Favorite Quotes

Love

Believe me Felix, women are fundamentally evil. Their only purpose in this world is to wreck men's hearts, empty their wallets and ruin their lives. The only thing to do is to pretend they don't exist.
~ Pierre La Mure, "Beyond Desire"

The more you love, the more you suffer.
~ Vincent van Gogh

Art

I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it's true I'm here, and I'm just as strange as you.
~ Frida Kahlo

The beautiful is a manifestation of the secret laws of nature... When nature begins to reveal her open secret to a person, he feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

When you do something noble and beautiful and nobody noticed, do not be sad. For the sun every morning is a beautiful spectacle and yet most of the audience still sleeps.
~ John Lennon

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
~ Franz Kafka

History

We learn from history that we do not learn from history.
~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Philosophy

Life is meaningless, but worth living, provided you recognize it's meaningless.
~ Albert Camus

The intelligent desire self-control;
children want candy.
~ Rumi

I don’t mind what happens.
That is the essence of inner freedom.
~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

You didn't come into this world.
You came out of it,
like a wave from the ocean.
You are not a stranger here.
~ Alan Watts

A stupid or simple person is always ready to see the wrong in another and ready to form an opinion and to judge. But you will find a wise person expressing his opinion of others quite differently, always trying to tolerate and always trying to forgive still more. The present is the reflection of the past, and the future will be the echo of the present; this saying will always prove true.
~ Hazrat Inayat Khan

A man who as a physical being is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him.
~ Søren Kierkegaard

All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, until they take root in our personal experience.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.
~ André Gide

Truth is a product of the human spirit that wouldn't exist at all, if we wouldn't create it.
~ Rudolf Steiner

Politics

All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.
~ John Steinbeck

Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, these ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
~ Robert F. Kennedy

Patriotism is a superstition, one far more injurious, brutal and inhumane than religion.
~ Gustave Hervé

Psychology

We suffer more in imagination than in reality.
~ Seneca

Mind is stress -
meditation is
relaxation.
~ Osho

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.
~ William Gibson

Rare in the world is one who no longer even cares for experience. In him the true understanding has already dawned.
~ Ramesh S. Balsekar

Three things tell a man: his eyes, his friends and his favorite quotes.
~ Immanuel Kant

Life should be a sweet song but man has made it very bitter, very ugly. It has lost all the qualities of music, rhythm, harmony. It has become an ugly struggle to survive, and survival to no purpose at all, just an ugly struggle which leads nowhere, a cut-throat competition, absolutely unnecessary. Life is meant to be a celebration, not a competition. We need not be enemies here.
~ Osho

What the herd hates most is the one who thinks differently; it is not so much the opinion itself, but the audacity of wanting to think for themselves, something that they do not know how to do.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer

A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Kindness is like snow — it beautifies everything it covers.
~ Kahlil Gibran

Good mind, good world.
Bad mind, bad world.
No mind, no world.
~ Swami Parthasarathy

Spirituality

The essence of spirituality and mysticism is readiness to serve the person next to us.
~ Hazrat Inayat Khan

Religion

God is a circle whose centre is everywhere, and its circumference nowhere.
~ Hermes Trismegistos

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
~ Seneca

What is required now is complete mutual understanding, not just tolerance and patience. So far, Christians have tended to take the attitude that, while they do not understand the faith of Muslims or of the Jewish people, and equally they do not understand Christianity, each one tolerates the other's views. This attitude will prove insufficient. In the future, complete understanding is necessary. Human beings must be able to recognize that their faith has developed within a certain culture and that it determines their thoughts and ideals. But life is shared with people of different cultures and with different views, and these a person must endeavor to understand. The truth should result in more than mere patience and tolerance; it should enable a person to enter with understanding into what the others feel and experience. A person's comprehension of Truth must encompass all other faiths.
~ Rudolf Steiner

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
~ Epicurus

There cannot be any volition. God cannot let two billion people have volition and still run this universe with any kind of precision!
~ Ramesh S. Balsekar

There is no scripture in which contradiction does not exist. It is the contradiction which makes the music of the message.
~ Hazrat Inayat Khan

A person should hear a little music, read a little poetry and see a fine picture every day in order that worldly cares do not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Because we cannot discover God's throne in the sky with a radio telescope or establish (for certain) that a beloved father or mother is still about in a more or less corporeal form, people assume that such ideas are "not true." I would rather say that they are not "true" enough, for these are conceptions of a kind that have accompanied human life from prehistoric times, and that still break through into consciousness at any provocation.
~ Carl Gustav Jung

The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly.
~ Søren Kierkegaard

Even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardour of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ.
~ Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

If just once a person could see what dying is like, what happens in death, then the next time he would have no fear of death because there would be no death.
~ Osho

Lord, you exist as me. Your power moves, and I start walking. A prior impulse is the only difference between us. Other than that, everything I am is You.
~ Lalla (14th century North Indian mystic)

These theologians fail to see that it is not a matter of proving the existence of the light, but of blind people who do not know that their eyes could see. It is high time we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing.
~ Carl Gustav Jung

The Saint is a man who disciplines his ego. The Sage is a man who rids himself of his ego.
~ Wei Wu Wei

A billion stars go spinning through the night,
Blazing high above your head.
But in you is the presence that
Will be, when all the stars are dead.
~ Ranier Maria Rilke

Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
~ Alan Watts

How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain, can experience itself as anything less than a god?
~ Alan Watts

Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day's own trouble be sufficient for the day.
~ Yeshua

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.
~ Buddha Siddhartha Guatama Shakyamuni

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
~ Carl G. Jung

To preach morality is easy,
to establish it is difficult.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Zen

In spring, hundred of flowers;
In autumn, a harvest moon.
In summer, a refreshing breeze;
In winter, snow will accompany you.
If useless things do not hang in your mind,
Any season is good season for you.
~ Wu Men Hui Kai

We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.
~ Lao-tzu