"Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric."
— Bertrand Russell

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
— Anaïs Nin

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference."
— Elie Wiesel

"Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible."
— Frank Zappa

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

"Ever notice how 'What the hell' is always the right answer?"
— Marilyn Monroe

"The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions."
— Noam Chomsky

"When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling."
— John Taylor Gatto

"Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in."
— Leonardo da Vinci

"If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library."
— Frank Zappa

"[Kids] don't remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are."
— Jim Henson (It's Not Easy Being Green: And Other Things to Consider)

"In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra. "
— Fran Lebowitz

"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."
— Oscar Wilde

"Watch out for intellect, because it knows so much it knows nothing and leaves you hanging upside down, mouthing knowledge as your heart falls out of your mouth."
— Anne Sexton

"I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker."
— Stanley Kubrick

"If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered."
— Stanley Kubrick

"The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent, but if we can come to terms with this indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light."
— Stanley Kubrick

"What we don't understand we can make mean anything."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close up."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"It's pathetic how we can't live with the things we can't understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Asfixia / Choke)

"Rant would tell people: 'You're a different human being to everybody you meet.'"
— Chuck Palahniuk (Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey)

"You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics."
— Charles Bukowski (Women: A Novel)

"“If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose”"
— Charles Bukowski

"An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way."
— Charles Bukowski

"For each Joan of Arc there is a Hitler perched at the other end of the teeter-totter."
— Charles Bukowski (Factotum)

"When a writer is swayed with his fame and his fortune, you can float him down the river with the turds. "
— Charles Bukowski

""Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.""
— Martin Heidegger

"You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation."
— Plato

"In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.""
— Leo Tolstoy

"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. "
— Leo Tolstoy

"The two most powerful warriors are patience and time."
— Leo Tolstoy

"The business of art lies just in this, -- to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible."
— Leo Tolstoy (What Is Art?)

"Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library, and you won't come out for twenty years, if you really wish to learn."
— Leo Tolstoy

"Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it. "
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

"If you look for perfection, you'll never be content."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom."
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

"All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.
"
— Leo Tolstoy

"The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad" but "good vs. good.""
— Leo Tolstoy

""'at one time, a freethinker was a man who had been brought up in the conceptions of religion, law and morality, who reached freethought only after conflict and difficulty. But now a new type of born freethinkers has appeared, who grow up without so much as hearing that there used to be laws of morality, or religion, that authorities existed... In the old days, you see, if a man - a Frenchman, for instance- wished to get an education, he would have set to work to study the classics, the theologians, the tragedians, historians and philosophers- and you can realize all the intellectual labour involved. But nowadays he goes straight for the literature of negation, rapidly assimilates the essence of the science of negation, and thinks he's finished.'""
— Leo Tolstoy

"Everything in moderation, including moderation."
— Oscar Wilde

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious - the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science."
— Albert Einstein (Albert Einstein)

"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it."
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

"Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it."
— Flannery O'Connor (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose)

"We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Asfixia / Choke)

"If you guys want to get a MOM tattoo and save a little money, just get two letters done. Get about a one-inch capital M tattooed on each cheek of your ass in pink and brown ink. Then when you bend over, it says "Mom." Also, later on if you're havin' sex with your girlfriend, and her parents are in the next room, when you finish up you can just lie on your back, draw your legs up to your chest and silently say, 'Wow!'"
— George Carlin (Brain Droppings)

"Nothing shows you the straight line from here to death like a list."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)

"...make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty."
— Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild)

"People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them."
— George Bernard Shaw

"Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won't know for twenty years. And you'll never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: it's what you create. Even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but doesn't really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope for something good to come along. Something to make you feel connected, to make you feel whole, to make you feel loved."
— Charlie Kaufman (Synecdoche, New York: The Shooting Script)