Milos > Milos's Quotes

“Out beyond
the ideas of wrongdoing and right doing,
there is a field.
I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase 'each other'
doesn't make any sense.”
― Rumi

“The only intelligent tactical response to life’s horror is to laugh defiantly at it”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“I have only one friend, and that is echo. Why is it my friend? Because I love my sorrow, and echo does not take it away from me. I have only one confidant, and that is the silence of night. Why is it my confidant? Because it remains silent.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Entweder - Oder (Kommentierte Gold Collection)

“The one great art is that of making a complete human being of oneself.”
― G.I. Gurdjieff

“A man’s worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions.”
― Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Meditations

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
― Rumi

“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“Modern civilization is based on violence and slavery and fine words.”
― G. I. Gurdjief

“To awaken means to realize one's nothingness, that is, to realize one's complete and absolute mechanicalness, and one's complete and absolute helplessness... So long as a man is not horrified at himself, he knows nothing about himself.”
― G.I. Gurdjieff

“The mentally healthy individual”, writes Wilson. “is he who habitually calls upon fairly deep levels of vital reserves. An individual whose mind is allowed to become dormant – so that only the surface is disturbed – begins to suffer from ‘circulation problems’. Neurosis is the feeling of being cut off from your own powers.”
― Colin Wilson

“‎Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.”
― Voltaire

“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”
― Rosa Luxemburg

“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. Only if you do that can you hope to make the reader feel every particle of what you, the writer, have known and feel compelled to share."---Forward to Kafka's Short stories”
― Anne Rice

“A traveler who had seen many countries, peoples and several of the earth’s continents was asked what attribute he had found in men everywhere. He said: “They have a propensity for laziness.” To others, it seems that he should have said: “They are all fearful. They hide themselves behind customs and opinions.” In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that there will be no second chance for his oneness to coalesce from the strangely variegated assortment that he is: he knows it but hides it like a bad conscience – why? From fear of his neighbor, who demands conformity and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that forces the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare cases. For the majority it is idleness, inertia, in short that propensity for laziness of which the traveler spoke. He is right: men are even lazier than they are fearful.”
― NIETZSCHE FRIEDRICH WILHELM

“The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.”
― J. Krishnamurti

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
― J. Krishnamurti

“People don't have ideas. Ideas have people.”
― Carl Jung

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“A man may hate cruelty and lies, but if he’s never given an opportunity to show what he’s made of, no one will remember him when he dies.”
― Xenophon, Cyrus the Great: The Arts of Leadership and War

“there are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion; and what remains but to take it ready-made from others, instead of forming opinions for himself?”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Always Being Right

“Anything forced is not beautiful”
― Xenophon, The Art of Horsemanship

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The purpose of thinking is to let the ideas die instead of us dying.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“Intellectualisation creates a gap or lack of rapport between you and your life. You may think about things so much that you get into the state where you are eating the menu instead of the dinner.”
― Alan Watts

“Tell me who your enemy is, and I will tell you who you are.”
― Carl Schmitt

“Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.”
― Voltaire

“There is a false saying: “How can someone who can’t save himself save others?” Supposing I have the key to your chains, why should your lock and my lock be the same?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“But I need solitude--which is to say, recovery, return to myself, the breath of a free, light, playful air.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals / Ecce Homo