A long long time ago I began collecting inspirational quotes and aphorisms which became my collection of quotes.
When I remember all
~ Tom Moore
the friends so link’d together,
I’ve seen around me fall,
like leaves in wintry weather;
I feel like one who treads alone
some banquet hall deserted,
Whose lights are fled, whose garlands dead,
and all but he departed.
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Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
~ Franz Kafka
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These details may seem trivial to the foolish, but to the thoughtful they will not seem trivial. The proper, wise balancing of one’s whole life may depend upon the feasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour.
~ Arnold Bennett
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You have to be myopic and completely focused and unbalanced in every way. Once you’ve achieved success, you’re free to do whatever you like.
~ Kevin O’Leary
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There are two types of ignorance, the pure, natural ignorance into which all people are born, and the ignorance of the so-called wise. You will see that many among those who call themselves scholars do not know real life, and they despise simple people and simple things.
~ Blaise Pascal
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The minute we begin to think we have all the answers, we forget the questions.
~ Madeleine L’Engle
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I put a dollar in one of those change machines. Nothing changed.
~ George Carlin
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Accursed thirst for gold! What dost thou not compel mortals to do?
~ Virgil
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Instead of feeling complacent about what you know, you must expand your knowledge to related fields, giving your mind fuel to make new associations between different ideas. You must experiment and look at problems from all possible angles. As your thinking grows more fluid, your mind will grow increasingly dimensional, seeing more and more aspects of reality. In the end, you will turn against the very rules you have internalized, shaping and reforming them to suit your spirit.
~ Robert Greene
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The worst mistake which was ever made in this world was the separation of political science from ethics.
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Learning never exhausts the mind.
~ Leonardo da Vinci
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[…] what we need is a few hints on the art of creating an entirely new kind of society, durable but adventurous, strong but humane, highly organized but liberty-loving, elastic and adaptable. In this matter Greece and Rome can teach us only negatively—by demonstrating, in their divergent ways, what not to do.
~ Aldous Huxley
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The alternative is an interaction that creates a connection instead of destroying it. Where is the eye contact? Where is the dignity that comes from recognizing another?
When we humanize the person at the other end of the counter or the phone or the Internet, we grant them something precious—personhood. When we treat the people around us with dignity, we create an entirely different platform for the words we utter and the plans we make.
~ Seth Godin
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Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.
~ Marcel Proust
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If you see that some aspect of your society is bad, and you want to improve it, there is only one way to do so: You have to improve people. And in order to improve people, you begin with only one thing: You can become better yourself.
~ Leo Tolstoy
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Many stupid things are uttered by people whose only motivation is to say something original.
~ Voltaire
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I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
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After a long conversation, stop and try to remember what you have just discussed. Don’t be surprised if many things, sometimes even everything you have discussed, were meaningless, empty, and trivial, and sometimes even bad.
~ Leo Tolstoy
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Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment… the present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.
~ C.S. Lewis
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When a person sets to work, even if it is the most unqualified, primitive, simple work, the human soul calms down. As soon as a person starts to work, all the demons leave him and cannot approach him. A man becomes a man.
~ Thomas Carlyle
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