Quotes:

Preface
Identity
Love
Idealism
Anger
Life
Good vs. Evil
Enlightenment
Leadership
Alcohol
Miscellaneous/Humor
Stupidity
Cinema
Ego
Friendship
Knowledge & Education
Women



These quotes were collected over the period of many years from Splunge: Quotes of the Day moderated by my 'mother' Haras and amoung other places.

Thanx for stopping by, enjoy!
-Benjamin Kallos

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Preface:

"It is pure illusion to think that an opinion which passes down from century to century, from generation to generation, may not be entirely false." - Pierre Boyle

"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books.
Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.
Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.
But after observation and analysis,
when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all,
then accept it and live up to it."
- Buddha

"A book of quotations... can never be complete." - Robert M. Hamilton

Identity:

"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice." - Albert Einstein

"I think the reward for conformity is everyone likes you but yourself." - Rita Mae Brown

"Peace come from within. Do not seek it without." - Buddha

"Don't let yesterday use up too much of today." - Will Rogers

"Most people are as happy as they make up their minds to be." - Abraham Lincoln

"Man is only miserable so far as he thinks himself so." - Jacopo Sannazaro

"Success is getting what you want. Happiness is liking what you get." - H. Jackson Brown

"About all you can do in life is be who you are. Some people will love you for you. Most will love you for what you can do for them, and some won't like you at all." -Rita Mae Brown

"People always say how you should be yourself, like yourself is this definite thing, like a toaster or something." - My So Called Life

"I don't care what other people think of me because I judge myself on harsher and more strict terms than they ever could." -Richey James

"There is no such thing as a 'self-made' man. We are made up of thousands of others. Everyone who has ever done a kind deed for us, or spoken one word of encouragement to us, has entered into the makeup of our character and of our thoughts, as well as our success." - George Matthew Adams

"Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school." - Albert Einstein

Roark: Shall I tell you what's wrong with it?
Dean: It's the *Parthenon*!
Roark: Yes, God damn it, the Parthenon!... Look... the famous flutings on the famous columns - what are they there for? To hide the joints in wood - when columns were made of wood, only these aren't, they're marble. The triglyphs, what are they? *Wood*. Wooden beams, the way they had to be laid when people began to build wooden shacks. Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are, making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies of wood. Why?... The Parthenon did not serve the same purpose as its wooden ancestor. An airline terminal does not serve the same purpose as the Parthenon. Every form has its own meaning. Every man creates his meaning and form and goal. Why is it so important - what others have done? Why does it become sacred by the mere fact of not being your own? Why is anyone and everyone right - so long as it's not yourself? Why does the number of those others take the place of truth? Why is truth made a mere matter of arithmetic - and only of addition at that? Why is everything twisted out of all sense to fit everything else? There must be some reason. I don't know. I've never known it. I'd like to understand." - Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

"If a child lives with criticism, he learns to condemn.
If a child lives with hostility, he learns to fight.
If a child lives with ridicule, he learns to be shy.
If a child lives with shame, he learns to feel guilty.
If a child lives with tolerance, he learns to be patient.
If a child lives with encouragement, he learns confidence.
If a child lives with praise, he learns to appreciate.
If a child lives with fairness, he learns justice.
If a child lives with security, he learns to have faith.
If a child lives with approval, he learns to like himself.
If a child lives with acceptance and friendship, he learns to find love in the world."
- Dorothy Law Nolte

"For your information, I'm staying like this, and everyone else can just get used to it! If people don't like me the way I am, well TOUGH BEANS! It's a free country! I don't need anyone's permission to be the way I want! This is how I am- take it or leave it!" -Calvin and Hobbes

Love:

"Somewhere there is someone who dreams of your smile, and finds in your presence that life is worth while, so when you are lonely, remember it's true, somebody, somewhere, is thinking of you." - D'Anne Bucy

"I love you, not for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you." - Roy Croft

"Sad thing is, you can love someone and still be wrong for them." - Elvis Presley

"Being in love doesn't mean loving. You can be in love with a woman and yet hate her." - Dostoevsky

"If I can't have me no one can." - Motherboard

" ...love is what still goes on when you are not horny." - Robert A. Heinlein

"He'll rekindle all those dreams it took you a lifetime to destroy." - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

"...whispering 'I will ne'er consent,' consented." -Don Juan, Julia; Byron.

"That's the nature of women, not to love when we love them, and to love when we love them not." - Cervantes

"We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all." - Eleanor Roosevelt

"I've been loving a lie." - Orson Scott Card, Treasure Box

"I think that I don't know you... No, that's wrong. I think that I didn't know you before, even though I thought I knew you, and now that I finally know you, I don't really know you at all." - Orson Scott Card, The Memory of Earth

"Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can - that is their secret." -Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse

"Man always wants to be a woman's first love - Women like to be a man's last romance." -Oscar Wilde

"Love is so short, and forgetting takes so long." - Pablo Neruda

"Thou shalt not covet; but tradition Approves all forms of competition." - Arthur Hugh Clough

"Every time you see a beautiful woman, just remember, somebody else got tired of her shit." -Kinky Friedman

"Sometimes you have to get to know someone really well to realize you're really strangers." - The Mary Tyler Moore Show

"Love not what you are, but what you may become." - Miguel de Cervantes

"The ultimate test of a relationship is to disagree but to hold hands." - Alexandria Penney

"The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books." - Katharine Mansfield



Idealism:

"Perfection is to be strived for, not achieved." -Lloyd Eric Cotsen

"The superior man, when he stands alone, is unconcerned,
And if he has to renounce the world, he is undaunted." -I Ching

"You see thing that are and say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were and say, 'Why not?' " -George Bernard Shaw

"In order to make your dreams come true, you must awaken and take charge." - Natasha Newsome

"A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world." - Oscar Wilde

"Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, that person sends forth a tiny ripple of hope... and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." - Robert F. Kennedy

"Acquire the courage to believe in yourself. Many of the things that you have been taught were at one time the radical ideas of individuals who had the courage to believe what their own hearts and minds told them was true, rather than accept the common beliefs of their day." - Ching Ning Chu

"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence." -Albert Einstein

"Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it." - Helen Keller

"If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven played music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

"There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest." - Elie Wiesel



Anger:

"Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more harmful to us than the injury that provokes it." - Seneca

"Anyone can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not easy." - Aristotle

"He who smiles rather than rages is always the stronger." - Japanese Proverb

"Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment." -Benjamin Franklin

"What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens." -Thaddeus Golas

"Criticizing others is a dangerous thing, not so much because you may make mistakes about them, but because you may be revealing the truth about yourself." - Harold Medina

"Pain results from a judgement you have made about a thing. Remove the judgement and the pain disappears." - Neale Donald Walsch



Life:

"Be not afraid of life." - William James

"What is the use of living if it be not to make this world a better place for those who live in it after we are gone?" - Winston Churchill

"When I was young, my ambition was to be one of the people who made a difference in this world. My hope still is to leave the world a little bit better for my having been here." -Jim Henson

"Difficulties show men what they are. In case of any difficulty remember that God has pitted you against a rough antagonist that you may be a conqueror, and this cannot be without toil." -Epictetus (50-138 A.D.)

"Life is not holding a good hand; Life is playing a poor hand well." - Danish proverb

"The art of necessities is strange, That can make vile thing precious" -William Shakespeare, King Lear

"Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack." - George S. Patton

"I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing." - Agatha Christie

"You never know what you can do without until you try." - Franklin Pierce Adams

"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then give up. No use being a damned fool about it." - W.C. Fields

"Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing." - Helen Keller

"The most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well." - Baron Pierre De Coubertin

"It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. This is not a weakness. That is life." - Captain Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation

"Life is too important to be taken seriously." - Oscar Wilde

"Life is what happens while you're making other plans." - John Lennon

"If you smile when no one else is around, you really mean it." - Andy Rooney

"The whole secret of existence is to have no fear. Never fear what will become of you, depend on no one. Only the moment you reject all help are you freed." - Buddha (B.C. 568-488)

"Attachment is the source of all suffering." - Buddha

DYING TO THE SELF

Lord, make me an instrument of thy Peace; 
Where there is hatred, let me sow love; 
Where there is injury, pardon; 
Where there is doubt, faith; 
Where there is despair, hope; 
Where there is darkness, light; 
And where there is sadness, joy. 

Oh Divine Maker! Grant that I may not so much seek 
To be consoled, as to console. 
To be understood, as to understand. 
To be loved, as to love. 
For it is in giving that we receive; 
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned; 
It is in dying to the self that we are born to eternal life. 

-FRANCIS of ASSISI

"What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneness, and say, "This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must
come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned--and you with it, dust of the dust!" Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, "Never have I heard anything more divine?"" --Friedrich Nietzsche

"Count no day lost in which you waited your turn, took only your share and sought advantage over no one." -Robert Brault


"I know God won't give me anything I can't handle. I just wish he didn't trust me so much." - Mother Teresa

"Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself." - Harvey Fierstein

"I am a part of all that I have met." - Lord Alfred Tennyson

"How far you go in life depends on your being
tender with the young,
compassionate with the aged,
sympathetic with the striving and
tolerant of the weak and the strong.
Because someday in life you will have been all of these."
-George Washington Carver



Good vs. Evil:

"You may either win your peace or buy it; win it by resistance to evil; buy it by compromise with evil." John Ruskin (1819-1900)

"No evil propensity of the human heart is so powerful that it may not be subdued by discipline." - Seneca

"The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose." - William Shakespeare

"Now, now my good man, this is no time for making enemies." 
- Voltaire (1694-1778) on his deathbed in response to a priest asking that he renounce Satan.

"Careful when you cast your devil out of you lest you cast out the best thing in you." -Nietzsche



Intelligence:

"I have no particular talent; I am merely extremely inquisitive." - Albert Einstein

"College isn't the place to go for ideas." -Helen Keller

"By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, [journalism] keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community." -Oscar Wilde



Enlightenment:

"Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish." -Siddhartha, Herman Hesse

"Fifteen hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everyone knew the world was flat and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that people were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow." -Agent K, Men in Black



Leadership:

"One person can make a difference and every person should try." - John F. Kennedy

"A man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them." - John C. Maxwell

"A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks that others throw at him." - Sidney Greenberg

"There are two kinds of people, those who finish what they start and so on." - Robert Byrne

"Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it." - Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life, but define yourself." - Harvey Fierstein

"Person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt person doing it." - Chinese proverb



Alcohol:

"An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools." -Ernest Hemingway

"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut." -Ernest Hemingway

"I don't trust any bastard who doesn't drink. People who don't drink are afraid of revealing themselves." -Humphrey Bogart

"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." - Benjamin Franklin



Miscellaneous/Humor:

"I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me." -Woody Allen

There is no spoon! -Neo, the Matrix

"I don't want any yes-men around me. I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their jobs." - Samuel Goldwyn

"That's the beautiful thing about crayons they can take you places starships can't." -Guinan-Star Trek: the next generation

"Clear analysis of any situation is often mistaken for pessimism. The two should not be confused." - Barbara Hambly

"You probably wouldn't worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do." - Olin Miller

"There is a thin line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line." -Oscar Levant

"Sacred cows make the best hamburger." - Mark Twain

"For the majority of people, smoking has a beneficial effect." - Dr. Ian G. Macdonald, Newsweek 11/18/1963

"In New York, fuck isn't even a word. It's a comma." - Lewis Black

Stupidity:

"Silence is the virtue of fools." - Francis Bacon

"To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing." - Elbert Hubbard

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result." - Albert Einstein

"I had to quit university because my Dungeons and Dragons character died." - Al Rae

"In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language." - Mark Twain

"Trying is the first step to failure." -Homer Simpson, "The Simpsons"



Cinema:

"Dear God, make me a bird so I can fly far, far, far away from here. Dear God, make me a bird so I can fly far, far, far away from here. " -Jenny, Forrest Gump.

"There's a passage I got memorized.
Ezekiel 25:17.  "The path of the
righteous man is beset on all sides
by the inequities of the selfish
and the tyranny of evil men.
Blessed is he who, in the name of
charity and good will, shepherds
the weak through the valley of the
darkness.  For he is truly his
brother's keeper and the finder of
lost children.
And I will strike down upon thee
with great vengeance and furious
anger those who attempt to poison
and destroy my brothers.  And you
will know I am the Lord when I lay
my vengeance upon you."  I been
sayin' that shit for years.  And if
you ever heard it, it meant your
ass.  I never really questioned
what it meant.  I thought it was
just a cold-blooded thing to say to
a motherfucker 'fore you popped a
cap in his ass.  But I saw some
shit this mornin' made me think
twice.  Now I'm thinkin', it could
mean you're the evil man.  And I'm
the righteous man.  And Mr. .45
here, he's the shepherd protecting
my righteous ass in the valley of
darkness.  Or is could by you're
the righteous man and I'm the
shepherd and it's the world that's
evil and selfish.  I'd like that.
But that shit ain't the truth.  The
truth is you're the weak.  And I'm
the tyranny of evil men.  But I'm
tryin'.  I'm tryin' real hard to be
a shepherd."   -Jules, Pulp Fiction



Ego:


""In spiritual matters there is a simple infallible test: everything that proceeds from the ego is evil; everything that proceeds from love for others is good."
"A man braver than his brothers insults them by implication. Lets us aspire to no virtue which cannot be shared."
"I have yet to see a genius or a hero who, if struck with a burning match, would feel less pain than his undistinguished average brother."
"Genius is an exageration of dimension. So is elephantiasis. Both may be only a disease."
"We are all brothers under the skin - and I, for one, would be willing to skin humanity to prove it.""
-Ellsworth Toohey, The Fountainhead by Ayyn Rand

"Don't you know who you are?"
"No. Not as fa as you're seeing me, or anyone else."
Heller sat silently, his wrist describing circles with a cigarette. Then Heller laughed, and said:
"That was typical."
"What?"
"That you didn't ask me to tell you what you are as i see you. Anybody else would have."
"I'm sorry. It wasn't indifference. You're one of few friends I wan to keep. I just didn't think of asking."
"I know you didn't. That's the point. You're self-centered monster, Howard. The more monstrous because you're utterly innocent about it."
-Heller & Roark, The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand



Friendship:

"Only enemies speak the truth. Friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty." - Stephen King

"No one in your life is with you constantly. No one is completely on your side." - Tim Rice, Chess



Knowledge & Education:

"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance." - Confucius

"Nothing is said that has not been said before." - Terence (185-159 B.C.)

"Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours." - John Locke

"One cannot have wisdom without living life." - Dorothy McCall

"Everyone is ignorant, only on different subjects." - Will Rogers

"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper." - Robert Frost

"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein

"Learn to unlearn."- Benjamin Disraeli

"I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way." - Franklin Pierce Adams



Women:

"Hello all, I just wanted to wish you all a wonderful women's month. Sorry about the tardiness, but I was busy shaving my legs, going to the tanning bed, waxing my upper lip, bleaching my sideburns, wearing a bra, looking into a nose or boob job, rubbing my sore heal-wearing feet, working out for hours, counting all my calories, dying my hair, changing my clothes 50 times, straightening my hair, painting my nails, oh yeah, and shopping. Well it's wonderful being a women. Fuck no." -Kim Gannon

"She will beg you for advice, your reply will be concise, and she'll listen very nicely then go out and do precisely what she wants!" -My Fair Lady

"If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things." - Plato