Ben > Ben's Quotes

“If the ability to read carries the average man no higher than the gossip of his neighbours, if he asks nothing more nourishing out of books and the theatre than he gets hanging about the store, the bar and the street-corner, then culture is bound to be dragged down to him instead of his being lifted up by culture.”
― Edith Wharton, French Ways and Their Meaning

“That our selves and all men are apt and prone to differ it is no new Thing in all former Ages in all parts of this World in these parts and in our deare native Countrey and mournfull state of England.

That either part or partie is most right in his owne eye his Cause Right his Cariage Right, his Argumts Right his Answeres Right is as wofully and constantly true as the former. And experience tells us that when the God of peace hath taken peace from the Earth one sparke of Action word or Cariage is too too powrefull to kindle such a fire as burns up Families Townes Cities Armies, Navies Nations and Kingdomes.

[Letter of Roger Williams to Town of Providence, August 31, 1648]”
― Roger Williams, The Correspondence of Roger Williams

“People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.”
― Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

“Who is John Galt?”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals and I loathe humanity for its failure to live up to these possibilities.”
― Ayn Rand

“Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“People create their own questions because they are afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don't sit looking at it - walk.”
― Ayn Rand

“There is no such thing as a lousy job - only lousy men who don't care to do it.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing to correct it; only a mystic would judge human beings by the standard of an impossible, automatic omniscience. But a breach of morality is the conscious choice of an action you know to be evil, or a willful evasion of knowledge, a suspension of sight and of thought. That which you do not know, is not a moral charge against you; but that which you refuse to know, is an account of infamy growing in your soul. Make every allowance for errors of knowledge; do not forgive or accept any break of morality.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“When you have something to say, silence is a lie.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“RULE 4 COMPARE YOURSELF TO WHO YOU WERE YESTERDAY, NOT TO WHO SOMEONE ELSE IS TODAY”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“Order is not enough. You can’t just be stable, and secure, and unchanging, because there are still vital and important new things to be learned. Nonetheless, chaos can be too much. You can’t long tolerate being swamped and overwhelmed beyond your capacity to cope while you are learning what you still need to know. Thus, you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering. Then you have positioned yourself where the terror of existence is under control and you are secure, but where you are also alert and engaged. That is where there is something new to master and some way that you can be improved. That is where meaning is to be found.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“The successful among us delay gratification. The successful among us bargain with the future.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“It is my firm belief that the best way to fix the world—a handyman’s dream, if ever there was one—is to fix yourself,”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“Stop saying those things that make you weak and ashamed. Say only those things that make you strong. Do only those things that you could speak of with honour.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“What you aim at determines what you see.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“you should not overlook the guidelines of your culture. Life is short, and you don’t have time to figure everything out on your own. The wisdom of the past was hard-earned, and your dead ancestors may have something useful to tell you).”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“Mark Twain once said, “It’s not what we don’t know that gets us in trouble. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“you should never sacrifice what you could be for what you are.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“It is better, proverbially, to rule your own spirit than to rule a city.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“loving your neighbour as yourself.” The first lesson was that neither of these statements has anything to do with being nice. The second was that both are equations, rather than injunctions. If I am someone’s friend, family member, or lover, then I am morally obliged to bargain as hard on my own behalf as they are on theirs. If I fail to do so, I will end up a slave, and the other person a tyrant. What good is that?”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit.”
― Aristotle

“A friend to all is a friend to none.”
― Aristotle

“The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living differ from the dead.”
― Aristotle

“Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.”
― Aristotle

“Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.”
― Max Weber