Gene Ruyle > Gene's Quotes

“I've been riding on the crest of a slump lately.”
― Tom Waits

“The stone that was rolled before Christ's tomb might appropriately be called the philosopher's stone because its removal gave not only the pharisees but, now for 1800 years, the philosophers so much to think about.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“No one is exempt from speaking nonsense. The great misfortune is to do it solemnly.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“The first duty of love is to listen.”
― Paul Tillich

“I always tell my students that Malcolm X came both to his spirituality and to his consciousness as a thinker when he had solitude to read. Unfortunately, tragically, like so many young black males, that solitude only came in prison.”
― Bell Hooks

“Individuals who want to believe that there is no fulfillment in love, that true love does not exist, cling to these assumptions because this despair is actually easier to face than the reality that love is a real fact of life but is absent from their lives.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet.”
― Karl Jaspers

“The difference between genius and stupidity is: genius has its limits.”
― Alexandre Dumas-fils

“Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“…. by the time they have reached the middle of their life’s journey, few people remember how they have managed to arrive at themselves, at their amusements, their point of view, their wife, character, occupation and successes, but they cannot help feeling that not much is likely to change anymore. It might even be asserted that they have been cheated, for one can nowhere discover any sufficient reason for everything’s coming about as it has. It might just have well as turned out differently. The events of people’s lives have, after all, only to the last degree originated in them, having generally depended on all sorts of circumstances such as the moods, the life or death of quite different people, and have, as it were, only at the given point of time come hurrying towards them”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities: Volume I