaard
When one has once fully entered the realm of love, the world — no matter how imperfect — becomes rich and beautiful; it consists solely of opportunities for love.
- Soren Kierkegaard
There is no mistaking love. You can find it in a simple act of kindness toward someone who needs help. You feel it in your heart. It is the common fiber of life, the flame that heals our soul, energizes our spirit and supplies passion to our lives. It is our connection to God and to each other.
- Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
- Robert Heinlein
In the end the love you take is equal to the love you make.
- John Lennon
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
- Carl Jung
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.
- William Shakespeare
Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength; loving someone deeply gives you courage.
- Lao Tzu
I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love.
- Mother Teresa
Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love.
- Gautama Buddha
You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.
- Gautama Buddha
Truth
Believe those who seek the truth; doubt those who find it.
- André Gide
What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
The right way is not always the popular and easy way. Standing for right when it is unpopular is a true test of moral character. – Margaret Chase Smith
Truth suffers from too much analysis.
- Frank Herbert
Attempt to see Truth without knowing Falsehood, or to see the Light without knowing Darkness. It cannot be.
- Frank Herbert
Humans are born with a susceptibility to that most persistent and debilitating disease of intellect: self-deception. The best of all possible worlds and the worst get their dramatic coloration from it. As nearly as we can determine, there is no natural immunity. Constant alertness is required.
- Frank Herbert
The proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensations which tells you this is something you’ve always known.
- Frank Herbert
Time
Time is always against us.
- The Matrix
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
- Louis Hector Berlioz
A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.
- Frank Herbert
It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: “And this, too, shall pass.” How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!
- Abraham Lincoln
The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, worry about the future, or anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly.
- Gautama Buddha
The gravest error a thinking person can make is to believe that one particular version of history is absolute fact. History is recorded by a series of observers, none of whom is impartial. The facts are distorted by sheer passage of time and thousands of years of humanity’s dark ages, deliberate misrepresentations by religious sects, and the inevitable corruption that comes from an accumulation of careless mistakes. The wise person, then, views history as a set of lessons to be learned, choices and ramifications to be considered and discussed, and mistakes that should never again be made.
- Frank Herbert
Life
We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.
- Joseph Campbell
Follow your bliss.
- Joseph Campbell
It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.
- Joseph Campbell
The unexamined life is not worth living.
- Socrates
He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
You should never be in the company of anyone with whom you would not want to die.
- Frank Herbert
You do not take from this universe. It grants you what it will.
- Frank Herbert
Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your life. The object can be stated this way: Live the best life you can. Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise, you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play. Non-players often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse to see that they can create some of their own luck.
- Frank Herbert
Life is lived forwards but understood backwards.
- Soren Kierkegaard
Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
- Soren Kierkegaard
Experience
By three methods may we learn wisdom. First, by reflection, which is noblest. Second, by imitation, which is easiest. Third, by experience, which is the bitterest.
- Confucius
The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.
- Soren Kierkegaard
It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
- Henry David Thoreau
Be the change you want to see in the world.
– Mahatma Gandhi
Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.
- Mahatma Gandhi
We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program.
- C.S. Lewis
Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.
- C.S. Lewis
Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
- Oscar Wilde
Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.
- Joseph Campbell
What each must seek in his life is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else.
- Joseph Campbell
It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Every experience carries its lesson.
- Frank Herbert
It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
Power
But thus do I counsel you, my friends: distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful! Distrust all those who talk much of their justice!
- Friedrich Nietzsche
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
- Carl Jung
Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.
- Frank Herbert
This is the fallacy of power: ultimately it is effective only in an absolute, a limited universe. But the basic lesson of our relativistic universe is that things change. Any power must always meet a greater power.
- Frank Herbert
Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity.
- Frank Herbert
Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.
- Albert Einstein
Humanity
What a chimera is man! What a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, helpless earthworm, depository of truth, sink of uncertainty and error. Glory and scum of the universe.
- Blaise Pascal
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
- Frank Herbert
There’s no secret to balance. You just have to feel the waves.
- Frank Herbert
Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.
- Frank Herbert
You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.
- C.S. Lewis
What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
- Oscar Wilde
Being right too soon is socially unacceptable.
- Robert Heinlein
A mind is a precious thing to taste.
- Sublime
To keep the body in good health is a duty; otherwise we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear.
- Gautama Buddha
He that will not reason is a bigot, he that cannot is a fool, and he that dares not is a slave.
- William Drummond
Ignorance is never out of style. It was in fashion yesterday, it is the rage today, and it will set the pace tomorrow.
- Frank Dane
What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals — and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
- William Shakespeare
A human being is a part of a whole, called by us a “universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest…a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
- Albert Einstein