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Philosophy-of-life Quotes

The work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists ourselves...The art of reading poetry i...

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Picture of Harold Bloom
Harold BloomThe Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost

Before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by...

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All kinds of things are happening to me." I begin. ,,Some I choose, some I didn't. I don't know how ...

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At the same time that 'I' am the content of a relation, 'I' am also that which does the relating.

When shit becomes valuable, the poor will be born without assholes.

...flight from tyranny does not of itself insure a safe asylum, far less a happy home.

Picture of Herman Melville
Herman MelvilleThe Encantadas or Enchanted Isles: By Herman Melville - Illustrated

Often ill comes from the good, as good from ill.

Picture of Herman Melville
Herman MelvilleThe Encantadas or Enchanted Isles: By Herman Melville - Illustrated

... the river is everywhere at once, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry,...

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Alas, Siddhartha, I see you suffering, but you're suffering a pain at which one would like to laugh,...

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We must believe in free will, we have no choice.

I have never, in all my life, not for one moment, been tempted toward religion of any kind. The fact...

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Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.

Picture of Italo Calvino
Italo CalvinoIf on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Writing is turning life's worst moments into money.

Other things being roughly equal, that man lives most keenly who lives in closest harmony with natur...

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It may seem contradictory, but in the languid tropics one spends more time contemplating those great...

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Things, relationship, and ideas are so transparently impermanent, we are ever made unhappy by them.....

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The Native Americans know that wolves are mirrors for humans. What they show us are our strengths an...

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The Lord enjoins us to do good to all without exception, though the greater part, if estimated by th...

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John CalvinInstitutes of the Christian Religion

Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful.

The existence of broccoli does not in any way affect the taste of chocolate".

The existence of broccoli does not in any way affect the taste of chocolate.

As Garp put it, 'You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.' E...

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John IrvingThe World According to Garp

The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long a...

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A lot of people see doubt as legitimate philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middl...

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John le CarréThe Honourable Schoolboy

Happiness exists on earth, and it is won through prudent exercise of reason, knowledge of the harmon...

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I am I and my circumstance; and, if I do not save it, I do not save myself.

Reason is the inextinguishable impulse to philosophize with whose destruction reason itself is destr...

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As to the roaming of sages,They move in utter emptiness,Let their minds meander in the great nothing...

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The Master, by residing in the Tao,sets an example for all beings.Because he doesn't display himself...

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...suffering and freedom have their limits...those limits are very near together.

Man lives consciously for himself but unconsciously he serves as an instrument for the accomplishmen...

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There are two sides to the life of every man: there is his individual existence which is free in pro...

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Man is created for happiness, that happiness lies in himself, in the satisfaction of simple human ne...

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It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.

Worrying is the most natural and spontaneous of all human functions. It is time to acknowledge this,...

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Picture of Lewis Thomas
Lewis ThomasThe Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher

Every man must find his own philosophy, his attitude towards life.

Happiness for me is largely a matter of digestion.

There is a certain proper and luxurious way of lying in bed. Confucius, that great artist of life, "...

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If one's bowels move, one is happy, and if they don't move, one is unhappy. That is all there is to ...

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Those who are wise won't be busy, and those who are too busy can't be wise.

Reality - Dreams = Animal BeingReality + Dreams = A Heart-Ache (usually called Idealism)Reality + Hu...

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Picture of Lin Yutang
Lin YutangThe Importance of Living

An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers...To define everything is to annihilate mu...

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In your language you have a form of poetry called a sonnet...It is a very strict form of poetry, is ...

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Sexual ecstasy is like death. It is one of the secrets of nature’s wisdom.

…praise does not make anything better or worse.

The world is mere change, and this life, opinion.

Be like a rocky promontory against which the restless surf continually pounds; it stands fast while ...

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Be your own master, and look at things as a man, as a human being, as a citizen, as a mortal creatur...

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What you don’t know won’t hurt you. A dubious maxim: sometimes what you don’t know can hurt you very...

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But the elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time.

You're too young to decide to live forever.

There are people who can never go to Fantastica," said Mr. Coreander, "and others who can, but who s...

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In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one 'episteme' that defines the c...

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Picture of Michel Foucault
Michel FoucaultThe Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away. T...

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But a desperate heart will seduce the mind.

A grayeyard is not a democracy, and yet death is the great democracy..

Every day I add to the list of things I refuse to discuss. The wiser the man, the longer the list.

Picture of Nicolas Chamfort
Nicolas ChamfortMaximes et pensées : Caractères et anecdotes

For a scientist, this is a good way to live and die, maybe the ideal way for any of us - excitedly f...

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The essential reason for my loneliness is that I don't even know where I belong.

Dear little Swallow,’ said the Prince, ‘you tell me of marvelous things, but more marvelous than any...

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Picture of Oscar Wilde
Oscar WildeThe Happy Prince and Other Tales

If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart.

Picture of Oscar Wilde
Oscar WildeThe Picture of Dorian Gray

There can be no fairer spectacle than that of a man, who combines the possession of moral beauty in ...

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The society we have described can never grow into a reality or see the light of day, and there will ...

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Have you ever sensed that our soul is immortal and never dies?

At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet

Adharmenaidhate tabat, tato bhadrani pashyati, tatah sapatnan jayati, - samulastu vinashyati. In unr...

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And what is written well and what is written badly...need we ask Lysias or any other poet or orator ...

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Picture of Robert M. Pirsig
Robert M. PirsigZen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

You meet somebody at the seashore on a vacation and have a wonderful time together. Or in a corner a...

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She wanted to say, I am made of smoke. My mind is smoke, my thoughts are smoke, I am all smoke and o...

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Picture of Salman Rushdie
Salman RushdieTwo Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

Maybe in the case of true human, their mind, their soul, their consciousness flows through their bod...

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Picture of Salman Rushdie
Salman RushdieTwo Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

Ibn Rushd caressing her body had often praised its beauty to the point at which she grew irritated a...

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Picture of Salman Rushdie
Salman RushdieTwo Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

Our habitual failure to recognise thought as thought, our habitual identification with discursive th...

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Habitual identification with discursive thought is the source of human suffering

To quench my longing I bent me low By the streams of the spirits of Peace that flow In that magical ...

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Don't base reality on what you have seen when you have seen very little.

When you play with a gentleman, you play like a gentleman. But when you play with bastards, make sur...

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So much of life, it seems, is determined by pure randomness.

So when the ruling ideology enjoins us to enjoy sex, not to feel guilty about it, since we are not b...

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Picture of Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj ŽižekThe Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity

Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart’s desire the other is to get it.

All I know is that I do not know anything

Intelligent individuals learn from every thing and every one; average people, from their experiences...

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The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but size. Size encompasses life, and the Tower ...

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The world was made in order to result in a beautiful book.

There's only so much room at the top of the heap. The rest of us are fill dirt.

There are three conditions which often look alikeYet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgero...

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Nanny's philosophy of life was to do what seemed like a good idea at the time, and do it as hard as ...

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Friendship is the source of the greatest pleasures, and without friends even the most agreeable purs...

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The widespread willingness to rely on thermonuclear bombs as the ultimate weapon displays a cavalier...

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Picture of Thomas Nagel
Thomas NagelThe View from Nowhere

There are two more turds, smaller ones, and when he has eaten these, residual shit to lick out of he...

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Is that man's fate: to spend his closest hours to truth longing for a lie?

Picture of Tom Robbins
Tom RobbinsAnother Roadside Attraction

The illusion of the seventh veil was the illusion that you could get somebody else to do it for you....

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In that pallid and sullen shadow in which he crawled, whenever he turned his head and endeavoured to...

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Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives and few are able to raise themselves above the ...

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An opportunity fordoing an injury happens a hundred times a day, hut for doing good not once a year,...

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...our great modern error is the belief that we must invariably give up one thing in order to have a...

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We are what we repeatedly do. Greatness then, is not an act, but a habit

You know that if I were reincarnated, I’d want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies h...

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Life itself is a rickety building

Let tomorrow cross its own rivers.

Picture of William Morris
William MorrisThe Well at the World's End