Jurek > Jurek's Quotes

“It is truth that liberates, not your effort to be free.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, The First and Last Freedom

“Tell your friend that in his death, a part of you dies and goes with him. Wherever he goes, you also go. He will not be alone.”
― J. Krishnamurti

“do it or don't do it but get on with it...”
― J. Krishnamurti, Beginnings of Learning

“Why are you unhappy?
Because 99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself—and there isn’t one.”
― Wei Wu Wei

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“It is not enough to be nice; you have to be good. We are attracted by nice people; but only on the assumption that their niceness is a sign of goodness.”
― Roger Scruton

“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
― Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays

“I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.”
― Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point

“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”
― Aldous Huxley

“The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.”
― Czeslaw Milosz

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”
― Aldous Huxley, Collected Essays

“The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.”
― Albert Einstein

“Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb, too. The imagination and spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.... Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“When you part from your friend, you grieve not;
For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as
the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.”
― Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

“The enchantment of being here at all, alive and aware, is a gift too often considered a problem.

Simply feeling the aliveness—the unique suchness—of each never-to-be-repeated moment outshines completely the desire for power, or pleasure, or meaning—outshines those desires in my world at least.

When actually engaged in this aliveness without trying to explain it (as if it ever could be explained), questions such as “What does it all mean?” or “Who am I?” never even arise. The aliveness is the meaning.”
― Robert Saltzman, The Ten Thousand Things

“If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. If they don't, they never were.”
― Kahlil Gibran

“Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.”
― Kahlil Gibran

“No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.”
― Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

“Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.”
― Kahlil Gibran

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“The glory of Christianity is to conquer by forgiveness.”
― William Blake

“A quiet mind is all you need. All else will happen rightly, once your
mind is quiet. As the sun on rising makes the world active, so does
self-awareness affect changes in the mind. In the light of calm and
steady self-awareness, inner energies wake up and work miracles
without any effort on your part”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj

“My ambition is handicapped by laziness”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum

“All you want is to be happy. All your desires, whatever they may be, are longing for happiness. Basically, you wish yourself well...desire by itself is not wrong. It is life itself, the urge to grow in knowledge and experience. It is choices you make that are wrong. To imagine that some little thing-food, sex, power, fame-will make you happy is to decieve oneself. Only something as vast and deep as your real self can make you truly and lastingly happy.”
― Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“Don’t try to understand! It’s enough if you do not misunderstand.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj

“The consciousness in you and the consciousness in me, apparently two, really one, seek unity and that is love.”
― Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“There is no such thing as a person. There are only restrictions and limitations. The sum total of these defines the person. You think you know yourself when you know what you are. But you never know who you are. The person merely appears to be, like the space within the pot appears to have the shape and volume and smell of the pot. See that you are not what you believe yourself to be. Fight with all the strength at your disposal against the idea that you are nameable and describable. You are not. Refuse to think of yourself in terms of this or that. There is no other way out of misery, which you have created for yourself through blind acceptance without investigation. Suffering is a call for enquiry, all pain needs investigation. Don’t be too lazy to think.”
― Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.”
― Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain