Quotations

K to R

Immanuel Kant

• Out of the crooked timber of humanity nothing straight can be made.

Omar Khayyam

• The secret must be kept from all non-people. The mystery must be hidden from all idiots.

Soren Kierkegaard

• Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
• Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic—if it is pulled out I shall die.

J. Krishnamurti

• Fear is not of the unknown, but of loss of the known.
• The truth is a pathless land.
• To be religious is to be sensitive to reality.

Judge Mills Lane

• A dog doesn’t want very much and is happy with that. A cat doesn’t know what he wants and wants more of it.

La Rochefoucauld

• The height of cleverness is to be able to conceal it.
• What makes us like new acquaintances is not so much the weariness we have of the old ones or the pleasure of changing, as the disgust of not being admired enough by those who know us too well, and the hope of being more admired by those who do not know us as well.

C.W. Leadbeater

• We must beware of falling into the fatally common error of supposing that what we see is all there is to see.

V.I. Lenin

• When a liberal is abused, he says, “Thank God they didn’t beat me.” When he is beaten, he thanks God they didn’t kill him. When he is killed, he will thank God that his immortal soul has been delivered from its mortal clay.

John Lennon

• Possession isn't nine-tenths of the law; it's nine-tenths of the problem.
• The pressures of being a parent are equal to any pressure on earth. To be a conscious parent, and really look to that little being's mental and physical health, is a responsibility which most of us, including me, avoid most of the time, because it's too hard. . . . To put it loosely, the reason why kids are crazy is because nobody can face the responsibility of bringing them up.

C.S. Lewis

• There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened. [in The Great Divorce]
• There seems no plan because it’s all plan. There seems no center because it’s all center.

G. C. Lichtenberg

• A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.

Abraham Lincoln

• By the frame of the Government under which we live this same people have wisely given their public servants but little power for mischief, and have with equal wisdom provided for the return of that little to their own hands at very short intervals. [First Inaugural Address, 1861]
• Good things come to those who wait, but only the things left over by those who hustle.
• Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
• Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.

• The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.

Rob Low

• Intelligence is that aspect of human cognition that we haven't managed to emulate yet.

James Madison

• The accumulation of all powers in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.
• [T]there never was a people whose liberties long survived a standing army.

Charles Manson

• Paranoia is just a higher form of awareness.

Judith Martin (Miss Manners)

• Manners require showing consideration of all human beings, not just the ones to whom one is close. [10/13/2000]

Abraham Maslow

• If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

Richard May

• Don't take your life personally. It's not about you!

Jinx McCombs

• Value judgements are bad.

H.L. Mencken

• A man may be a fool and not know it--but not if he is married.
• Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.
• For every complex question there’s a simple answer—and it’s wrong.
• The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
• Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
• We are here, and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

Thomas Merton

• The truth that many people never understand, until it is toolate, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.

James Grier Miller

• Ontology recapitulates philology.

John Milton

• Fear and dull disposition, lukewarmness and sloth, are not seldom wont to cloak themselves under the affected name of moderation.

Sakyong Mipham

• Our root fantasy is that "I" am real and that it's possible for "me" to be happy.

Wilson Mizner

• The worst-tempered people I've ever met were the people who knew they were wrong.

Montaigne

• I never met a man who thought his thinking was faulty.
• We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.

Bryce Muir

• All play and no work makes Jack a dumb jerk.

Edward R. Murrow

• The obscure we see eventually; the completely apparent takes a litle longer.

Martin Neimoller

• In Germany, they first came for the communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the homosexuals, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a homosexual. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me—but by that time there was no one left to speak up.

Isaac Newton

• I know not what I appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell, whilest the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Friedrich Nietzsche

• Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.
• He who despises himself yet esteems himself as a self-despiser.
• In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule. (Beyond Good and Evil)
• The most common sort of lie is the one uttered to one's self.

Geoffrey Norman

• A lot of what passes for depression these days is nothing more than a body saying that it needs work.

Gregory Nunn

• To a warden, Utopia is an escape-proof jail.

Howard Ogden

• Don't take yourself too seriously. And don't be too serious about not taking yourself too seriously.

George Orwell

• If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
• The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being but to remind him that he is already degraded.

P.D. Ouspensky

• There are many things that you can understand now, although, of course, they will be surrounded by things you cannot understand yet; but if you begin with those you can understand, you will understand many other things. Every moment of understanding, every realization, sheds light not only on the thing we are thinking about but on many other things as well
• Think in other categories.
• Whatever stops thought is false. [in Tertium Organum]

Thomas Paine

• It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government.

Robert L. Park

• Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough that you be persecuted by an unkind establishment, you must also be right.

Blaise Pascal

• Vanity is so secure in the heart of man that everyone wants to be admired: even I who write this, and you who read this.

General George S. Patton

• Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.

Wendell Phillips

• Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Max Planck

• An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarised with the ideas from the beginning

Plato

• As you ought not to attempt to cure the eyes without the head, or the head without the body, so neither ought you to attempt to cure the body without the soul. (Charmides)
• Science is nothing but perception.

Pogo

• We have met the enemy and he is us.

Alexander Pope

• Some praise at morning what they blame at night
  But always think the last opinion right.

J.M. Power

• The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.

Marcel Proust

• Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments. 
• The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which have become permanent.  
• The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity. 
• The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. 
• Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.

Nick Rhodes

• Intelligence can’t be insulted.

Ayn Rand

• Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men. (The Fountainhead)

Rainer Maria Rilke

• Live your questions now and, perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.

Will Rogers

Personally, I have always felt that the best doctor in the world is the veterinarian. He can't ask his patients what is the matter . . . he's just got to know.

Jim Rohn

• Success lies in the opposite direction of the natural flow.

Theodore Roosevelt

• Nine-tenths of wisdom consists of being wise in time.

Arthur Rubinstein

• If I omit practice one day, I notice it. If two days the critics notice it. If three days the public notices it.

Bertrand Russell

• Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
• Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trustedto act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.
• No one gossips about other people's secret virtues.
• One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
• To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.

Bertrand Russell’s grandmother

• What is mind? It doesn’t matter. What is matter? Never mind.

[Quotations A-E]  [Quotations F-J]  [Quotations S-Z]

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