“I want you to believe...to believe in things that you cannot.”
Bram Stoker - Dracula
The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror. - Hans-Georg Gadamer
"Falling in love and having a relationship are two different things."
Keeanu Reeves
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
But you are eternity and you are the mirror.
-Kahlil Gibran
You have come into a hard world. I know of only one easy place in it, and that is the grave. - Henry Ward Beecher
“ ‘Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible.’ “
From the book War and Peace
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
-- Isaac Asimov
"Sometimes, people aren't as consciously aware of their decisions as they should be."
Timothy Olyphant
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them. - James Baldwin
"Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant." -Robert Louis Stevenson
“Never waste a minute thinking about people you don't like.”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower
Whenever there is fear, you will get wrong figures. - W. Edwards Deming
“Until the great mass of the people shall be filled with the sense of responsibility for each others welfare, social justice can never be attained.” - Helen Keller
“Gossip is just a tool to distract people who have nothing better to do from feeling jealous of those few of us still remaining with noble hearts.”
― Anna Godbersen, Splendor
It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man. - H. L. Mencken
“He who thinks great thoughts, often makes great errors” – Martin Heidegger
The absent are never without fault, nor the present without excuse. - Benjamin Franklin
"War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children." -- Jimmy Carter
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Albert Einstein
The best blood will at some time get into a fool or a mosquito. - Benito Mussolini
“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society.”
—Mark Twain
“Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye
From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned. - Immanuel Kant
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
Not suffering another existence is reaching the Way. - Bodhidharma
"Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom." -Thomas Jefferson
"Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment" - Buddha
"A wisp of evil can lure the vulnerable into a miasma of wickedness."
Michael Shaw
I have spent more than half a lifetime trying to express the tragic moment. - John Locke
“What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational” – G. W. F. Hegel
Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there. – Henry James
"When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses."
— Shirley Chisholm
Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live. - Anais Nin
“I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsch
Many a man thinks he is patient when, in reality, he is indifferent. - B. C. Forbes
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein
"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." - Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg trails
He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears. - Michel de Montaigne
“Take responsibility of your own happiness, never put it in other people’s hands.”
― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
I should be making plans more for the next world than for this one. - Giulio Andreotti
"You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough."
Mae West
“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
"From the moment I could talk I was ordered to listen" - Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens)
The suicide arrives at the conclusion that what he is seeking does not exist; the seeker concludes that what he has not yet looked in the right place. - Paul Watzlawick
“I didn't want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that's really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare you're so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare.”
― Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story
“Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination” – Immanuel Kant
Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless. - B. F. Skinner
"I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the water to create many ripples." -Mother Teresa
And, after all, what is a lie? 'Tis but the truth in a masquerade. - Alexander Pope
“Tears shed for another person are not a sign of weakness. They are a sign of a pure heart.”
― José N. Harris, MI VIDA: A Story of Faith, Hope and Love
"If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor." -Eleanor Roosevelt