Random quotes

Quotes in
Sorted by
Author
Subject
Text
2495 quotes     Show as list

It seems to me certain that more people are killed out of righteous stupidity than out of wickedness.
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.
You cannot give to people what they are incapable of receiving.
It begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible.
When everything is done, the mornings are sad.
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it.
People tend to talk about what people tend to talk about.
Silence is the best response to a fool.
BIRTH: The first and dirtiest of all disasters.
Everyone tells you what's good for you. they don't want you to find your own answers. they want you to believe theirs.
The telephone is a good way to talk to people without having to offer them a drink.
If you fear failure, you shall never succeed.
I listen to all these complaints about rudeness and intemperateness, and the opinion that I come to is that there is no polite way of asking somebody: have you considered the possibility that your entire life has been devoted to a delusion? But that’s a good question to ask. Of course we should ask that question and of course it’s going to offend people. Tough.
Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
Where ignorance is our master, there is no possibility of real peace.
We human beings are social beings. We come into the world as the result of others’ actions. We survive here in dependence on others. Whether we like it or not, there is hardly a moment of our lives when we do not benefit from others’ activities. For this reason, it is hardly surprising that most of our happiness arises in the context of our relationships with others.
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
Quando ero piccolo i miei genitori mi volevano talmente bene che mi misero nella culla un orsacchiotto.

Vivo.
A hypothesis is something which looks as if it might be true and were true, and which is capable of verification or refutation by comparison with facts.
If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry
A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age.
So consider carefully, what prevents you from living the way you want to live your life?
Science, however, is not just a matter of making mistakes, but of making mistakes in public. Making mistakes for all to see, in the hopes of getting the others to help with the corrections.
There is nothing more dangerous than a philosopher who wants to change the world
There is no false sensation.
Christians have abused, oppressed, enslaved, insulted, tormented, tortured, and killed people in the name of God for centuries, on the basis of a thelogically defensible reading of the Bible.
Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.
No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess” -
When you seem to be listening to my words, they seem to be your words, with me listening.
How can we encourage other human beings to extend their moral sympathies beyond a narrow locus? How can we learn to become mere human beings, shorn of any more compelling national, ethnic, or religious identity? We can be reasonable. It is in the very nature of reason to fuse cognitive and moral horizons. Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love.
Well, it's either kiss me or kill me, that's how I see it.
Never lend books -- nobody ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are those which people have lent me. 
Death is not evil, for it frees man from all ills and takes away his desires along with desire's rewards. Old age is the supreme evil, for it deprives man of all pleasures while allowing his appetites to remain, and it brings with it every possible sorrow. Yet men fear death and desire old age.
I don't trust anyone who doesn't laugh.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against its government. 
The ultimate authority must always rest with the individual's own reason and critical analysis.
We have Christians against Muslims against Jews, and no matter how liberal your theology, merely identifying yourself as a Christian or a Jew lends tacit validity to this status quo. People have morally identified with a subset of humanity rather than with humanity as a whole.
Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much of life. So aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.
The road to success is always under construction.
Learning is acquired by reading books; but the much more necessary learning, the knowledge of the world, is only to be acquired by reading man, and studying all the various editions of them.
Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
The important and the unimportant are the same only at the start.
..the average child in our society generally prefers a safe, orderly, predictable, organized world, which he can count on, and in which unexpected, unmanageable or other dangerous things do not happen, and in which, in any case, he has all-powerful parents who protect and shield him from harm.
There is no ideal in observation. When you have an ideal, you cease to observe, you are then merely approximating the present to the idea, and therefore there is duality, conflict, and all the rest of it. The mind has to be in the state when it can see, observe. The experience of the observation is really an astonishing state. In that there is no duality. The mind is simply - aware.
One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.
Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.
I have come to the conclusion that whether or not a person is a religious believer does not matter. Far more important is that they be a good human being.
The man who will not act until he knows all will never act at all.
The more you are motivated by Love, The more Fearless & Free your action will be.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
While there is no guarantee that rational people will always agree, the irrational are certain to be divided by their dogmas.
Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie.
I will not propose to you that my way is best. The decision is up to you. If you find some point which may be suitable to you, then you can carry out experiments for yourself. If you find that it is of no use, then you can discard it.
As long as we think we are worth something, we wrong ourselves.
Play the music, not the instrument.
SWEATER: A garment worn by child when it's mother is feeling chilly.
Truth is what works.
Shared pain is lessened; shared joy, increased — thus do we refute entropy.
Follow the three R's: - Respect for self. - Respect for others. - Responsibility for all your actions.
For every major problem in this nation there is a simple solution--and it is wrong.
If you look around at your family and friends, you will see that the happiest people are the ones who don't pretend to know what's right for others and don't try to control anyone but themselves.
We find systems which by their very nature and definition are not closed systems. Every living organism is essentially an open system. It maintains itself in a continuous inflow and outflow, a building up and breaking down of components, never being, so long as it is alive, in a state of chemical and thermodynamic equilibrium but maintained in a so-called steady state which is distinct from the latter.
Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.
The thinkers of the Enlightenment sought a new understanding of the human condition. The era was a cornucopia of ideas, some of them contradictory, but four themes tie them together: reason, science, humanism, and progress.
History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
In the transmission of human culture, people always attempt to replicate, to pass on to the next generation the skills and values of the parents, but the attempt always fails because cultural transmission is geared to learning, not DNA.
The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself.
Women like silent men. They think they're listening.
Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. And no, this isn't having "faith" in reason (in the same way that some people have faith in miracles), because we don't "believe" in reason; we use reason.
One should always be in love; that is the reason one should never marry.
Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man.
The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.
There is nothing so pathetic as a bore who claims attention - and gets it
You are rich if you have enough money to satisfy all your desires. So there are two ways to be rich: you earn, inherit, borrow, beg, or steal enough money to meet all your desires; or you cultivate a simple lifestyle of few desires; that way you always have enough money.
We do not judge the people we love.
Either God can do nothing to stop catastrophes like this, or he doesn't care to, or he doesn't exist. God is either impotent, evil, or imaginary. Take your pick, and choose wisely.
One of the effects of civilization is to diminish the rigour of the application of the law of natural selection. It preserves weakly lives that would have perished in barbarous lands.
I have nothing to declare but my genius.
I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.
The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.
To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.
Never give up. No matter what is happening, no matter what is going on around you, never give up.
What we call progress consists in coordinating ideas with realities.
If something good happens to a Christian—he feels some bliss while praying, or he sees some positive change his life—we're told that God is good. But when children by the tens of thousands are torn from their parents’ arms and drowned, we are told god is mysterious.
Nobody really cares if you're miserable, so you might as well be happy.
Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.
The emotions triggered by fiction are very real.
The object of education ought not to be to make all men think alike, but to make each think in the way which is the fullest expression of his own.
Words, I will argue, are the best example of memes, culturally transmitted items that evolve by differential replication—that is, by natural selection.
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.
As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.
The old dreams were good dreams; they didn't work out but I'm glad I had them.
As I said, relationship has true significance only when it is a process of self-revelation, when it is revealing oneself in the very action of relationship. But most of us do not want to be revealed in relationship.
You don't have to travel around the world to understand that the sky is blue everywhere.
The only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts. Only openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for us.
The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.
It is necessary to study not only parts and processes in isolation, but also to solve the decisive problems found in organization and order unifying them, resulting from dynamic interaction of parts, and making the the behavoir of the parts different when studied in isolation or within the whole...
I want to be just a pure spiritual leader.
2495 quotes     Show as list