- “Yin and yang, fundamentally different yet symbiotic. I will never see one but for the other, as day has no meaning absent the dark, nor night without light, good without bad, right without wrong.” ― John Casey
- “Any idea of separation is bondage. True liberation of the mind is in non-differentiation. And in the pursuit of breaking free from all the shackles of such man-made bondages, science is the most effective tool we have till this date. But in order to bring out all its effectiveness into the human society, it must be sweetened first with the touch of philosophy. Science without Philosophy leads to chaos. Philosophy without Science leads to nowhere. Only together they can construct a better world.” ― Abhijit Naskar, Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost
- “All paths are present, always… and we can but choose among them.” ― Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel’s Chosen
- “Any game where the goal is to build territory has to be beautiful. There may be phases of combat, but they are only means to an end, to allow your territory to survive. One of the most extraordinary aspects of the game of go is that it has been proven that in order to win, you must live, but you must also allow the other player to live. Players who are too greedy will lose: it is a subtle game of equilibrium, where you have to get ahead without crushing the other player. In the end, life and death are only the consequences of how well or how poorly you have made your construction. This is what one of Taniguchi’s characters says: you live, you die, these are consequences. It’s a proverb for playing go, and for life.” ― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog
- “Plunging into the depths of hell, re-opening the gates to wounds and emotions that we have long tried to keep sealed and locked within, we discover that that the devil is not the Herculean ruler of darkness that we had imagined, but only a vulnerable and devastated child. With honesty and without judgment, we must muster the courage to meet this innocent child with whom we have come to label as the devil.” ― Forrest Curran, Purple Buddha Project: Purple Book of Self-Love
- “Happenchance sparks with no matter who, waiting for love to arrive. To anyone, here I am, longing, as long as I am alive.” ― John Casey
- “My ideas would burn barbarian stars, topple sectarian gods and raise up empires of liberty and truth.” ― Abhijit Naskar
- “Not only consciousness, but why the physical processes have led to us having consciousness in the first place is beyond explanation through science or scientific method. Some scientists try to skip or assume this question away by denying consciousness.” ― Salman Ahmed Shaikh, Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World
- Truly man is a marvellously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgement on him. Michel de Montaigne
- “Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or silly action for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgement, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?” ― Edgar Allan Poe, The Black Cat
- “How you think and create your inner world that you gonna become in your outer world. Your inner believe manifest you in the outside” ― Rashedur Ryan Rahman
- “There are situations in life which are beyond one. The sensible man realizes this, and slides out of such situations, admitting himself beaten. Others try to grapple with them, but it never does any good. When affairs get in a real tangle, it is best to sit still and let them straighten themselves out. Or, if one does not do that, simply to think no more about them. This is Philosophy. The true philosopher is the man who says “All right,” and goes to sleep in his arm-chair. One’s attitude towards Life’s Little Difficulties should be that of the gentleman in the fable, who sat down on an acorn one day and happened to doze. The warmth of his body caused the acorn to germinate, and it grew so rapidly that, when he awoke, he found himself sitting in the fork of an oak sixty feet from the ground. He thought he would go home, but, finding this impossible, he altered his plans. “Well, well,” he said, “if I cannot compel circumstances to my will, I can at least adapt my will to circumstances. I decide to remain here.” Which he did, and had a not unpleasant time. The oak lacked some of the comforts of home, but the air was splendid and the view excellent.Today’s Great Thought for Young Readers. Imitate this man.” ― P. G. Wodehouse
- “In practice people who study philosophy too long become very odd birds, not to say thoroughly vicious; while even those who are the best of them are reduced by…[philosophy] to complete uselessness as members of society.” ― Plato, Republic: The Theatre of the Mind
- “It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all. By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all.” ― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
- “Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly if there wasn’t someone, somewhere, laughing?” ― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
- “MIGHT, something God only has.” ― A Gentlemen
- “To doubt the literal meaning of the words of Jesus or Moses incurs hostility from most people, but it’s just a fact that if Jesus or Moses were to appear today, unidentified, with the same message he spoke many years ago, his mental stability would be challenged. This isn’t because what Jesus or Moses said was untrue or because modern society is in error but simply because the route they chose to reveal to others has lost relevance and comprehensibility. “Heaven above” fades from meaning when space-age consciousness asks, Where is “above”? But the fact that the old routes have tended, because of language rigidity, to lose their everyday meaning and become almost closed doesn’t mean that the mountain is no longer there. It’s there and will be there as long as consciousness exists.” ― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
- “The timid may say, “What is the use? We shall be sent to prison.” To them I would reply: Even if only two percent of those assigned to perform military service should announce their refusal to fight, as well as urge means other than war of settling international disputes, governments would be powerless, they would not dare send such a large number of people to jail.” ― Albert Einstein
- “Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say that you’ve wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.” ― Fyodor Dostoevsky
- “Whether it was in the maze of my fantastical mind or the allure of her gossamer eyes, they took me to undiscovered worlds of azure and metamorphosis. The air shimmered with every breath, the water tightened with every sound.” ― Hubert Martin
- “A thought in itself is in fact a sinusoidal wave, and, from this, everything else – the entire nature of existence – follows. Equating a thought to a sinusoidal wave that can be used in Fourier mathematics is the greatest intellectual breakthrough of all time. When its consequences are eventually understood by scientists, philosophers and mathematicians, it will revolutionize the human race like nothing before.” ― Mike Hockney, Psychophysics
- “What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua…that’s the only name I can think of for it…like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America, this America, the one that we are now in, an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer. The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced radio, movies and TV, and it seems to me the change was not entirely an improvement. Perhaps because of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. The old channels cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks. In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated.” ― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
- “Sitting still is a pain in the ass.” ― Noah Levine, Against the Stream: A Buddhist Manual for Spiritual Revolutionaries
- “Dubium sapientiae initium. (Doubt is the origin of wisdom.)” ― Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy
- “Reality is non-directional, layered, and potential- all things at once and non-real in the sense that real is an unknown, so “real” is undefined and can not be experienced. Only your experience can be experienced, and that does not encompass everything or anything.” ― Laren Grey Umphlett, The Power of Perception
- “There is no sickness worse for me than words that to be kind must lie.” ― Aeschylus
- “These places I traveled through, they were a lot like the people I knew. Some abodes I muddled about for a day or two, others entertained my thoughts for a year or a few. Each place and person gave me wisdom or growth, and, if I was lucky, sometimes I’d get both.” ― Hubert Martin
- “But is all this true?” said Brutha.Didactylos shrugged. “Could be. Could be. We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork.””You mean you don’t KNOW it’s true?” said Brutha.”I THINK it might be,” said Didactylos. “I could be wrong. Not being certain is what being a philosopher is all about.” ― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
- “To sum it all up, the [Ayn] Rand belief system looks like this:1. Facts are facts: things can be absolutely right or absolutely wrong, as determined by reason.2. According to my reasoning, I am absolutely right.3. Charity is immoral.4. Pay for your own fucking schools.” ― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America
- “We have negative mental habits that come up over and over again. One of the most significant negative habits we should be aware of is that of constantly allowing our mind to run off into the future. Perhaps we got this from our parents. Carried away by our worries, we’re unable to live fully and happily in the present. Deep down, we believe we can’t really be happy just yet—that we still have a few more boxes to be checked off before we can really enjoy life. We speculate, dream, strategize, and plan for these “conditions of happiness” we want to have in the future; and we continually chase after that future, even while we sleep. We may have fears about the future because we don’t know how it’s going to turn out, and these worries and anxieties keep us from enjoying being here now.” ― Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Breath: A Practice for Our Busy Lives