A Curated Selection of Quotes (May 2024)

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“You only get one life. It’s actually your duty to live it as fully as possible.”

— Jojo Moyes

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“Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

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“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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"Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow."

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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“If anybody asks me what I have accomplished, I will say all I have accomplished is that I have written a few good sentences.”

— Eric Hoffer

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"We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state."

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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“Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.”

— Simone Weil

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“An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched.”

— Albert Camus

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“If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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“To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.”

— Henri Poincaré

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“If you are the smartest person in the room, then you are in the wrong room.”

— Confucius

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"Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them.”

— Camus

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"We will have to choose, in the more or less near future, between collective suicide and the intelligent use of our scientific conquests.”

— Camus

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“It is not death that one should fear, but never beginning to live.”

— Marcus Aurelius

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“How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.”

— Marcus Aurelius

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“We love ourselves above all others, yet we put more stock in other people’s opinions of us than in our own.”

— Marcus Aurelius

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"You always have the option of having no opinion."

— Marcus Aurelius

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“It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power — power to oppress others.”

— Eric Hoffer

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“The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.”

— Eric Hoffer

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“Death is always and under all circumstances a tragedy, for if it is not, then it means that life itself has become one.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

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“What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war.”

— Simone Weil

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"What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books."

— Sigmund Freud

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“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.”

— Dr. Seuss

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“To become god is merely to be free on this earth, not to serve an immortal being.”

— Albert Camus

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"To be great is to be misunderstood."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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"Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength."

- Eric Hoffer

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"Peace cannot be achieved through violence; it can only be attained through understanding."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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"They say love is the best investment; the more you give, the more you get in return."

- Audrey Hepburn

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“I am rooted, but I flow.”

- Virginia Woolf

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“I feel that the longest and worst punishment should be reserved for those who slandered God by inventing Hell.”

— Isaac Asimov

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“There are many aspects of the universe that still cannot be explained satisfactorily by science; but ignorance only implies ignorance that may someday be conquered. To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.”

— Isaac Asimov

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“I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.”

— Isaac Asimov

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"An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail."

- Edwin H. Land

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“In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

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“You'd be surprised at the things people will do in order to get their names or pictures in the paper.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

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“If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

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“I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

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“There will be no freedom, no lawfulness, no rights, if we allow climate breakdown to become the catastrophe that is now threatened.”

- Sue Parfitt (retired minister)

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"The greatness of a man is not in how much wealth he acquires, but in his integrity and his ability to affect those around him positively."

- Bob Marley

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"Never listen to people who speak badly of others and good to you."

- Leo Tolstoy

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"I want people to talk to one another no matter what their difference of opinion might be."

- Studs Terkel

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"When I am asked, "What, in your view, is the worst human rights problem in the world today?" I reply: "Absolute poverty." This is not the answer most journalists expect. It is neither sexy nor legalistic. But it is true."

- Mary Robinson

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"You have to pick the places you don't walk away from."

- Joan Didion

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“Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

- Anne Lamott

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"We can have faith in the future only if we have faith in ourselves."

- John F. Kennedy

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"Life is bristling with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one's garden."

- Voltaire

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"He who does great deeds, does them from his innate sensitiveness to moral beauty."

- Walt Whitman

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“The world needs you and it needs the things you carry.”

- Susan Cain

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