Quotations: Miscellaneous
The quotations found in this category don't quite fall into any other. This isn't to say that they are any lower in quality, however. Read and Enjoy.
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"Fear me not for my insanity, but for the mind which it protects."
-???
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"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats."
-Henry Louis Mencken
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"A low self-love in the parent desires that his child should repeat his character and fortune. I suffer whenever I see that common sight of a parent or senior imposing his opinion and way of thinking and being on a young soul to which he is totally unfit. Cannot we let people be themselves and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make another you. One's enough."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice."
-Albert Einstein
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"All's fair in love and war."
-Francis Edward Smedley
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"I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection."
-Charles Darwin
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"If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
-John Stuart Mill
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"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
-Edmund Burke
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"It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit."
-Harry S Truman
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"They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel."
-Carl W. Buechner
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"The test of our progress is not whether we add to the abundance of those who have much. It is whether we provide enough to those who have little."
-Franklin Delano Roosevelt
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"Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right."
-Laurens Van der Post
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"No one would talk much in society, if he knew how often he misunderstands others."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays."
-Aldous Huxley
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"What's madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?"
-Theodore Roethke
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"I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinions of himself than on the opinions of others."
-Marcus Aurelius
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"Seek simplicity, and distrust it."
-Alfred North Whitehead
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"I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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"Copy from one, it's plagiarism; copy from two, it's research."
-???
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"The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his."
-General George S. Patton
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"Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much."
-Oscar Wilde
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"Popularity is the one insult I have never suffered."
-Oscar Wilde
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"The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time."
-George Bernard Shaw
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"All my life, affection has been showered upon me, and every forward step I have made has been taken in spite of it."
-George Bernard Shaw
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"People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left."
-Margaret Thatcher
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"It is better to be silent, and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt."
-Silvan Engel
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"What luck for rulers, that men do not think."
-Adolph Hitler
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"I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him."
-Booker T. Washington
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"If we're going to be damned, let's be damned for who we really are."
-Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek
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"There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?"
-Dick Cavett
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"Perfection is our goal. Excellence will be tolerated."
-TQM Motto from the International Association of Business Communication
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"When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said "Let us pray." We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land."
-Bishop Desmond Tutu
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"The pioneers of a warless world are the youth who refuse military service."
-Albert Einstein
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"The optimist proclaims we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true."
-James B. Cabell
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"The world is full of wonders, riches, powers, puzzles. What it holds can make us horrified, sorrowful, amazed, confused, joyful. But nothing in it can make us bored. Boredom is the result of some pinch in ourselves, not of some lack in the world."
-Toni Flores
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"You aren't going crazy. You're going sane in a crazy world."
-The Tick (cartoon character)
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"Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour."
-Stephen Butler Leacock
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"Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think."
-Jean de La Bruyère
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"Sometimes laughter is the only weapon we have."
-Roger Rabbit
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"What sort of philosophy one chooses depends, therefore, on what sort of man one is; for a philosophical system is not a dead piece of furniture that we can reject or accept as we wish; it is rather a thing animated by the soul of the person who holds it."
-Johann Gottlieb Fichte
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"That action is best which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers."
-Francis Hutcheson
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"Knowledge is power."
-Francis Bacon
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"Nothing, and no one, should be placed beyond the bounds of rational criticism."
-Graham Priest
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"We are like sailors who have to rebuild their ship on the open sea, without ever being able to dismantle it in dry-dock and reconstruct it from the best components."
-Otto Neurath
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"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind."
-Bertrand Russell
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"I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true."
-Bertrand Russell
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"A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen."
-Edward de Bono
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"When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."
-Richard Buckminster Fuller
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"I don't know who my grandfather was; I'm much more concerned to know what his grandson will be."
-Abraham Lincoln
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"I respect the man who knows distinctly what he wishes. The greater part of all mischief in the world arises from the fact that men do not sufficiently understand their own aims. They have undertaken to build a tower, and spend no more labor on the foundation than would be necessary to erect a hut."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"A penny will hide the biggest star in the Universe if you hold it close enough to your eye."
-Samuel Grafton
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"Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt."
-William Shakespeare
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"This is the true joy in life -- being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one."
-George Bernard Shaw
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"Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off the goal."
-Hannah More
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"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt."
-Helen Keller
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"We aim above the mark to hit the mark."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew."
-Marshall McLuhan
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"Man's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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"I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way."
-Mark Twain
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"A family is a place where minds come in contact with one another. If these minds love one another the home will be as beautiful as a flower garden. But if these minds get out of harmony with one another it is like a storm that plays havoc with the garden."
-Buddha
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"I was born not knowing and have only had a little time to change that here and there."
-Richard Feynman
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"The most decisive actions of our life -- I mean those that are most likely to decide the whole course of our future -- are, more often than not, unconsidered."
-Andre Gide
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"Winning is nice if you don't lose your integrity in the process."
-Arnold Horshak
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"By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"To the generous mind the heaviest debt is that of gratitude, when it is not in our power to repay it."
-Benjamin Franklin
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"It is the individual's task to differentiate himself from all the others and stand on his own feet. All collective identities... interfere with the fulfillment of this task. Such collective identities are crutches for the lame, shields for the timid, beds for the lazy, nurseries for the irresponsible."
-Carl Jung
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"The Universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper."
-Eden Philpotts
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"The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity."
-William Butler Yeats
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"Like the herd animals we are, we sniff warily at the strange one among us."
-Loren Eiseley
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"It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man. If he is more than a popular story-teller it may take humanity a generation to absorb and grow accustomed to the new geography with which the scientist or artist presents us. Even then, perhaps only the more imaginative and literate may accept him. Subconsciously the genius is feared as an image breaker; frequently he does not accept the opinions of the mass, or man's opinion of himself."
-Loren Eiseley
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"Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved."
-Mark Twain
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"Of all the strange 'crimes' that human beings have legislated out of nothing, 'blasphemy' is the most amazing, with 'obscenity' and 'indecent exposure' fighting it out for second and third place."
-Robert Heinlein
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"Art doesn't want to be familiar. It wants to astonish us. Or, in some cases, to enrage us. It wants to move us. To touch us. Not accommodate us, make us comfortable."
-Jamake Highwater
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"Posthumous men, like myself, are not so well understood as men who reflect their age, but they are heard with more respect. In plain English: we are never understood--hence our authority."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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"The 'silly question' is the first intimation of some totally new development."
-Alfred North Whitehead
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"Nothing is more damaging to a new truth than an old error."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"I am become death, shatterer of worlds."
-J. Robert Oppenheimer, after witnessing the world's first nuclear explosion
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"If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants."
-Isaac Newton
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"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."
-William Shakespeare
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"Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!"
-Albert Einstein
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"There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable, and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry."
-Mark Twain
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"The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on."
-Joseph Heller
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"To err is human, to forgive divine."
-Alexander Pope
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"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."
-H.P.Lovecraft
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"this is my 'depressed stance.' When you're depressed, it makes a lot of difference how you stand. The worst thing you can do is straighten up and hold your head high because then you'll start to feel better. If you're going to get any joy out of being depressed, you've got to stand like this."
-Charlie Brown
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"Little men with little minds and little imaginations go through life in little ruts, smugly resisting all changes which would jar their little worlds."
-???
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"A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation."
-???
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"Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves."
-Abraham Lincoln
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"It is only imperfection that complains of what is imperfect. The more perfect we are, the more gentle and quiet we become towards the defects of others."
-Joseph Addison
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"Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow that talent to the dark place where it leads."
-Erica Jong
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"Few things are harder to put up with than a good example."
-Mark Twain
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"If you're going to do something wrong, at least enjoy it."
-Leo Rosten
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"If ignorance is bilss, then knock this smile off my face."
-Zach De La Rocha
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"I can resist everything except temptation."
-Oscar Wilde
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"He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser."
-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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"A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark."
-Henry Louis Mencken
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"I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should."
-Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
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"The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or fiend, by prayer or by wine."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"A man must consider what a rich realm he abdicates when he becomes a conformist."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"I never think of the future. It comes soon enough."
-Albert Einstein
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"It is my observation that too many of us are spending money we haven't earned to buy things we don't need to impress people we don't like."
-H. Jackson Brown's mom
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"How come there's only one Monopolies Commission?"
-Nigel Rees
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"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
-Charles Babbage
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"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila."
-Mitch Ratliffe
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"The careful application of terror is also a form of communication."
-???
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"Reality is whatever refuses to go away when I stop believing in it."
-Philip K. Dick
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"History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it."
-Winston Churchill
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"Sleazy entertainment and dirty jokes will never be as popular as sobriety and self-denial."
-Marge Simpson
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"When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint. When I asked why the poor were hungry, they called me a communist."
-Dom Helder Camara
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"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another."
-James Matthew Barrie
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"Life is like a cash register, in that every account, every thought, every deed, like every sale, is registered and recorded."
-Fulton J. Sheen
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"We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from it."
-William Osler
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"Good sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world, for everyone thinks himself so well supplied with it that even those who are hardest to satisfy in every other way do not usually desire more of it than they already have."
-René Descartes
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"They who depend upon manifest observations will philosophize better than those who persist in opinions repugnant to the senses."
-Galileo Galilei
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"So the good has been well explained as that at which all things aim."
-Aristotle
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"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy."
-Albert Camus
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"We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express."
-A. J. Ayer
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"Logic is the hygiene the mathematician practices to keep his ideas healthy and strong."
-Hermann Weyl
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"As far as the propositions of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."
-Albert Einstein
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"The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."
-Alfred North Whitehead
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"Good generally conquers evil. Unless, of course, good is stupid."
-???
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"The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it."
-William Gibson
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"You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches them tolerance."
-W. Somerset Maugham
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"It is difficult to live in the present, ridiculous to live in the future, and impossible to live in the past. Nothing is as far away as one minute ago."
-Jim Bishop
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"The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated."
-Henry Louis Mencken
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"Intellectuals are the most intolerant of all people."
-Paul Duncun
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"I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me."
-Winston Churchill
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"Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue."
-John Kenneth Galbraith
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"What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal."
-Albert Pine
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"There are many ways of going forward, but only one way of standing still."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt
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"I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they must change if they are to get better."
-G. C. Lichtenberg
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"Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice."
-Baruch Spinoza
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"Lack of will power has caused more failure than lack of intelligence or ability."
-Flower A. Newhouse
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"Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent."
-Napoleon
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"One that would have the fruit must climb the tree."
-Thomas Fuller
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"If you don't learn to laugh at troubles, you won't have anything to laugh at when you grow old."
-Ed Howe
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"We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools."
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
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"Everyone who gets sleepy at night should have a simple decent place to lay their heads, on terms they can afford to pay."
-Millard Fuller
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"A moment's thinking is an hour in words."
-Thomas Hood
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"The dread of evil is a much more forcible principle of human actions than the prospect of good."
-John Locke
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"The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves."
-Ray Kroc
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"The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers."
-James Baldwin
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"Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous."
-Thornton Wilder
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"Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment."
-Buckminster Fuller
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"It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one needs to be good."
-T. S. Eliot
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"We are rich only through what we give, and poor only through what we refuse."
-Anne Swetchine
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"There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning, and yearning."
-Christopher Morley
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"No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft."
-H. G. Wells
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"Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today's world do not have."
-Ronald Reagan
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"Perception is strong and sight weak. In strategy it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things."
-Miyamoto Musashi
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"Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform."
-Mark Twain
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"All perfect republics are perfect nonsense. The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?"
-John Fowles
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"Nothing is as terrible to see as ignorance in action."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that the cat has only nine lives."
-Mark Twain
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"Adam and Eve entered the world naked and unashamed - naked and pure-minded. And no descendant of theirs has ever entered it otherwise. All have entered it naked, unashamed, and clean in mind. They entered it modest. They had to acquire immodesty in the soiled mind, there was no other way to get it. ... The convention mis-called "modesty" has no standard, and cannot have one, because it is opposed to nature and reason and is therefore an artificiality and subject to anyone's whim - anyone's diseased caprice."
-Mark Twain
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"The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent."
-John Hughes Holmes
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"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far."
-H. P. Lovecraft
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"Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility, the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted, everything in fact which masks reality from us, in order to set us face to face with reality itself."
-Henri Bergson
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"Contrary to general belief, an artist is never ahead of his time but most people are far behind theirs."
-Edgard Varese
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"Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day."
-D. H. Lawrence
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"The creative person is both more primitive and more cultivated, more destructive, a lot madder and a lot saner, than the average person."
-Frank Barron
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"As an artist grows older, he has to fight disillusionment and learn to establish the same relation to nature as an adult as he had when a child."
-Charles Burchfield
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"'How often conscience had to bite in times gone by! What good teeth it must have had! And today, what is amiss?' -a dentist's question."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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"He who knows not how to plant his will in things at least endows them with some meaning: that is to say, he believes that a will is already present in them (A principle of faith.)"
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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"A man should not play the coward to his deeds. He should not repudiate them once he has performed them. Pangs of conscience are indecent."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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"Choices, more choices than we like afterward to believe, are made far backward in the innocence of childhood."
-Loren Eiseley
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"We must overact our part in some measure, in order to produce any effect at all."
-William Hazlitt
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"You are like a porcupine. When the animal has its spines erect, it cannot eat. If you do not eat, you will starve. And your prickles will die with the rest of your body."
-John Fowles
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"We know what we are, but know not what we may be."
-William Shakespeare
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"Only the shallow know themselves."
-Oscar Wilde
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"An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail."
-Edwin Land
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"Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail."
-Henry David Thoreau
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"We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows."
-Robert Frost
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"I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was."
-William Shakespeare
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"I think you should defend to the death their right to march, and then go down and meet them with baseball bats."
-Woody Allen, on the KKK
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"People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say."
-Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
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"In Germany they came first 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 Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up."
-Martin Niemoeller
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"Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death....Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man."
-Bertrand Russell
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"Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons."
-Bertrand Russell
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"Don't walk behind me, I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend."
-Albert Camus
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"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
-Leo Tolstoy, opening line of Anna Karenina
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"Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world."
-Mary Shafer
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"I think; therefore I am."
-Rene Descartes
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"It is no longer a question of where civilization began, but if it ever did!"
-Alfred E. Newman
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"Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man."
-J. Robert Oppenheimer, speaking of Albert Einstein
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"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months."
-Oscar Wilde
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"I don't like principles. I prefer prejudices."
-Oscar Wilde
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"My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably."
-George Bernard Shaw
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"Don't overestimate the decency of the human race."
-Henry Louis Mencken
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"One word sums up probably the responsibility of any vice president, and that one word is 'to be prepared'."
-Dan Quayle
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"What kills a skunk is the publicity it gives itself."
-Abraham Lincoln
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"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject."
-Winston Churchill
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"If, before going to bed every night, you will tear a page from the calendar, and remark, 'There goes another day of my life, never to return,' you will become time conscious."
-A. B. Zu Tavern
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"When a dog runs at you, whistle for him."
-Henry David Thoreau
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"The clinching proof of my reasoning is that I will cut anyone who argues further into dogmeat."
-Sir Geoffery de Tourneville
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"Reality is nothing but a collective hunch."
-Lily Tomlin
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"If we keep doing what we're doing, we're going to keep getting what we're getting."
-Stephen Covey
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"Nationalism is an infantile disease."
-Albert Einstein
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"When authorities warn you of the sinfulness of sex, there is an important lesson to be learned. Do not have sex with the authorities."
-Matt Groening
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"Life is the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations."
-Herbert Spencer
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"The market price of every particular commodity is regulated by the proportion between the quantity which is actually brought to market, and the demand of those who are willing to pay."
-Adam Smith
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"For our discussion is on no trifling matter, but on the right way to conduct our lives."
-Plato
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"Philosophy should be founded on detailed, positive knowledge of actual processes in the world and not on abstract assessments of human capacities."
-Nancy Cartwright
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"Conservation is humanity caring for the future."
-Nancy Newhall
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"And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything."
-Shakespeare
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"To give up the task of reforming society is to give up one's responsibility as a free man."
-Alan Paton
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"There is hardly anybody good for everything, and there is scarcely anybody who is absolutely good for nothing."
-Lord Chesterfield
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"Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future."
-Ayn Rand
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"Good questions outrank easy answers."
-Paul A. Samuelson
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"The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it."
-James Bryce
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"Discretion is being able to raise your eyebrow instead of your voice."
-???
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"A leader or a man of action in a crisis almost always acts subconsciously and then thinks of the reasons for his action."
-Jawaharlal Nehru
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"It may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma... which human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve."
-Edgar Allen Poe
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"I feel that you are justified in looking into the future with true assurance, because you have a mode of living in which we find the joy of life and the joy of work harmoniously combined. Added to this is the spirit of ambition which pervades your very being, and seems to make the day's work like a happy child at play."
-Albert Einstein, referring to America
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"My views and feelings [are] in favor of the abolition of war -- and I hope it is practicable, by improving the mind and morals of society, to lessen the disposition to war; but of its abolition I despair."
-Thomas Jefferson
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"Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth."
-Denis Diderot
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"Honest differences are often a healthy sign of progress."
-Mahatma Gandhi
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"Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error."
-Thomas Jefferson
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"We'll do all right if we can capitalize on our mistakes."
-Mickey Rivers
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"Fame comes only when deserved, and then is as inevitable as destiny, for it is destiny."
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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"There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other."
-Eric Hoffer
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"Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain't that a big enough majority in any town?"
-Mark Twain, Huckelberry Finn
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"How idiotic civilization is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?"
-Katherine Mansfield
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"It is so basic. A human being is an innocent part of nature. Our civilization has distorted this universal quality that allows us to feel at home in our skin. Other animals have coats that they accept, but the human race has yet to come to terms with being nude."
-Ruth Bernhard
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"Art is the objectification of feeling and the subjectification of nature."
-Suzanne Langer
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"See, when I paint, it is an experience that, at its best, is transcending reality. When it is working, you completely go into another place, you're tapping into things that are totally universal, completely beyond your ego and your own self. That's what it's all about."
-Keith Haring
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"I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them."
-Pablo Picasso
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"No great genius is without an admixture of madness."
-Aristotle
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"Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self."
-Jean-Luc Godard
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"One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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"An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it."
-Paul Valery
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"I distrust all systematisers, and avoid them. The will to a system shows a lack of honesty."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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"Contentment preserves one even from catching cold. Has a woman o knew that she was well-dressed ever caught cold? No, not even when she had scarcely a rag to her back."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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"Aristotle says that in order to live alone, a man must be either an animal or a god. The third alternative is lacking: a man must be both--a philosopher."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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"Even the pluckiest among us has but seldom the courage of what he really knows."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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"Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true."
-Demosthenes
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"One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star."
-G. K. Chesterton
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"If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it; for it is hard to be sought out, and difficult."
-Heraclitus
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"Some degree of withdrawal serves to nurture man's creative powers. The artist and the scientist bring out of the dark void, like the mysterious universe itself, the unique, the strange, the unexpected. Numerous observers have testified upon the lonliness of the process."
-Loren Eiseley
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"A man must have a certain amount of intelligent ignorance to get anywhere."
-Charles Kettering
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"It is vain to do with more what can be done with less."
-William of Occam
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"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
-Albert Einstein
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"One lives but once in the world."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"Yield to temptation. It may not pass your way again."
-Robert Heinlein
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"Modern man lives increasingly in the future and neglects the present."
-Loren Eiseley
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"I don't wish to be everything to everyone, but I would like to be something to someone."
-Javan
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"All a man can betray is his conscience."
-Joseph Conrad
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"Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after."
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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"...that was the first thing I had to learn about her, and maybe the hardest I've ever learned about anything--that she is her own, and what she gives me is of her choosing, and the more precious because of it. Sometimes a butterfly will come to sit in your open palm, but if you close your hand, one way or the other, it--and its choice to be there--are gone."
-Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane
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"I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves."
-E. M. Forster
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"I have my faults, but changing my tune is not one of them."
-Samuel Beckett
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"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."
-Ayn Rand
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"Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it."
-Albert Einstein
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"It is not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that make horseraces."
-Mark Twain
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"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
-Henry David Thoreau
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"The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them."
-Henry David Thoreau
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"Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes."
-Henry David Thoreau
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"In a mad world, only the mad are sane."
-Akiro Kurosawa
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"People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles."
-Frank Herbert
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"People talking without speaking,
People hearing without listening,
People writing songs that voices never share,
and no one dare disturb the Sound of Silence."
-Simon & Garfunkel, Sounds of Silence
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"The only man who is really free is the one who can turn down an invitation to dinner without giving an excuse."
-Jules Renard
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"If you can't convince them, confuse them."
-Harry Truman
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