Colin's quotes

(showing 1-50 of 88)

"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large -- I contain multitudes."
— Walt Whitman

241 people liked it

"Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god."
— Aristotle

tags: solitude
34 people liked it

"The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day."
— David Foster Wallace (This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life)

tags: awareness, caring, discipline, freedom, love, people, sacrifice
37 people liked it

"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."
— Albert Camus

tags: seasons, strength, trial, triumph
612 people liked it

"The bad thing about falling into pieces is that it hurts. The good thing about it is that once you're lying there in shards you've got nothing left to protect, and so have no reason not to be honest"
— David James Duncan

5 people liked it

"I drink to make other people more interesting."
— Ernest Hemingway

tags: drinking
142 people liked it

"Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat."
— Theodore Roosevelt

tags: inspirational
187 people liked it

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."
— Dwight D. Eisenhower

tags: budget, government, guns, military, politics, poverty, war, weapons
91 people liked it

"It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night is another thing."
— Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises)

47 people liked it

"Anyone too undisciplined, too self-righteous or too self-centered to live in the world as it is has a tendency to idealize a world which ought to be. But no matter what political or religious direction such idealists choose, their visions always share one telling characteristic: in their utopias, heavens or brave new worlds, their greatest personal weakness suddenly appears to be a strength."
— David James Duncan (The Brothers K)

7 people liked it

"Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot. Take thou what course thou wilt."
— William Shakespeare (Julius Caesar)

tags: mischief
1 person liked it

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."
— C.S. Lewis (The Four Loves)

tags: love
1,512 people liked it

"I would rather live my life as if there is a god and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't and die to find out there is."
— Albert Camus

46 people liked it

"Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel."
— Socrates

tags: education
27 people liked it

"Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you."
— Thomas Jefferson

tags: inspiration, motivation
244 people liked it

"A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both."
— Dwight D. Eisenhower

tags: freedom, president, principles, privilege, society
24 people liked it

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

tags: education
355 people liked it

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

tags: accomplishment, be-yourself, conformity, individuality, world
6,648 people liked it

"Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking..."
— Leo Tolstoy

81 people liked it

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

529 people liked it

"Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other."
— Dalai Lama XIV

tags: love
109 people liked it

"I do not know what I may appear to the world. But to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting my self in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
— Isaac Newton

tags: inspirational
4 people liked it

"It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (The Complete Prose Works Of Ralph Waldo Emerson)

tags: essay, inspirational, lecture, nonfiction, philosophy, self-reliance, social-commentary, transcendentalism
141 people liked it

"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

tags: life
126 people liked it

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
— Mark Twain

tags: individuality, majority, minority, pause, reflect, wisdom
6,019 people liked it

"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."
— Mark Twain

160 people liked it

"I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time."
— Jack London

95 people liked it

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

tags: individuality
338 people liked it

"There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

274 people liked it

"Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)

117 people liked it

"I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best. "
— Walt Whitman

51 people liked it

"You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray and Three Stories)

tags: sin
690 people liked it

"What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the words I have read in my life."
— Walt Whitman

51 people liked it

"And your very flesh shall be a great poem."
— Walt Whitman

47 people liked it

"I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least."
— Walt Whitman

11 people liked it

"For myself I am an optimist - it does not seem to be much use to be anything else."
— Winston S. Churchill

tags: inspirational, optimism
194 people liked it

"Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me."
— Robert Frost

tags: humor, poetry, religion
230 people liked it

"No longer forward or behind
I look in hope or fear,
But grateful, take the good I find,
The best of now and here."
— John Greenleaf Whittier

5 people liked it

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."
— Albert Einstein

tags: inspirational, life, live, miracle, miracles
5,594 people liked it

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
— Albert Einstein

tags: reality
2,083 people liked it

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
— Albert Einstein

tags: religion, science
1,548 people liked it

"Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy."
— Albert Einstein

tags: funny
587 people liked it

"A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
— Albert Einstein

tags: compassion, einstein, nature, philosophy
516 people liked it

"Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value."
— Albert Einstein

441 people liked it

"Wit is educated insolence."
— Aristotle

43 people liked it

"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

tags: anger
93 people liked it

"Why I came here, I know not; where I shall go it is useless to inquire - in the midst of myriads of the living and the dead worlds, stars, systems, infinity, why should I be anxious about an atom?"
— George Gordon Byron

6 people liked it

"To See a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour."
— William Blake

tags: inspirational
143 people liked it

"The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself."
— William Blake

22 people liked it