Trevor > Trevor's Quotes

“The proverb says that 'The answer to a fool is silence'. Observation, however, indicates that almost any other answer will have the same effect in the long run.”
― Idries Shah, Reflections

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.”
― Elie Wiesel

“You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it never
Rises from the soul, and sways
The heart of every single hearer,
With deepest power, in simple ways.
You’ll sit forever, gluing things together,
Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps,
Blowing on a miserable fire,
Made from your heap of dying ash.
Let apes and children praise your art,
If their admiration’s to your taste,
But you’ll never speak from heart to heart,
Unless it rises up from your heart’s space.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, First Part

“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, First Part

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

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

“Possessions, outward success, publicity, luxury - to me these have always been contemptible. I believe that a simple and unassuming manner of life is best for everyone, best for both the body and the mind.”
― Albert Einstein

“If you're honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values. Then you're forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal. This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws.”
― Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

“When we cannot bear to be alone, it means we do not properly value the only companion we will have from birth to death - ourselves.”
― Eda LeShan

“In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. More powerfully and persuasively than from the "shalt nots" of the Ten Commandments, I learned the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. A Wrinkle in Time described that evil, that wrong, existing in a different dimension from our own. But I felt that I, too, existed much of the time in a different dimension from everyone else I knew. There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books, a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which I might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger. My real, true world. My perfect island.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“Find people who share your values, and you'll conquer the world together.”
― John Ratzenberger

“Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series

“Getting money is not all a man's business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.”
― Samuel Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. Vol 3

“In much of the rest of the world, rich people live in gated communities and drink bottled water. That's increasingly the case in Los Angeles where I come from. So that wealthy people in much of the world are insulated from the consequences of their actions."

[Why Societies Collapse, ABC Local, July 17, 2003]”
― Jared Diamond

“[W]hat makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or crush their infidel enemy.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

“People often ask, "What is the single most important environmental population problem facing the world today?" A flip answer would be, "The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“We know from our recent history that English did not come to replace U.S. Indian languages merely because English sounded musical to Indians' ears. Instead, the replacement entailed English-speaking immigrants' killing most Indians by war, murder, and introduced diseases, and the surviving Indians' being pressured into adopting English, the new majority language.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

“One way to explain the complexity and unpredictability of historical systems, despite their ultimate determinacy, is to note that long chains of causation may separate final effects from ultimate causes lying outside the domain of that field of science.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

“With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

“(On the beginning of the mid-1990s' genocidal war in Rwanda:)

Within six weeks, an estimated 800,000 Tutsi, representing about three-quarters of the Tutsi then remaining in Rwanda, or 11% of Rwanda's total population, had been killed.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“When you have seen the errors in which you live, you will understand the good that we have done you by coming to your land by order of his Majesty the King of Spain. Our Lord permitted that your pride should be brought low and that no Indian should be able to offend a Christian.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

“Why you white man have so much cargo and we New Guineans have so little? (asked Yali)”
― Jared Diamond

“All oppression creates a state of war. And this is no exception.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“If you understood everything I said, you’d be me”
― Miles Davis

“Creativity is the greatest rebellion in existence.”
― Osho, Creativity: Unleashing the Forces Within

“The less people know, the more stubbornly they know it.”
― Osho

“The real question is not whether life exists after death. The real question is whether you are alive before death.”
― Osho

“A little foolishness, enough 2 enjoy life, & a little wisdom to avoid the errors, that will do”
― Osho

“Be less of a judge and you will be surprised that when you become a witness and you don't judge yourself, you stop judging others too. And that makes you more human, more compassionate, more understanding.”
― Osho