Michael Antonio > Michael's Quotes

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

“The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.”
― Voltaire

“I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?”
― Voltaire, Candide, or, Optimism

“Love truth, but pardon error.”
― Voltaire

“I don’t know where I am going, but I am on my way.”
― Voltaire

“Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.”
― Voltaire

“The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.”
― Voltaire

“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”
― Lewis Carroll

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

“How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself and in no instance bypass the discriminations of reason? You have been given the principles that you ought to endorse, and you have endorsed them. What kind of teacher, then, are you still waiting for in order to refer your self-improvement to him? You are no longer a boy, but a full-grown man. If you are careless and lazy now and keep putting things off and always deferring the day after which you will attend to yourself, you will not notice that you are making no progress, but you will live and die as someone quite ordinary.
From now on, then, resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside. And whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable, or highly or lowly regarded, remember that the contest is now: you are at the Olympic Games, you cannot wait any longer, and that your progress is wrecked or preserved by a single day and a single event. That is how Socrates fulfilled himself by attending to nothing except reason in everything he encountered. And you, although you are not yet a Socrates, should live as someone who at least wants to be a Socrates.”
― Epictetus (From Manual 51)

“It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.”
― James Baldwin

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.”
― Albert Camus

“Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.”
― Frank Zappa

“The past has no power over the present moment.”
― Eckhart Tolle

“Life is a constant process of dying.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“All I know is that I do not know anything”
― Socrates

“We are what we repeatedly do. Greatness then, is not an act, but a habit”
― Will Durant

“It takes billions of years to create a human being. And it takes only a few seconds to die.”
― Jostein Gaarder, Maya

“The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self.”
― Max Stirner

“What we know is a drop, what we don't know is an ocean.”
― Isaac Newton

“Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude.”
― William James

“Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.”
― John Dewey

“I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise.”
― Blaise Pascal

“Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“Knowledge is the conformity of the object and the intellect”
― AverroEs, Decisive Treatise and Epistle Dedicatory

“The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.”
― E. M. Cioran

“Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?”
― Emil Cioran, Tears and Saints