Henry David Thoreau

• "Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it."
• "Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary."
• "Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe."
• "My greatest skill in life has been to want but little"
• "What's the use of a fine house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?"
• "As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness."
• "Not till we are completely lost or turned around... do we begin to find ourselves."
• "Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves."
• "There is no remedy for love, but to love more."
• "All good things are wild and free."
• "Never look back unless you are planning to go that way."
• "It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."
• "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

• "People only see what they are prepared to see."
• "In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him."
• "Nothing external to you has any power over you."
• "People do not seem to realise that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character."
• "Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life."
• "Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not."
• "Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm."
• "Make the most of yourself....for that is all there is of you."
• "Life is a journey, not a destination."
• "It is not the length of life, but the depth."
• "The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well."
• "Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."
• "Always do what you are afraid to do."
• "To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."
• "Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
• "Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could do. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."
• "The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common"

Bertrand Russell

• "Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness."
• "Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric."
• "In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted."
• "Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."
• "To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it."
• "It is the preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else that prevents us from living freely and nobly."
• "To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness."

Alan Watts

• "Nothing ruins pleasure more than the desire to go on having it"
• "This is the real secret of life. To be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. Instead of calling it work, realize it is play."
• "You didn't come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here."
• "Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth."
• "We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society."
• "The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves."
• "You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself."
• "The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance."
• "Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations."
• "What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are "coins" for real things."

Voltaire

• "It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."
• "The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing."
• "Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities."
• "Love truth, but pardon error."
• "I don't know where I am going, but I am on my way."
• "The most important decision you make is to be in a good mood."
• "Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one."
• "Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road."
• "Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers."

Alain de Botton

• "The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be."
• "Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them."
• "One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on."
• "Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand."
• "There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life."
• "A good half of the art of living is resilience."
• "People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages."

Friedrich Nietzsche

• "For believe me: the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is - to live dangerously!"
• "It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages."
• "That which does not kill us makes us stronger."
• "There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness."
• "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."
• "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how."
• "When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago."
• "In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule."
• "The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."

François de La Rochefoucauld

• "No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong."
• "Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire."
• "If we had no faults we should not take so much pleasure in noting those of others."
• "It is easier to be wise for others than for ourselves."
• "We promise according to our hopes and perform according to our fears."
• "Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy."
• "We only confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no big ones."
• "Almost all our faults are more pardonable than the methods we resort to to hide them."
• "Few people have the wisdom to prefer the criticism that would do them good, to the praise that deceives them."
• "A refusal of praise is a desire to be praised twice."

Slavoj Žižek

• "Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire."
• "The one measure of true love is: you can insult the other"
• "Words are never 'only words'; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do."
• "The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire."
• "True universalists are not those who preach global tolerance of differences and all-encompassing unity, but those who engage in a passionate struggle for the assertion of the Truth which compels them."

Soren Kierkegaard

• "The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays."
• "Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom."
• "Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced."
• "The most common form of despair is not being who you are."
• "To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity."
• "To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one's self.... And to venture in the highest is precisely to be conscious of one's self."

Rollo May

• "Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us. Like a chemical mixture, if one of us is changed, both of us will be. Will we grow in self-actualization, or will it destroy us? The one thing we can be certain of is that if we let ourselves fully into the relationship for good or evil, we will not come out unaffected."
• "The distinctive characteristic of the human being, in contrast to the merely vegetative or the merely animal, lies in the range of human possibility. Kierkegaard sees man as a creature who is continually beckoned by possibility, who conceives of possibility, visualizes it, and by creative activity carries it into actuality."
• "The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity."
• "Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is."
• "Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness."
• "A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence."
• "Depression is the inability to construct a future."

Baltasar Gracián

• "Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other and greater ones invariably slink in after it."
• "A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends."
• "Never compete with someone who has nothing to lose."
• "Without courage, wisdom bears no fruit."
• "Two kinds of people are good at foreseeing danger: those who have learned at their own expense, and the clever people who learn a great deal at the expense of others."
• "For the advice in a joke is sometimes more useful than the most serious teaching."
• "Life is a warfare against the malice of others."
• "He that has satisfied his thirst turns his back on the well."
• "Be first the master of yourself"

Aristotle

• "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
• "Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom."
• "No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness."
• "Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet."
• "The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living differ from the dead."
• "He who has overcome his fears will truly be free."
• "I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies, for the hardest victory is over self."
• "The more you know, the more you know you don't know."
• "Great men are always of a nature originally melancholy."

Marcus Aurelius

• "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 opinion of himself than on the opinion of others."
• "Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them."
• "You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength."
• "The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts."
• "Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one."
• "Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart."
• "The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury."
• "It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live."
• "If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed."
• "How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbour says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy."
• "Remember that very little is needed to make a happy life."
• "What we do now echoes in eternity."
• "Do not waste what remains of your life in speculating about your neighbors, unless with a view to some mutual benefit. To wonder what so-and-so is doing and why, or what he is saying, or thinking, or scheming—in a word, anything that distracts you from fidelity to the ruler within you—means a loss of opportunity for some other task."

Epicurus

• "Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for."
• "He who is not satisfied with a little, is satisfied with nothing."
• "Of all the means to insure happiness throughout the whole life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friends."
• "You don't develop courage by being happy in your relationships everyday. You develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity."
• "Not what we have But what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance."
• "He who has peace of mind disturbs neither himself nor another."
• "It is better for you to be free of fear lying upon a pallet, than to have a golden couch and a rich table and be full of trouble."

Socrates

• "Know thyself."
• "No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable."
• "The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing."
• "There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance."
• "I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think"
• "Wonder is the beginning of wisdom."
• "To find yourself, think for yourself."
• "Be slow to fall into friendship, but when you are in, continue firm and constant."
• "The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less."
• "Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty."
• "Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for."
• "I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world."
• "We cannot live better than in seeking to become better."
• "Understanding a question is half an answer"
• "Thou shouldst eat to live; not live to eat."
• "What screws us up the most in life is the picture in our head of what it's supposed to be."

Plato

• "Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something."
• "You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation."
• "Courage is knowing what not to fear."
• "Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety."

George Carlin

• "The planet is fine. The people are fucked."
• "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."

Jon Stewart

• "The bias of the mainstream media is toward sensationalism, conflict, and laziness."

Doug Stanhope

• "It's our flaws who make us who we are."
• "Everything that is going to kill you is extremely appetizing."
• "What did you learn in school that you still use today? Go ahead teachers, tell me. What? Fear, conformity, don't question authority…"

Louis C.K.

• "Twitter and Facebook and MySpace; all that stuff makes you warped. We've all basically given ourselves data entry jobs. I've actually heard people say things like, 'Aw shit, I have to update my Twitter.' Really? You have to? That's a big priority for you?"
• "I think you have to try and fail, because failure gets you closer to what you're good at."
• "'I'm bored' is a useless thing to say. You live in a great, big, vast world that you've seen none percent of."
• "Some things I think are very conservative, or very liberal. I think when someone falls into one category for everything, I'm very suspicious. It doesn't make sense to me that you'd have the same solution to every issue."

Carl Sagan

• "I don't want to believe. I want to know."
• "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."
• "One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time."
• "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."
• "If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth."
• "We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good."
• "The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence."
• "Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception."
• "But I could be wrong."
• "Understanding is a kind of ecstasy"
• "There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths."

Albert Einstein

• "If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself."
• "Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere."
• "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."
• "Never memorize something that you can look up."
• "I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious."
• "Any fool can know. The point is to understand."
• "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen"

Richard P. Feynman

• "Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible."
• "Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough."
• "You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing."
• "I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something."
• "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool."
• "The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion."
• "We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress."
• "I'm smart enough to know that I'm dumb."
• "What I cannot create, I do not understand."
• "Words can be meaningless. If they are used in such a way that no sharp conclusions can be drawn."
• "I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong."

Nikola Tesla

• "Anti-social behavior is a trait of intelligence in a world full of conformists."
• "If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration."
• "The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane."

Neil deGrasse Tyson

• "When Students cheat on exams it's because our School System values grades more than Students value learning."
• "Curious that we spend more time congratulating people who have succeeded than encouraging people who have not."
• "We spend the first year of a child's life teaching it to walk and talk and the rest of its life to shut up and sit down."
• "Knowing how to think empowers you far beyond those who know only what to think."
• "The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."
• "Kids are never the problem. They are born scientists. The problem is always the adults. They beat the curiosity out of kids. They outnumber kids. They vote. They wield resources. That's why my public focus is primarily adults."

Isaac Newton

• "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."
• "I do not know what I may 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 than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
• "Men build too many walls and not enough bridges."
• "Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things."

Hubert Reeves

• "Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature. Unaware that this Nature he's destroying is this God he's worshiping."

Linus Pauling

• "When an old and distinguished person speaks to you, listen to him carefully and with respect — but do not believe him. Never put your trust into anything but your own intellect."

George Washington Carver

• "Ninety-Nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses."
• "How far in life you go depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these."

Martin Luther King Jr.

• "Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that."
• "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."
• "Let no man pull you so low as to hate him."
• "Only in the darkness can you see the stars."
• "Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education."
• "No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they'd die for."
• "Forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a constant attitude."
• "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
• "There comes a time when silence is betrayal."
• "We must live together as brothers or perish together as fools."

Frederick Douglass

• "Knowledge is the pathway from slavery to freedom."
• "It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men."
• "I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence."
• "People might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get."
• "To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker."
• "No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck."
• "Freedom is a road seldom traveled by the multitude."

Vincent Van Gogh

• "I would rather die of passion than of boredom."
• "It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done."
• "I dream my painting and I paint my dream."
• "If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced."
• "Normality is a paved road: It's comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it."
• "If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere."
• "I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it."
• "Your profession is not what brings home your weekly paycheck, your profession is what you're put here on earth to do, with such passion and such intensity that it becomes spiritual in calling."

Abraham Lincoln

• "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."
• "Every man's happiness is his own responsibility."
• "Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?"
• "My Best Friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read."
• "When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion."
• "Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves"
• "We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses."
• "I am a slow walker, but I never walk back."
• "Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle."
• "I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice."
• "You cannot help people permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves."

Theodore Roosevelt

• "We need the iron qualities that go with true manhood. We need the positive virtues of resolution, of courage, of indomitable will, of power to do without shrinking the rough work that must always be done."
• "Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life."
• "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."
• "It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed."
• "Believe you can and you're halfway there."
• "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care"
• "To educate a person in the mind but not in morals is to educate a menace to society."
• "Knowing what's right doesn't mean much unless you do what's right."
• "If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn't sit for a month."
• "Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children's children. Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance."
• "In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing."
• "Courage is not having the strength to go on; it is going on when you don't have the strength."
• "No man needs sympathy because he has to work, because he has a burden to carry. Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing."
• "The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it."
• "Politeness [is] a sign of dignity, not subservience."
• "Character, in the long run, is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike."
• "No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency."

Henry Rollins

• "Yes, I guess you could say I am a loner, but I feel more lonely in a crowded room with boring people than I feel on my own."
• "Scar tissue is stronger than regular tissue. Realize the strength, move on."
• "I'll never forget how the depression and loneliness felt good and bad at the same time. Still does."
• "Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better."
• "Girls aren't beautiful, they're pretty. Beautiful is too heavy a word to assign to a girl. Women are beautiful because their faces show that they know they have lost something and picked up something else."
• "Don't do anything by half. If you love someone, love them with all your soul. When you go to work, work your ass off. When you hate someone, hate them until it hurts."
• "I think about the meaning of pain. Pain is personal. It really belongs to the one feeling it. Probably the only thing that is your own. I like mine."
• "If you hate your parents, the man or the establishment, don't show them up by getting wasted and wrapping your car around a tree. If you really want to rebel against your parents, out-learn them, outlive them, and know more than they do."
• "I believe that one defines oneself by reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be like your friends. To be yourself. To cut yourself out of stone."
• "When life hands you a lemon, say, 'Oh yeah, I like lemons! What else ya got?'"
• "Don't push me, I've got a corner at my back, I've nowhere to go except over you."

Bruce Lee

• "It's not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential."
• "Mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage to admit them."
• "I'm not in this world to live up to your expectations and you're not in this world to live up to mine."
• "To hell with circumstances; I create opportunities."
• "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."
• "A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at."
• "Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it."
• "A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer."
• "Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own."
• "Knowledge will give you power, but character respect."
• "Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind."

Mahatma Gandhi

• "Be the change that you wish to see in the world."
• "Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever."
• "When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it--always."
• "The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong."
• "Nobody can hurt me without my permission."
• "Hate the sin, love the sinner."
• "The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others."
• "The future depends on what you do today."
• "Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it."
• "Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will."
• "Poverty is the worst form of violence."
• "Nonviolence is a weapon of the strong."

Malcolm X

• "If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing."
• "My alma mater was books, a good library.... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity."
• "I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being, first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole."
• "Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today."
• "People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book."
• "So early in my life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise."
• "If you have no critics you'll likely have no success."
• "Don't be in a hurry to condemn because he doesn't do what you do or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn't know what you know today."

Frank Zappa

• "Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible."
• "The mind is like a parachute, it doesn't work unless it's open."

Pablo Picasso

• "Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone."
• "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up."
• "Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life."
• "Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not."

Lao Tzu

• "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."
• "A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving."

Buddha

• "You will not be punished for your anger. You will be punished by your anger."
• "Your worst enemies won't harm you as much as your own unguarded thoughts."

Edward Snowden

• "Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say."

Terence McKenna

• "We have to stop Consuming our culture. We have to create culture. Don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are --Now-- is the most immediate sector of your universe. And if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered. Your giving it all away to Icons. Icons which are maintained by an electronic media, so that, you want to dress like X or have lips like Y.. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion. What is real is you, and your friends, your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And you are told No, you're unimportant, you're peripheral -- get a degree, get a job, get a this, get that and then you're a player. You don't even want to play that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world."
• "The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation"
• "You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness."
• "You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding."
• "You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms."
• "If you don't have a plan, you become part of somebody else's plan."
• "We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together."
• "Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coercion, brainwashing, and manipulation."
• "My technique is don't believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite."
• "The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer"
• "Half the time you think your thinking you're actually listening"
• "The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it's only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse."
• "There is a transcendental dimension beyond language... It's just hard as hell to talk about!"
• "The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams."

Thomas Sowell

• "I have never understood why it is 'greed' to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money."
• "People who pride themselves on their 'complexity' and deride others for being 'simplistic' should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth."
• "Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good."
• "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics."
• "Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on 'income distribution,' the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned."
• "The fact that the market is not doing what we wish it would do is no reason to automatically assume that the government would do better."
• "Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric."
• "Can you cite one speck of hard evidence of the benefits of 'diversity' that we have heard gushed about for years? Evidence of its harm can be seen — written in blood — from Iraq to India, from Serbia to Sudan, from Fiji to the Philippines. It is scary how easily so many people can be brainwashed by sheer repetition of a word."
• "Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers."
• "Rhetoric is no substitute for reality."
• "What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?"
• "One of the consequences of such notions as 'entitlements' is that people who have contributed nothing to society feel that society owes them something, apparently just for being nice enough to grace us with their presence."

Friedrich Hayek

• "From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time"
• "Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion."
• "The more the state 'plans' the more difficult planning becomes for the individual."
• "It is because every individual knows little and, in particular, because we rarely know which of us knows best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it."
• "'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have eroded."
• "The chief difference [between totalitarian and free countries] is that only the totalitarians appear clearly to know how they want to achieve that result, while the free world has only its past achievements to show, being by its very nature unable to offer any detailed 'plan' for further growth."

Milton Friedman

• "A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both."
• "One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results."
• "Well first of all, tell me: Is there some society you know that doesn't run on greed? You think Russia doesn't run on greed? You think China doesn't run on greed? What is greed? Of course, none of us are greedy, it's only the other fellow who's greedy. The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn't construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat... In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you're talking about, the only cases in recorded history, are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade."
• "The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another."
• "Governments never learn. Only people learn."
• "Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government."

Maya Angelou

• "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."
• "What you're supposed to do when you don't like a thing is change it. If you can't change it, change the way you think about it. Don't complain."
• "When someone shows you who they are, believe them; the first time."
• "Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently."
• "Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it."
• "Never make someone a priority when all you are to them is an option."
• "If I am not good to myself, how can I expect anyone else to be good to me?"
• "The desire to reach for the stars is ambitious. The desire to reach hearts is wise."
• "Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him."
• "When you learn, teach, when you get, give."

William Shakespeare

• "The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool."
• "All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages."

Mark Twain

• "Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
• "I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."
• "The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog."
• "If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
• "Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect)."
• "The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read."
• "The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time."
• "Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first."
• "Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society."
• "Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other."
• "If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed."
• "It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog."
• "The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself."
• "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."

Isaac Asimov

• "The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."
• "So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You'd better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can't rearrange the universe."
• "In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate."
• "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny...'"
• "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."
• "Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in."
• "I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it. Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself."
• "Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers."
• "And above all things, never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning."

Aldous Huxley

• "The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm."
• "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
• "There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception."
• "That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach."
• "To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries."
• "Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted."

Christopher Hitchens

• "That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence."
• "Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the 'transcendent' and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you."
• "To the dumb question 'Why me?' the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: why not?"
• "To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid."

George Orwell

• "He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past."
• "In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
• "Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it."
• "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
• "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
• "The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection."
• "Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one."
• "Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing."

Oscar Wilde

• "Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken."
• "You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear."
• "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
• "It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it."
• "The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame."
• "Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood."
• "Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary."
• "Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future."
• "Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes."
• "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."
• "If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you."
• "No good deed goes unpunished."
• "Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about."
• "Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious."
• "Everything in moderation, including moderation."
• "Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer."

Hunter S. Thompson

• "The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over."
• "In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity."
• "A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance."
• "We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely—at least, not all the time—but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness."
• "So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?"
• "Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously."
• "I was not proud of what I had learned but I never doubted that it was worth knowing."
• "Freedom is something that dies unless it's used."

Stephen Fry

• "It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more... than a whine."
• "It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me."
• "An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them."
• "The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriousity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is."
• "First love is unrequited ultimately because it's so huge. It's such an act of giving and it requires so much back that it can never be given back. It's like an atom bomb. It's like… It's all the energy of who you are and who you want to be and what you love and what you hope to be explodes. It is impossible for a single... human being to offer that back to you in a mutual way."

Hermann Hesse

• "Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest."
• "If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us."
• "Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish."
• "Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity."
• "I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value."
• "We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps."
• "There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside of them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself."

Bill Bryson

• "Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you."
• "I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted, or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored."
• "It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you."
• "I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything."

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

• "Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth."
• "To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's."
• "Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness."
• "The soul is healed by being with children."
• "Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid."
• "Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery."
• "You can be sincere and still be stupid."

Viktor E. Frankl

• "When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."
• "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
• "But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer."
• "What is to give light must endure burning."
• "Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible."
• "No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same."

Philip K. Dick

• "It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane."
• "The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them."
• "The problem with introspection is that it has no end."

Alden Nowlan

• "The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect, he becomes an adolescent; the day he forgives them, he becomes an adult; the day he forgives himself, he becomes wise."

Harlan Ellison

• "You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant."

Hugh Walpole

• "Life is a comedy to those who think, and a tragedy to those who feel."

Chuck Palahniuk

• "It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace."

Joseph Brodsky

• "Evil takes root when one man starts to think that he is better than another."
• "At all costs try to avoid granting yourself the status of the victim… No matter how abominable your condition may be, try not to blame anything or anybody"

Salvatore Quasimodo

• "The politician wants men to know how to die courageously; the poet wants men to live courageously."

Theodor Mommsen

• "Without passion there is no genius."

Sweden

• "He who buys what he doesn't need steals from himself."
• "Don't throw away the old bucket until you know whether the new one holds water."

African

• "He who conceals his disease cannot expect to be cured."
• "Be wary of the naked man that offers you a shirt."

Arabian

• "Examine what is said, not him who speaks."

Japanese

• "The rich man thinks of next year, the poor man of the present moment."

Native American

• "If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies in yourself."
• "Man has responsibility, not power."

Yiddish

• "Everyone is kneaded out of the same dough, but not baked in the same oven."

Latin

• "Fortune favours the bold"