Life Celebration Quotes
Crafted with the reader in mind, this collection is clearly divided by themes:
Agatha Christie
The truth, however ugly in itself, is always curious and beautiful to seekers after it.
Everything must be taken into account. If the fact will not fit the theory - let the theory go.
Alan Watts
What I am really saying is that you don’t need to do
anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of a galaxy. You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all.
You are wasting your energy all the time in self defense, trying to manage things, trying to force things to conform to your will.
You can make any human activity into meditation simply by being completely with it and doing it just to do it.
Enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what already is.
Albert Camus
Always go too far, because that's where you'll find the truth.
The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.
Albert Einstein
Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder, to search for the truth. Have holy curiosity. Make your life worth living.
If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.
Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. Matter is spirit reduced to point of visibility. There is no matter.
What is right is not always popular and what is popular is not always right.
The more I learn of physics, the more I am drawn to metaphysics.
Aldous Huxley
Facts do not cease to exist just because they are ignored.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.
Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.
Bertrand Russell
People’s opinions are mainly designed to make them feel comfortable; truth, for most people is a secondary consideration.
Carl Jung
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Carl Sagan
At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes -an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense.
Confucius
If you are the smartest person in the room, then you are in the wrong room.
When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it – this is knowledge.
Deepak Chopra
Religion is belief in someone else's experience. Spirituality is having your own experience. Atheism is no experience only measurement.
Dalai Lama
When you talk, you’re only repeating what you know. But if you listen, you may learn something new.
The purpose of religion is to control yourself, not criticize others.
Frank Zappa
Without deviation progress is not possible.
Franz Kafka
A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.
You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
When I look back, at the past and think of all the time I squandered in error and idleness, lacking the knowledge needed to live. When I think of how often I sinned against my heart and soul, then my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute could have been an eternity of happiness! If youth only knew! Now my life will change, now will I be reborn. Dear brother, I swear that I shall not lose hope. I will keep my soul pure and my heart open. I will be reborn for better.
George Bernard Shaw
Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.
The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.
George Carlin
Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.
People who say they don't care what people think are usually desperate to have people think they don't care what people think.
Most people work just hard enough not to get fired and get paid just enough money not to quit.
Henry David Thoreau
The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
Isaac Asimov
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Knowledge can be taught in a school, but wisdom cannot be taught. A school of wisdom is nonsense. Wisdom is the discovery and the understanding of what is from moment to moment, and how can you be taught to observe what is?
Your God is the product of your imagination or your fear. So do not speculate about the unknown. Understand the known and be free of it.
When we are inwardly poor, we indulge in every form of outward show, in wealth, power and possessions. When our hearts are empty, we collect things. If we can afford it, we surround ourselves with objects that we consider beautiful, and because we attach enormous importance to them, we are responsible for much misery and destruction.
Khalil Gibran
If I accept the sunshine and warmth, then I must also accept the thunder and lightning.
Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth.
Leo Tolstoy
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
Marcus Aurelius
Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
You always own the option of having no opinion.
Margaret Atwood
When I was young I believed that ‘nonfiction’ meant ‘true.’ But you read a history written in, say, 1920 and a history of the same events written in 1995 and they’re very different. There may not be one Truth—there may be several truths—but saying that is not to say that reality doesn’t exist.
Marie Curie
When radium was discovered, no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it.
Mark Twain
There are many humorous things in the world, among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages.
Oscar Wilde
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
Plato
Reality is created by the mind. We can change our reality by changing our mind.
Who are the true philosophers? Those whose passion is to love the truth.
Robert Anton Wilson
I do not believe anything. Most people, even the educated, think that everybody must “believe” something or other, that if one is not a theist, one must be a dogmatic atheist, and if one does not think Capitalism is perfect, one must believe fervently in Socialism, and if one does not have blind faith in X, one must alternatively have blind faith in not-X, or the reverse of X.
My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence.
Rumi
I looked in temples, churches and mosques. But I found the divine within my heart.
There is a life-force within your soul, seek that life. There is a gem in the mountain of your body, seek that mine. O traveller, if you are in search of that don't look outside, look inside yourself and seek that.
Seneca
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
Simone de Beauvoir
I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me.
Sir Isaac Newton
What we know is a drop, what we don’t know is an ocean.
Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.
To arrive at the simplest truth requires years of contemplation.
Socrates
The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.
Well I am certainly wiser than this man. It is only too likely that neither of us has any knowledge to boast of; but he thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know.
Most people, including ourselves, live in a world of relative ignorance. We are even comfortable with that ignorance, because it is all we know. When we first start facing truth, the process may be frightening, and many people run back to their old lives. But if you continue to seek truth, you will eventually be able to handle it better. In fact, you want more! It's true that many people around you now may think you are weird or even a danger to society, but you don't care. Once you've tasted the truth, you won't ever want to go back to being ignorant.
Soren Kierkegaard
You become what you understand.
Christ was crucified because he would have nothing to do with the crowd (even though he addressed himself to all). He did not want to form a party, an interest group, a mass movement, but wanted to be what he was, the truth, which is related to the single individual. Therefore everyone who will genuinely serve the truth is by that very fact a martyr. To win a crowd is no art; for that only untruth is needed, nonsense, and a little knowledge of human passions. But no witness to the truth dares to get involved with the crowd.
Thich Nhat Hanh
My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.
William Shakespeare
The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.
Why not keep this resource at your fingertips?
Other Voices
For these sections without caricature the quote comes first, the cited person after. In case you are using text-to-speech be aware.
What is done cannot be undone, but one can prevent it happening again.
Anne Frank
People can only meet you as deeply as they have met themselves.
Anonymous
Some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.
Baruch Spinoza
By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.
Benjamin Franklin
A lie doesn't become truth, wrong doesn't become right, and evil doesn't become good, just because it's accepted by a majority.
Booker T. Washington
You must let suffering speak, if you want to hear the truth.
Cornell West
The number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in Nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes.
Denis Diderot
You'll never be criticized by someone who is doing more than you. You'll always be criticized by someone doing less. Remember that.
Denzel Washington
It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.
Eugene Ionesco
The truth must not be only the truth - it must also be told.
Fidel Castro
The height of all philosophy is to know thyself; and the end of this knowledge is to know God.”
Francis Quarles
Things are the way they are because they were the way they were.
Fred Hoyle
By Nature man is not what he ought to be; only through a transforming process does he arrive at truth.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Truth is the cry of all, but the game of few.
George Berkeley
What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.
George Santayana
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
Hannah Arendt
If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.
Heraclitus
The death of dogma is the birth of morality.
If the truth shall kill them, let them die.
Immanuel Kant
If you wish to know how civilized a culture is, look at how they treat it's women.
Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan
Whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Max Ehrmann
There is nothing outside of yourself that can ever enable you to get better, stronger, richer, quicker, or smarter. Everything is within. Everything exists. Seek nothing outside of yourself.
Miyamoto Musashi
There’s difference between knowing the path and walking the path.
Morpheus
All philosophies are mental fabrications. There has never been a single doctrine by which one could enter the true essence of things.
Nagarjuna
The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
I think hell is something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go.
Neil Gaiman
An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.
Robert Louis Stevenson
That is one of the many reasons why I avoid speaking as much as possible. For I always say either too much or too little, which is a terrible thing for a man with a passion for truth like mine.
Samuel Beckett
To accept some idea of truth without experiencing it, is like a painting of a cake on paper which you cannot eat.
Shinryu Suzuki
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.
The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.
Stephen Hawking
Science is simply common sense at its best - that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.
Thomas Huxley
If you let a person talk long enough you'll hear their true intentions. Listen twice, speak once.
Tupac Shakur
Follow the man who seeks the truth; run from the man who has found it.
Václav Havel
In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors.
What is now proved was once only imagined.
William Blake
You were not there for the beginning, you will not be there for the end. Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative.
William S. Burrows
Knowledge is learning something new every day. Wisdom is letting go of something every day.
Zen Proverb
