boluthebraniac > boluthebraniac's Quotes

“I am I and my circumstance; and, if I do not save it, I do not save myself.”
― José Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Quixote

“Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are.”
― José Ortega y Gasset

“Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.”
― Jose Ortega y Gasset

“There is a point in every philosophy at which the "conviction" of the philosopher appears on the scene; or, to put it in the words of an ancient mystery: adventavit asinus, / pulcher et fortissimus. (Translation: The ass arrives, beautiful and most brave.)”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“24. O sancta simplicitas! In what strange simplification and falsification man lives! One can never cease wondering when once one has got eyes for beholding this marvel! How we have made everything around us clear and free and easy and simple!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“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

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

“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in His Journals

“Always do what you are afraid to do.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
― C.G. Jung

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch. ”
― James Baldwin

“I sought the bird of bliss and she flew away, I sought my neighbor's good and bliss came my way”
― Anonymous

“Once the meaning of suffering had been revealed to us, we refused to minimize or alleviate the camp’s tortures by ignoring them or harboring false illusions and entertaining artificial optimism. Suffering had become a task on which we did not want to turn our backs. We had realized its hidden opportunities for achievement, the opportunities which caused the poet Rilke to write, “Wie viel ist aufzuleiden!” (How much suffering there is to get through!).”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!" It seems to me that there is nothing which would stimulate a man's sense of responsibleness more than this maxim, which invites him to imagine first that the present is past and, second, that the past may yet be changed and amended.”
― Viktor Frankl

“Usually, to be sure, man considers only the stubble field of transitoriness and overlooks the full granaries of the past, wherein he had salvaged once and for all his deeds, his joys and also his sufferings. Nothing can be undone, and nothing can be done away with. I should say having been is the surest kind of being.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Weren’t the numbers just the numbers? Had we all just given in to the “hope” that every patient was above average? It occurred to me that my relationship with statistics changed as soon as I became one.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“I was searching for a vocabulary with which to make sense of death, to find a way to begin defining myself and inching forward again. The privilege of direct experience had led me away from literary and academic work, yet now I felt that to understand my own experiences, I would have to translate them back into language. Hemingway described his process in similar terms: acquiring rich experiences, then retreating to cogitate and write about them. I needed words to go forward.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“The defining characteristic of the organism is striving.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“One can pass on knowledge but not wisdom. One can find wisdom, one can live it, one can be supported by it, one can work wonders with it, but one cannot speak it or teach it.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else ... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”
― Heraclitus