"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."
— Albert Camus

"Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite."
— Thomas Carlyle

"You raise your voice when you should reinforce your argument."
— Samuel Johnson

"There are people.

There are stories.

The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse if often closer to the truth.

Stories shape the world. They exist independently of people, and in places quite devoid of man, there may yet be mythologies."
— Alan Moore (Swamp Thing Vol. 2: Love and Death)

"Many men walk by day; few walk by night. It is a different season."
— Henry David Thoreau

"Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse."
— Christopher Hitchens

"Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be."
— William Hazlitt

"That all men are equal is a proposition to which at ordinary times no sane individual has ever given his assent."
— Aldous Huxley

"Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it. "
— Richard P. Feynman

"Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well."
— Aristotle

"The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy. "
— Steven Weinberg

"Out of Ireland have we come.
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother's womb
A fanatic heart."
— William Butler Yeats (The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats)

"You purchase pain with all that joy can give and die of nothing but a rage to live."
— Alexander Pope

"The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves one of the most useful men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigator. What actually urges him on is not some brummagem idea of Service, but a boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret, to find out what has not been found out before. His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but a dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes."
— H.L. Mencken (A Mencken Chrestomathy)

"All the great masters have understood that there cannot be great art without the little limited life of the fable, which is always better the simpler it is, and the rich, far-wandering, many-imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it"
— William Butler Yeats

"Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?"
— William Butler Yeats (The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats)

"It still would be years before I understood the seriousness of my change of view. Much later, I recognized it in "Revolution," the essay of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, who describes the moment when a man on the edge of a crowd looks back defiantly at a policeman — and when that policeman senses a sudden refusal to accept his defining gaze — as the imperceptible moment in which rebellion is born. "All books about all revolutions begin with a chapter that describes the decay of tottering authority or the misery and sufferings of the people," Kapuscinski writes. "They should begin with a psychological chapter — one that shows how a harassed, terrified man suddenly breaks his terror, stops being afraid. This unusual process — sometimes accomplished in an instant, like a shock — demands to be illustrated. Man gets rid of fear and feel free. Without that, there would be no revolution."
— Gloria Steinem (Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem)

"Yes, the long war on Christianity. I pray that one day we may live in an America where Christians can worship freely! In broad daylight! Openly wearing the symbols of their religion... perhaps around their necks? And maybe -- dare I dream it? -- maybe one day there can be an openly Christian President. Or, perhaps, 43 of them. Consecutively."
— Jon Stewart

"A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit."
— David Sedaris

"It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure."
— Albert Einstein

"The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it."
— H.G. Wells

"You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into."
— Ben Goldacre (Bad Science)

"I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD."
— William Lloyd Garrison

"The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church."
— Ferdinand Magellan

"Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen."
— John le Carré

"We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are."
— Stephen Jay Gould (The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History)

"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or fascist dictorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the
leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denouce the peace makers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
— Herman Goering

"In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite."
— Paul Dirac

"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist."
— Hélder Câmara

"The true men of action in our time those who transform the world are not the politicians and statesmen but the scientists. Unfortunately poetry cannot celebrate them because their deeds are concerned with things, not persons, and are therefore speechless. When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes."
— W.H. Auden

"The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me."
— W.H. Auden

"It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong."
— Voltaire

"One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead"
— Oscar Wilde

"A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it."
— Oscar Wilde

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

"The government is merely a servant -- merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them."
— Mark Twain

"The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also."
— Mark Twain

"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives."
— Leo Tolstoy

"Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women."
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

""I sit on a man's back choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that i am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all means possible....except by getting off his back."
— Leo Tolstoy

"The plain working truth is that it is not only good for people to be shocked occasionally, but absolutely necessary to the progress of society that they should be shocked pretty often."
— George Bernard Shaw

"Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire."
— George Bernard Shaw

"If you're going to tell the truth, you better make them laugh; otherwise they'll kill you."
— George Bernard Shaw

"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one."
— George Bernard Shaw

"What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action."
— Bertrand Russell

"It's no wonder most religions are born in the desert, because when men lay beneath that boundless night sky and look up at the infinite expanse of creation they have an uncontrollable urge to put something in the way"
— Terry Pratchett

"What can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the Reaper Man?"
— Terry Pratchett (Reaper Man)

"The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac."
— George Orwell