Famous Quotes

Here are some famous quotes that have resonated with me at some time or another. I suppose, then, that they are quotes that I would agree with – often ‘working on a few levels’.

The intellectual, the moral, the religious seem to me all naturally bound up and interlinked together in one great and harmonious whole.

— Ada Lovelace

The more I study, the more insatiable do I feel my genius for it to be.

— Ada Lovelace

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.

— Thomas Huxley

Give a man a gun and he can rob a Bank. Give a man a Bank and he can rob the world.

— Tyrell Wellick, Mr. Robot

It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.

— Henry Ford

I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one…He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man.

— Fredrick Douglass

He that plants trees, loves others besides himself.

— Thomas Fuller

If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.

— Mark Twain

Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.

— C.S. Lewis

Space and time are the framework within which the mind is constrained to construct its experience of reality.

— Immanuel Kant

Without data you’re just another person with an opinion.

— W. Edwards Deming

If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.

— Red Adair

On the CTRL + ALT + DEL interrupt… “I may have invented it, but I think Bill made it famous.”

On her greatest fear… “as we drifted towards this blandly amorphous generic world view not only would we see the entire range of the human imagination reduced to a more narrow modality of thought, but that we would wake from a dream one day having forgotten there were even other possibilities.”

— Margaret Mead

Intimate relationships cannot substitute for a life plan. But to have any meaning or viability at all, a life plan must include intimate relationships.

— Harriet Lerner

Having a mind that is open to everything and attached to nothing seems to me to be one of the most basic principles that you can adopt to contribute to individual and world peace.

— Wayne Dyer

Anytime you’re filled with resentment, you’re turning the controls of your emotional life over to others to manipulate . . . Resentments give you an excuse to return to your old ways. This is what got you there in the first place.

— Wayne Dyer, 21 Days to Master Success and Inner Peace

Don’t die with your music still in you.

— Wayne Dyer

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

— Albert Einstein

We are not slaves of the market. Our human life has a greater meaning than making money, making profit, and working for the market or for multinational corporations.

— Satish Kumar

Facts are irrelevant. What matters is what the consumer believes.

— Seth Godin

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

— Leonardo Da Vinci

Man is the cheapest 150-pound nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.

— NASA, 1965

Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.

— Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak – Listening for the Voice of Vocation

That world’s not ours! That’s what we always say.
We’ll build a new one but some other day!
When will we wake from comfort and from ease,
and strive together to create a world of love and peace.

— Estelle White, Hymns Old & New

Nature and the outdoors are languages that can be learned. Once you identify a beech tree, tie a clove hitch or cook a simple meal over a fire that you’ve built yourself, you’ll never forget it.

— Bear Grylls

We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

— George Bernard Shaw

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that most adaptable to change.

— Charles Darwin

All the world is a laboratory to the inquiring mind.

— Martin H. Fischer

for a person to “grow”, they need an environment that provides them with genuineness (openness and self-disclosure), acceptance (being seen with unconditional positive regard), and empathy (being listened to and understood).
Without these, relationships and healthy personalities will not develop as they should, much like a tree will not grow without sunlight and water.

— Carl Rogers

Arithmetic is to maths= like spelling is to journalism,

Greed is not good: Being rapacious doesn’t make you a capitalist. It makes you a sociopath

— Nick Hanauer, TED Talk, Edinburgh, Sep 2017

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

— Maya Angelou

A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.

— Edward R. Murrow

Zero is powerful because it is infinity’s twin. They are equal and opposite, yin and yang. They are equally paradoxical and troubling. The biggest questions in science and religion are about nothingness and eternity, the void and the infinite, zero and
infinity.

— Charles Seife, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea

Gold is money. Everything else is credit.

— JP Morgan, 1912

Your own Self-Realization is the greatest service you can render the world.

— Ramana Maharshi

Black holes are where God divided by zero.

— Steven Wright

The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting.

— Plutarch, AD 46 -120

Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.

— Albert Einstein

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

— Philip K. Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

Political correctness is facism disguised as manners.

— George Carlin

“[political correctness] is destroying universities. And its invading the rest of our society. And the idea that there is something good behind it, that’s a dangerous idea. I don’t think so. I think what’s behind it is exactly what Nietzsche noted a hundred and fifty years ago. It’s resentment and the demand for power; disguising itself most reprehensibly as compassion and it’s time for the mask of that to be taken off and things set straight before we walk further down the path that will lead to no good.”

In a growth mindset, challenges are exciting rather than threatening. So rather than thinking, oh, I’m going to reveal my weaknesses, you say, wow, here’s a chance to grow.

— Carol Dweck

If you focus on success, you’ll have stress. But if you pursue excellence, success will be guaranteed.

— Deepak Chopra, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success: A Practical Guide to the Fulfillment of Your Dreams

We are not slaves of the market. Our human life has a greater meaning than making money, making profit, and working for the market or for multinational corporations.

— Satish Kumar

Keep your thoughts positive because your thought become YOUR WORDS.
Keep your words positive because your words become YOUR BEHAVIOUR
Keep your behaviour positive because your behaviour becomes YOUR HABITS
Keep your habits positive because your habits become YOUR VALUES
Keep your values positive because your values become YOUR DESTINY

— Mahatma Gandhi

That I feed the hungry, forgive an insult, and love my enemy…. these are great virtues! But what if I should discover that the poorest of the beggars and the most impudent of offenders are all within me, and that I stand in need of the alms of my own kindness; that I myself am the enemy who must be loved? What then?

— Carl Jung

The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.

— Albert Einstein

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

— Carl Jung

When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.

— Turkish Proverb

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.

— Philip K. Dick

Tyranny is a habit which may be developed until at last it becomes a disease. I declare that the noblest nature can become so hardened and bestial that nothing distinguishes it from that of a wild animal. Blood and power intoxicate; they help to develop callousness and debauchery. The mind then becomes capable of the most abnormal cruelty, which it regards pleasure; the man and the citizen are swallowed up in the tyrant; and the return to human dignity, repentance, moral resurrection, becomes almost impossible.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead

Lupus est homo homini, non homo, quom qualis sit non novit.

— Plautus

I don’t know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense.

— David Lynch

If you don’t build your dream someone else will hire you to help build theirs.

— Tony Gaskins

Far from experience producing his idea of the Jew, it was the latter which explained his experience. If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would have to invent him.

— Jean Paul Satre, Anto-Semite & Jew

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

— Philip K. Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less.

— Eldridge Cleaver

I am afraid the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can, and do, create money…And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of Governments and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people.

— Reginald McKenna

“It from bit symbolises the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom — at a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source and explanation; that what we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe.”

— John Archibald Wheeler

“Quite an experience, to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.”

— Blade Runner

“…we are living in the most fearmongering time in human history. And the main reason for this is that there’s a lot of power and money available to individuals and organizations who can perpetuate these fears.”

— Barry Glassner, Why We’re Living in the Age of Fear

Inverted quarantine constitutes a response to the fear that the human condition is inherently unsafe.

— Frank Furedi, Social Distancing, Safe Spaces and the Demand for Quarantine

when you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.

— why the lucky stiff

If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so.

— Thomas Jefferson

A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.’

— St. Antony the Great

It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature.

— Niels Bohr

Forgiving and being reconciled to our enemies or our loved ones are not about pretending that things are other than they are. It is not about patting one another on the back and turning a blind eye to the wrong. True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the hurt, the truth. It could even sometimes make things worse. It is a risky undertaking but in the end it is worthwhile, because in the end only an honest confrontation with reality can bring real healing. Superficial reconciliation can bring only superficial healing.

— Desmond Tutu

Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.

— Viktor E. Frankl

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.

— Carl Jung

Audiophiles don’t use their equipment to listen to your music. Audiophiles use your music to listen to their equipment.

— Alan Parsons

Friends tell each other how they feel with relative frequency. Siblings wait for a more convenient time, like their deathbeds.

— Unknown, The Endless (2018)

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

— H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature