Mike > Mike's Quotes

“Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, 'This is the real me,' and when you have found that attitude, follow it.”
― William James, The Principles of Psychology

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series

“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion."

[The Minotaur]”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
― Albert Camus

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”
― William James, The Will to Believe : and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy

“Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.”
― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

“To change one’s life:
1. Start immediately.
2. Do it flamboyantly.
3. No exceptions.”
― William James

“The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude.”
― William James

“The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.”
― William James

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”
― Friedrich W. Nietzsche

“God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.”
― Voltaire

“Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action. ”
― William James

“There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power or our will. ”
― Epictetus

“The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.”
― William Francis Butler, Charles George Gordon

“Someone will say, "I did not ask to be born." This is a naive way of throwing greater emphasis on our facticity. I am responsible for everything, in fact,
except for my very responsibility, for I am not the foundation of my being. Therefore everything takes place as if I were compelled to be responsible. I am abandoned in the world, not in the sense that I might remain abandoned and passive in a hostile universe like a board floating on the water, but rather in the sense that I find myself suddenly alone and without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant. For I am responsible for my very desire of fleeing responsibilities. To make myself passive in the world, to refuse to act upon things and upon Others is still to choose myself, and suicide is one mode among others of being-in-the-world. Yet I find an absolute responsibility for the fact that my facticity (here the fact of my birth) is directly inapprehensible and even inconceivable, for this fact of my birth never appears as a brute fact but always across a projective reconstruction of my for-itself. I am ashamed of being born or I am astonished at it or I rejoice over it, or in attempting to get rid of my life I affirm that I live and I assume this life as bad. Thus in a certain sense I choose being born.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions

“Misanthropy develops when without art one puts complete trust in somebody thinking the man absolutely true and sound and reliable and then a little later discovers him to be bad and unreliable ... and when it happens to someone often ... he ends up ... hating everyone”
― Plato, Phaedo

“Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible.”
― Miguel de Unamuno

“At times to be silent is to lie. You will win because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince. For to convince you need to persuade. And in order to persuade you would need what you lack: Reason and Right”
― Miguel de Unamuno

“Piensa el sentimiento, siente el pensamiento."

(roughly translated, "Think about the emotional and feel the intellectual")”
― Miguel de Unamuno

“We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.”
― William James

“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”
― William James

“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.”
― William James

“Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.”
― William James

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.'

'In fact,' said Mustapha Mond, 'you're claiming the right to be unhappy.'

'All right then,' said the Savage defiantly, 'I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.'

'Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.' There was a long silence.

'I claim them all,' said the Savage at last.

Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. 'You're welcome," he said.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“The life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general, and when only its most significant features are emphasized, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail it has the character of a comedy.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume I

“If you want a quality, act as if you already have it. —William James”
― Robert J. Morgan, Mastering Life Before It's Too Late: 10 Biblical Strategies for a Lifetime of Purpose

“A child that is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth”
― African Proverb