"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."
— Oscar Wilde

"Without music, life would be a mistake."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."
— E.B. White

"Everything you can imagine is real."
— Pablo Picasso

"I speak to everyone in the same way, whether he is the garbage man or the president of the university."
— Albert Einstein

"The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time."
— Mark Twain

"People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.

A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave.

A soul mates purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master..."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"
— Kurt Vonnegut

"A man who won't die for something is not fit to live."
— Martin Luther King Jr. (The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.)

"A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving."
— Laozi

"There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for."
— Tom Robbins (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues)

"Our lives are not as limited as we think they are; the world is a wonderfully weird place; consensual reality is significantly flawed; no institution can be trusted, but love does work; all things are possible; and we all could be happy and fulfilled if we only had the guts to be truly free and the wisdom to shrink our egos and quit taking ourselves so damn seriously."
— Tom Robbins

"When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?"
— Virginia Woolf

"Life is a daring adventure or nothing at all."
— Helen Keller

"Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen."
— Willa Cather

"CALVIN:
Isn't it strange that evolution would give us a sense of humor?

When you think about it, it's weird that we have a physiological response to absurdity. We laugh at nonsense. We like it. We think it's funny.

Don't you think it's odd that we appreciate absurdity? Why would we develop that way? How does it benefit us?

HOBBES:
I suppose if we couldn't laugh at the things that don't make sense, we couldn't react to a lot of life."
— Bill Watterson

"Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music-the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself."
— Henry Miller

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, "I used everything you gave me"."
— Erma Bombeck

"HOBBES:Do you think there's a God?
CALVIN:Well, somebody's out to get me!"
— Bill Watterson

"Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?"
— George Eliot

"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited."
— Sylvia Plath

"Now and then, hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted."
— Bertrand Russell

"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind."
— Bertrand Russell

"This was what Bertrand Russell called his 'Ten Commandments' as a teacher.

1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
2. Do not think it worthwhile to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
4. When you meet opposition, even if it should come from your husband, wife or children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority- for victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are contrary authorities to be found.
6. Do not use power to suppress opinion you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence, as you should, the former implies a deeper argument than the latter.
9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness."
— Bertrand Russell

"So far as I can remember there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence."
— Bertrand Russell

"If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years."
— Bertrand Russell

"Sometimes it's a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence."
— David Byrne

"I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing."
— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones)

"When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace."
— Jimi Hendrix

"Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness."
— Bertrand Russell

"It's not denial. I'm just selective about the reality I accept."
— Bill Watterson

"I accept chaos, I'm not sure whether it accepts me."
— Bob Dylan

"A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do."
— Bob Dylan

"May God bless and keep you always,
May your wishes all come true,
May you always do for others
And let others do for you.
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung,
May you stay forever young,"
— Bob Dylan

"Excuse me if I have/some place in my mind/where I go time to time."
— Tom Petty

"But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking about. I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses."
— Bill Bryson (Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe)

"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
— Thomas Jefferson

"Federal and state laws (should) be changed to no longer make it a crime to possess marijuana for private use."
— Richard Nixon

"Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself; and where they are, they should be changed. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against possession of marijuana in private for personal use... Therefore, I support legislation amending Federal law to eliminate all Federal criminal penalties for the possession of up to one ounce [28g] of marijuana."
— Jimmy Carter

"The amount of money and of legal energy being given to prosecute hundreds of thousands of Americans who are caught with a few ounces of marijuana in their jeans simply makes no sense - the kindest way to put it. A sterner way to put it is that it is an outrage, an imposition on basic civil liberties and on the reasonable expenditure of social energy."
— William F. Buckley Jr.

"They lie about marijuana. Tell you pot-smoking makes you unmotivated. Lie! When you're high, you can do everything you normally do just as well — you just realize that it's not worth the fucking effort. There is a difference."
— Bill Hicks

"Use them with care, and use them with respect as to the transformations they can achieve, and you have an extraordinary research tool. Go banging about with a psychedelic drug for a Saturday night turn-on, and you can get into a really bad place, psychologically. Know what you're using, decide just why you're using it, and you can have a rich experience. They're not addictive, and they're certainly not escapist, either, but they're exceptionally valuable tools for understanding the human mind, and how it works."
— Alexander Shulgin (Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story)

"Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction It is already happening to some extent in our own society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual's internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable."
— Theodore Kaczynski

"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up."
— Pablo Picasso

"Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life."
— Pablo Picasso

"Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone"
— Pablo Picasso

"Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for."
— Alice Walker

"All art is quite useless. "
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)