A Curated Selection of Quotes (November 2024)

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"Good advice is always certain to be ignored, but that's no reason not to give it."

- Agatha Christie

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“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”

— Franz Kafka

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"[…] The only part of writing I’m really familiar with is the Vows and Commitments."

- Ted Gioia

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"The biggest writing tools we all need are peace, safety and silence."

- Ada Limón

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“We all need someone to look at us.”

— Milan Kundera

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“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”

— Carl Jung

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“It's only terrible to have nothing to wait for.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

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“You are what you do, not what you say you'll do.”

— Carl Jung

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“Books are like imprisoned souls until some one takes them down from a shelf and reads them.”

— Samuel Butler

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“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”

— Robert A. Heinlein

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“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

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“A man is more a man through the things he keeps to himself than through those he says.”

— Albert Camus

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Johan Galtung defines peace as “the absence of all forms of violence” including “direct, cultural and structural violence"

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"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

- Hegel

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"When I despair, I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it, always."

- Gandhi

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"Freedom of the press is not just important to democracy, it is democracy."

- Walter Cronkite

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"We still have a First Amendment right to assemble, to petition our government, and to free speech and a free press. They are ours to insist upon or lose. I intend to insist."

- Joyce Vance

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“The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.”

— Maximilien Robespierre

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“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

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“Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.”

— Albert Camus

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“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

— Aldous Huxley

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“One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways.”

— Bertrand Russell

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“The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.”

— Albert Camus

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“If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.”

— Orson Welles

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“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

— Viktor Frankl

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“The most important thing we ever learn at school is the fact that the most important things can’t be learned at school.”

— Haruki Murakami

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"Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."

- Thomas Edison

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"A champion is afraid of losing. Everyone else is afraid of winning."

- Billie Jean King

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“The wise man thinks about his troubles only when there is some purpose in doing so; at other times he thinks about other things, or, if it is night, about nothing at all.”

— Bertrand Russell

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"Life is like a 10-speed bicycle. Most of us have gears we never use."

- Charles M. Schulz

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"It takes no money to respect the individual."

- Harvey Milk

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“I always loved you, and if one loves anyone, one loves the whole person, just as they are and not as one would like them to be.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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“The higher we are placed, the more humbly should we walk.”

— Cicero

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“But logic is not all, one needs one's heart to follow an idea.”

— Richard Feynman

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“Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”

— Franz Kafka

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“And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’”

– Kurt Vonnegut

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“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

— Simone Weil

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