Patrick > Patrick's Quotes

“He cannot become old, for he has never been young; he cannot become young, for he has already become old; in a way he cannot die, for he has never lived; in a way he cannot live, for he is already dead.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

“You are a deeply religious man who doesn’t believe in God. God will seek you out. You’ll come back. Whether here or elsewhere only God can tell.’ ”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge

“Amor Fati – “Love Your Fate”, which is in fact your life.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
― C.G. Jung

“Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.”
― Adam Smith

“Within ten days you will seem a god to those to whom you are now a beast and an ape, if you will return to your principles and the worship of reason.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire.”
― Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld, Maxims

“A mother only does her children harm if she makes them the only concern of her life.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge

“The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.”
― Nietzsche

“The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None

“To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The one measure of true love is: you can insult the other”
― Slavoj Zizek

“A woman simply is, but a man must become. Masculinity is risky and elusive. It is achieved by a revolt from woman, and it is confirmed only by other men.”
― Camille Paglia

“But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.”
― Albert Camus

“Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was.”
― Donald Kingsbury, Courtship Rite

“Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the “normal people” as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like “Have a nice day” and “Weather’s awful today, eh?”, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like “Tell me something that makes you cry” or “What do you think deja vu is for?”. Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others…”
― Timothy Leary

“To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one's self.... And to venture in the highest is precisely to be conscious of one's self.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.”
― E.M. Forster

“If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“But if she is a good woman, a strong woman, she won’t tolerate your childish needs for a pat on the head, collecting bigger toys, and being king of the mountain. A good woman will love the childlike part of you, but she wants your life to be guided by your deepest truths, not your untended childhood wounds. She wants to feel that at your core you have grown beyond the need for kudos and million-dollar toys. She wants to feel your self-generated strength of truth.”
― David Deida, The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work, and Sexual Desire

“But thus I counsel you, my friends: Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. They are people of a low sort and stock; the hangmen and the bloodhound look out of their faces. Mistrust all who talk much of their justice! Verily, their souls lack more than honey. And when they call themselves the good and the just, do not forget that they would be pharisees, if only they had—power.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Nothing emboldens sin so much as mercy.”
― William Shakespeare

“The heart has its reasons which reason knows not.”
― Blaise Pascal

“The beauty of doing business with a crook is that he always forgives you for catching him, so long as you don’t stop doing business with him.”
― Edwin Lefèvre, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator

“If their happiness was best served by leaving me, how would I feel about it?" This reveals the degree to which we are trying to restrict and control the other person--which is attachment and not love.”
― David R. Hawkins, Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.”
― Aristotle

“One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”
― Plato