Quotes - Brian Hoffstein (dharmabum) (The United States) Showing 1-30 of 95

#1

“Life is like playing the violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.”
― Samuel Butler

tags: inspirational

43 likes

#2

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

tags: individuality, majority, minority, pause, reflect, wisdom

43903 likes

#3

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

5096 likes

#4

“This wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, 'Morning, boys, how's the water?' and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, 'What the fuck is water?' and swim away.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

tags: fish, joke

40 likes

#5

“Many of us pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that we hurry past it.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

tags: pleasure

384 likes

#6

“It is very important in life to know when your cue comes.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

149 likes

#7

“The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should reply, 'Create silence'.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

99 likes

#8

“The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.”
― Baruch Spinoza

tags: education, free-thought, philosophy

886 likes

#9

“No matter how thin you slice it, there will always be two sides.”
― Spinoza

tags: disputes

410 likes

#10

“The more you struggle to live, the less you live. Give up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing. Instead, surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure....you are above everything distressing.”
― Spinoza

tags: philosophy

599 likes

#11

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
― Albert Camus

4499 likes

#12

“Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity.”
― Albert Einstein

159 likes

#13

“An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.”
― H.L. Mencken, A Book of Burlesques

tags: cabbage, cooking, fragrance, humor, idealism, metaphors, perfume, roses, similes

473 likes

#14

“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

tags: enjoy-life, fearlessness, live-in-the-moment

5501 likes

#15

“We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

3343 likes

#16

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

tags: ambiguity, virtue

5976 likes

#17

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

tags: love

11958 likes

#18

“I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

tags: inspirational, life

1662 likes

#19

“I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

tags: loneliness, secret-knowledge, secrets, solitude

1911 likes

#20

“Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

tags: writing

1427 likes

#21

“Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other. ”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

tags: poetry

1617 likes

#22

“The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

tags: poetry

1322 likes

#23

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.
...live in the question.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

1581 likes

#24

“Be melting snow.
Wash yourself of yourself.”
― Rumi, The Essential Rumi

tags: inspirational

1201 likes

#25

“Respond to every call
that excites your spirit.”
― Rumi, The Essential Rumi

1157 likes

#26

“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

89190 likes

#27

“(Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of sings (please stoop), in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world?”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

11 likes

#28

“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

tags: james-joyce, ulysses

2404 likes

#29

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

tags: dance, music

10924 likes

#30

“Every day one should at least hear one little song, read one good poem, see one fine painting and -- if at all possible -- speak a few sensible words.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

tags: attitude, perspective

557 likes

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