Nick B > Nick's Quotes

“How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

“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

“I am convinced all of humanity is born with more gifts than we know. Most are born geniuses and just get de-geniused rapidly.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller

“They say a person needs just three things to be truly happy in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for.”
― Tom Bodett

“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

“You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a teacher anymore or you're not a painter anymore. It may happen. It has happened. I mean Gauguin decided at a certain point he wasn't a banker anymore; he was a painter. And so he walked away from banking. I think we have a right to change course. But society is the one that keeps demanding that we fit in and not disturb things. They would like you to fit in right away so that things work now.”
― Anaïs Nin

“As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.”
― Carl Gustav Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.”
― Anaïs Nin

“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening

“The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.”
― Stanley Kubrick

“If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, and keep on learning. That way, their children don’t have to be slaves of praise. They will have a lifelong way to build and repair their own confidence.”
― Carol S. Dweck

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Every artist was first an amateur.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.”
― Abraham Harold Maslow

“The small are always dependent on the great; they are "small" precisely because they think they are independent. The great thinker is one who can hear what is greatest in the work of other "greats" and who can transform it in an original manner.”
― Martin Heidegger

“The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.”
― C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul

“...anyone who attempts to do both, to adjust to his group and at the same time pursue his individual goal, becomes neurotic.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.”
― Abraham Maslow

“A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be”
― Abraham Maslow

“I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony; but chaos, hostility and murder.”
― Werner Herzog

“One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.”
― Abraham Maslow

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Life is an ongoing process of choosing between safety (out of fear and need for defense) and risk (for the sake of progress and growth). Make the growth choice a dozen times a day.”
― Abraham Maslow

“One's only rival is one's own potentialities. One's only failure is failing to live up to one's own possibilities. In this sense, every man can be a king, and must therefore be treated like a king.”
― Abraham Maslow

“The most stable, and therefore, the most healthy self-esteem is based on deserved respect from others rather than on external fame or celebrity and unwarranted adulation.”
― Abraham Maslow

“The sacred is in the ordinary...it is to be found in one's daily life, in one's neighbors, friends, and family, in one's own backyard...travel may be a flight from confronting the scared--this lesson can be easily lost. To be looking elsewhere for miracles is to me a sure sign of ignorance that everything is miraculous.”
― Abraham Maslow