Philip Cushing > Philip's Quotes

“The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“Flow with whatever may happen, and let your mind be free: Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.”
― Zhuangzi

“If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.”
― Dalai Lama XIV

“I believe the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness. Whether one believes in religion or not, whether one believes in that religion or this religion, we are all seeking something better in life. So, I think, the very motion of our life is towards happiness...”
― Dalai Lama XIV, The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World

“Greater in battle
than the man who would conquer
a thousand-thousand men,
is he who would conquer
just one —
himself.
Better to conquer yourself
than others.
When you've trained yourself,
living in constant self-control,
neither a deva nor gandhabba,
nor a Mara banded with Brahmas,
could turn that triumph
back into defeat.”
― Buddha

“There was an omnivorous intellect that won him the family sobriquet of Walking Encyclopedia.”
― Eric Liu

“I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”
― William Faulkner, Nobel Prize in Literature Acceptance Speech, 1949

“the sense of being which in calm hours arises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them and proceeds obviously from the same source.... Here is the fountain of action and of thought.... We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Not only does God play dice but... he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.”
― Stephen Hawking

“Consciousness is a being the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.”
― Jacobus Johannes Leeuw

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

“What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.”
― Henry Stanley Haskins, Meditations in Wall Street

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin

“To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.”
― Stephen Hawking

“Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.'

I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!”
― Lewis Carroll

“The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”
― Niels Bohr

“How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.”
― Niels Bohr

“The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”
― Oscar Wilde

“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
― C.G. Jung

“Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.”
― Winston Churchill

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

“Know thyself.”
― Socrates

“All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“All great truths begin as blasphemies.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Annajanska the Bolshevik Empress