Jake E > Jake's Quotes

“While money can't buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery.”
― Groucho Marx

“Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.”
― Epictetus

“Don't think money does everything or you are going to end up doing everything for money.”
― Voltaire

“The discontent and frustration that you feel is entirely your own creation.”
― Stephen Richards, Think Your way to Success: Let Your Dreams Run Free

“There's nothing in the world so demoralizing as money.”
― Sophocles, Antigone

“Money is a great servant but a bad master.”
― Francis Bacon

“It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.”
― Albert Camus

“When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.”
― H.L. Mencken

“Money often costs too much”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Anything which is physically possible can always be made financially possible; money is a bugaboo of small minds.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

“A primary purpose of the police is to enforce the delusions of those with lots of green paper.”
― Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization

“money has no essence. It's not "really" anything; therefore, its nature has always been and presumably always will be a matter of political conten­tion.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“Life has no meaning a priori… It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions

“Il n'y a de réalité que dans l'action.

(There is no reality except in action.)”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism

“The literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself.”
― Albert Camus

“At the beginning of human history, man lost some of the basic animal instincts in which an animal's behavior is embedded and by which it is secured. Such security, like paradise, is closed to man forever; man has to make choices. In addition to this, however, man has suffered another loss in his more recent development inasmuch as the traditions which buttressed his behavior are now rapidly diminishing. No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people tell him to do (totalitarianism).”
― Viktor Emil Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“A lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we're married to him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him. And that's why we always remember that first rapturous night when he was a stranger, and why this rapture returns only when he's dead.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, The Story of a Marriage

“I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. the will to a system is a lack of integrity.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“In life man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh to someone who has not made a success of his life. But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism

“Some care is needed in using Descartes' argument. "I think, therefore I am" says rather more than is strictly certain. It might seem as though we are quite sure of being the same person to-day as we were yesterday, and this is no doubt true in some sense. But the real Self is as hard to arrive at as the real table, and does not seem to have that absolute, convincing certainty that belongs to particular experiences.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

“People are like dice. We throw ourselves in the direction of our own choosing.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.... Through words and concepts we shall never reach beyond the wall off relations, to some sort of fabulous primal ground of things.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

“The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite. If one has it one may permit oneself the beautiful luxury of skepticism: one is secure enough, fixed enough for it.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World

“A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity