John Pants > John's Quotes

“Cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it.”
― Voltaire

“Push back against the age as hard as it pushes against you.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“There are plenty of people to whom the crucial problems of their lives never get presented in terms they can understand.”
― John Jay Chapman

“Those who do not feel pain seldom think that it is felt.”
― Dr. Samuel Johnson

“The commitment to morality, or non-harming, is a source of tremendous strength, because it helps free the mind from the remorse of having done unwholesome actions. Freedom from remorse leads to happiness. Happiness leads to concentration. Concentration brings wisdom. And wisdom is the source of peace and freedom in our lives.”
― Joseph Goldstein, A Heart Full of Peace

“Any foolish boy can stamp on a beetle, but all the professors in the world cannot make a beetle.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography

“The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.”
― Susan Sontag

“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography

“Change and growth take place when a person has risked himself and dares to become involved with experimenting with his own life.”
― Herbert A. Otto

“If we can find the money to kill people, we can find the money to help people.”
― Tony Benn

“In the future, the great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle these complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them -- those who can acquire skills and discipline their minds and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them and can never focus enough to learn.”
― Robert Greene, Mastery

“But abuse is the local eruption of systemic oppression, and oppression the accumulation of millions of small systematic abuses.”
― Aurora Levins Morales, Medicine Stories: History, Culture and the Politics of Integrity

“Not what we have But what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.”
― Epicurus

“Well, I really want to encourage a kind of fantasy, a kind of magic. I love the term magic realism, whoever invented it – I do actually like it because it says certain things. It's about expanding how you see the world. I think we live in an age where we're just hammered, hammered to think this is what the world is. Television's saying, everything's saying 'That's the world.' And it's not the world. The world is a million possible things.”
― Terry Gilliam

“...we have more faith in what we imitate than in what we originate. We cannot derive a sense of absolute certitude from anything which has its roots in us. The most poignant sense of insecurity comes from standing alone and we are not alone when we imitate. It is thus with most of us; we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.”
― Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do

“That said, deciding to avoid other people does not necessarily equate with having no desire whatsoever for company; it may simply reflect a dissatisfaction with what—or who—is available. Cynics are, in the end, only idealists with awkwardly high standards. In Chamfort's words, 'It is sometimes said of a man who lives alone that he does not like society. This is like saying of a man that he does not like going for walks because he is not fond of walking at night in the forêt de Bondy.”
― Alain De Botton, Status Anxiety

“If you want to learn to swim jump into the water. On dry land no frame of mind is ever going to help you.”
― Bruce Lee

“There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.”
― Elbert Hubbard, Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Vol. 3: American Statesmen

“There are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“To define is to limit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“There is a loftier ambition than to stand high in the world. It is to step down and lift mankind a little higher.”
― Henry Van Dyke

“Self-confidence isn’t - as we might first imagine - the conviction that we’re bound to succeed at everything we try. The belief that we can’t fail is an irrational delusion bound eventually to lead to disaster. Genuine confidence is precisely the opposite: the inner sureness that we’ll be OK even if we do fail quite a few times and that our sense of self-worth can remain more or less intact, even if we don’t exactly pull off what we’re aiming at. To the confident person, the stakes are manageable - which leaves them free to have a go at all the many interesting things in the world where success cannot be guaranteed.”
― Alain de Botton

“It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“Do not ask your children
to strive for extraordinary lives.
Such striving may seem admirable,
but it is the way of foolishness.
Help them instead to find the wonder
and the marvel of an ordinary life.
Show them the joy of tasting
tomatoes, apples and pears.
Show them how to cry
when pets and people die.
Show them the infinite pleasure
in the touch of a hand.
And make the ordinary come alive for them.
The extraordinary will take care of itself.”
― William Martin, The Parent's Tao Te Ching: Ancient Advice for Modern Parents

“Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very quiet if only those birds sing there that sang best.”
― Henry Van Dyke

“When wealth is passed off as merit, bad luck is seen as bad character. This is how ideologues justify punishing the sick and the poor. But poverty is neither a crime nor a character flaw. Stigmatise those who let people die, not those who struggle to live.”
― Sarah Kendzior

“Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending. You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.”
― Augustine of Hippo Augustine of Hippo