Bruce > Bruce's Quotes

“Literature matters because it is how humanity, with all its losses and joys, can become a work of art.”
― Lisa C. Taylor

“There's no such thing as quitting. Just sometimes there's a longer pause between relapses, right?”
― Alan Moore

“The man with no future, who existed only in the moment, was invisible to a world fixated on anywhere but where they actually were.”
― Matthew Mather, The Complete Atopia Chronicles

“It is less painful, it turns out, to feel betrayed than to feel forgotten.”
― Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves

“DON’T LEAD A DOUBLE LIFE. Everything you do takes up space in your brain. If you live a double life (and you know what I mean if I’m talking to you), then that extra life takes up neurons and synapses working overtime. The brain can’t handle it. It starts to degrade instead of grow.”
― James Altucher, Choose Yourself

“Freedom is the right to difference; being plurality, it postulates the dispersion of the absolute, its resolution into a dust of truths, equally justified and provisional. There is an underlying polytheism in liberal democracy (call it an unconscious polytheism); conversely, every authoritarian regime partakes of a disguised monotheism.”
― Emil Cioran, The New Gods

“Look at your body— A painted puppet, a poor toy Of jointed parts ready to collapse, A diseased and suffering thing With a head full of false imaginings. —The Dhammapada”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror

“Said He, whoever exalts himself, shall be humbled, and he who is humbled shall become exalted.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Where Love Is There God Is Also

“The major part of our species seems able to undergo any trauma without significantly re-examining its household mantras, including “everything happens for a reason,” “the show must go on,” “accept the things you cannot change,” and any other adage that gets people to keep their chins up.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror

“Holiness is found in how we treat others, not in how we contemplate the cosmos.”
― Terryl L. Givens, Letter to a Doubter

“The world is a story we tell ourselves about the world.”
― Vikram Chandra

“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, Auguries of Innocence

“Wise criticism always begins with self-criticism.”
― Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism

“The meaning of awe is to realize that life takes place under wide horizons, horizons that range beyond the span of an individual life or even the life of a nation, a generation, or an era. Awe enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.”
― Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism

“One of the commonest and most generally accepted delusions is that every man can be qualified in some particular way -- said to be kind, wicked, stupid, energetic, apathetic, and so on. People are not like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic or vice versa; but it could never be true to say of one man that he is kind or wise, and of another that he is wicked or stupid. Yet we are always classifying mankind in this way. And it is wrong. Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection

“The hefty price for accepting information uncritically is that we go through life unaware that what we’ve accepted as impossible may in fact be quite possible.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility

“When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination.”
― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

“Much has been written about codependency. All agree that it is about the loss of selfhood. Codependency is a condition wherein one has no inner life. Happiness is on the outside. Good feelings and self-validation lie on the outside. They can never be generated from within.”
― John Bradshaw, Healing the Shame that Binds You

“With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion.”
― Steven Weinberg

“your head. Sally Kempton”
― David R. Loy, The World Is Made of Stories

“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance. —Confucius The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about. —Wayne Dyer”
― Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“You must be emptied of that with which you are full, so you may be filled with that whereof you are empty. Augustine”
― David R. Loy, The World Is Made of Stories

“Let us begin by turning the skeptic’s question on its head. If you could believe in God, why wouldn’t you? There is good evidence that those who believe in a loving God have happier lives. Loneliness is bad for people in many different ways—it diminishes immune function, increases blood pressure, and depresses cognitive function—and we know that people who believe in God are less lonely.”
― T.M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God