S > S's Quotes

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Le seul moyen d'affronter un monde sans liberté est de devenir si absolument libre qu'on fasse de sa propre existence un acte de révolte. ”
― Albert Camus, The Rebel

“Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.”
― Alan Watts

“It's like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it's dense, isn't it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see? So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting. But so we define ourselves as being only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlique, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time. Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually--if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning-- you're not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as--Mr so-and- so, Ms so-and-so, Mrs so-and-so--I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I'm that, too. But we've learned to define ourselves as separate from it. ”
― Alan Watts

“You are not supposed to be happy all the time. Life hurts and it's hard. Not because you're doing it wrong, but because it hurts for everybody. Don't avoid the pain. You need it. It's meant for you. Be still with it, let it come, let it go, let it leave you with the fuel you'll burn to get your work done on this earth.”
― Glennon Doyle Melton

“Reading is my inhale and writing is my exhale.”
― Glennon Doyle Melton, Carry On, Warrior: The Power of Embracing Your Messy, Beautiful Life

“Wherever you go, there you are. Your emptiness goes with you. Maddening. Things that help: writing, reading, water, walks, forgiving myself every other minute, practicing easy yoga, taking deep breaths, and petting my dogs. These things don't fill me completely, but they remind me that it is not my job to fill myself. It's just my job to notice my emptiness and find graceful ways to live as a broken, unfilled human...

If there's a silver lining to the emptiness, here it is: the unfillable is what brings people together. I've never made a friend by bragging about my strengths, but I've made countless by sharing my weakness and my emptiness.”
― Glennon Doyle Melton, Carry On, Warrior: Thoughts on Life Unarmed

“So what is it in a human life that creates bravery, kindness, wisdom, and reilience? What if it's pain? What if it's the struggle?”
― Glennon Doyle Melton, Love Warrior

“The journey is learning that pain, like love, is simply something to surrender to. It's a holy space we can enter with people only if we promise not to tidy up.”
― Glennon Doyle Melton, Love Warrior

“To re-establish man at the heart of his destiny is, they claim, to repudiate all ethics. However, far from God's absence authorizing all license, the contrary is the case, because man is abandoned on the earth, because his acts are definitive, absolute engagements. He bears the responsibility for a world which is not the work of a strange power, but of himself, where his defeats are inscribed, & his victories as well.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

“But if man is free to define for himself the conditions of a life which is valid in his own eyes, can he not choose whatever he likes and act however he likes? Dostoievsky asserted, “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” Today’s believers use this formula for their own advantage. To re-establish man at the heart of his destiny is, they claim, to repudiate all ethics. However, far from God’s absence authorizing all license, the contrary is the case, because man is abandoned on the earth, because his acts are definitive, absolute engagements. He bears the responsibility for a world which is not the work of a strange power, but of himself, where his defeats are inscribed, and his victories as well.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

“What stops them is that as soon as they give the word “end” its double meaning of goal and fulfillment they clearly perceive this ambiguity of their condition, which is the most fundamental of all: that every living movement is a sliding toward death. But if they are willing to look it in the face they also discover that every movement toward death is life.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

“I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

“Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us therefore try to look the truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

“The goal which my freedom aims at is conquering existence across the always inadequate density of being.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

“The nihilist is right in thinking that the world _possesses_ no justification and that he himself _is_ nothing. But he forgets that it is up to him to justify the world and to make himself exist validly.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

“The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness".”
― Alain de Botton

“You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.”
― Alain de Botton

“The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.”
― Alain de Botton

“It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.”
― Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

“Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.”
― Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy

“We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped ... We suffer, therefore we think.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.”
― Alain de Botton

“Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.”
― Alain de Botton, On Love

“We should add that it is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk: it means the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt. It is one of the odder gifts of love.”
― Alain de Botton, The Course of Love

“Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.”
― Alain de Botton

“There are things that are not spoken about in polite society. Very quickly in most conversations you'll reach a moment where someone goes, 'Oh, that's a bit heavy,' or 'Eew, disgusting.' And literature is a place where that stuff goes; where people whisper to each other across books, the writer to the reader. I think that stops you feeling lonely – in the deeper sense, lonely.”
― Alain de Botton

“It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.”
― Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

“Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.”
― Alain de Botton, A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary

“As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.”
― Alain de Botton