Spoke > Spoke's Quotes

“Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.”
― Joseph Campbell

“Friends are the family you choose (~ Nin/Ithilnin, Elven rogue).”
― Jess C Scott, The Other Side of Life

“About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough—and even miraculous enough if you insist—I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about?

Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don't believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart's content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others—while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity—so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities… but there, there. Enough.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“We’re on this planet for too short a time. And at the end of the day, what’s more important? Knowing that a few meaningless figures balanced—or knowing that you were the person you wanted to be?”
― Sophie Kinsella

“Ignore those that make you fearful and sad, that degrade you back towards disease and death.”
― Rumi Jalalud-Din

“You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”
― Sharon Salzberg

“When someone tells me "no," it doesn't mean I can't do it, it simply means I can't do it with them.”
― Karen E. Quinones Miller

“The individual who says it is not possible should move out of the way of those doing it.”
― Tricia Cunningham

“The firmest friendships have been formed in mutual adversity,
as iron is most strongly united by the fiercest flame”
― Charles Caleb Colton

“Our biggest regrets are not for the things we have done but for the things we haven't done”
― Chad Michael Murray

“The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration. ”
― Pearl S. Buck

“He was going to live forever, or die in the attempt.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“You see things; you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?”
― George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah

“We live for books.”
― Umberto Eco

“All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.”
― Federico Fellini

“Accept who you are. Unless you're a serial killer.”
― Ellen DeGeneres, Seriously... I'm Kidding

“The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough of is love.”
― Henry Miller

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
― Anais Nin

“We live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing.”
― Ira Glass

“Everyone has talent. What's rare is the courage to follow it to the dark places where it leads.”
― Erica Jong

“Laughter is wine for the soul - laughter soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness - the hilarious declaration made by man that life is worth living.”
― Sean O'Casey

“You must see with eyes unclouded by hate. See the good in that which is evil, and the evil in that which is good. Pledge yourself to neither side, but vow instead to preserve the balance that exists between the two.”
― Hayao Miyazaki

“There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice which does not live by secrecy.”
― Joseph Pulitzer

“We read to know we're not alone.”
― William Nicholson, Shadowlands: A Play

“Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.”
― Benjamin Spock

“I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.”
― John Cheever

“Never say 'no' to adventures. Always say 'yes,' otherwise you'll lead a very dull life.”
― Ian Fleming

“So many things are possible just as long as you don't know they're impossible.”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

“You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocket ship underpants don't help.”
― Bill Watterson