Rex Drabik > Rex's Quotes

“Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love ...”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good.”
― Marcus Aurelius

“Science and technology have a simple and persuasive message: the world's problems are soluble by ingenuity and material innovations; the world's riddles, such as the origins of the universe, can be unravelled by the scientific mind. But while science's achievements have been remarkable, they have not been revolutionary in probing human nature. In some ways the measurable problems analysed by science and technology are more easily dissected than human problems. The moon is more easily explored than the typical mind and heart.”
― Geoffrey Blainey, A Short History of Christianity

“If we disown history we are at its mercy. To have a reasonable knowledge of the past is to possess an anchor which is likely to prevent us from being swept towards false ideas about the present and future.”
― Geoffrey Blainey, The Great Seesaw: A New View of the Western World, 1750-2000

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”
― George Orwell

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
― George Orwell

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

“The greatness comes not when things go always good for you. But the greatness comes when you're really tested, when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes. Because only if you've been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.”
― Richard Nixon

“In writing I was often aware that the same observation could fit neatly into different ideological moulds and that a train window is both mirror and window.”
― Geoffrey Blainey, Across a red world

“The historian always oversimplifies, and hastily selects a manageable minority of facts and faces out of a crowd of souls and events whose multitudinous complexity he can never quite embrace or comprehend.”
― Will Durant, The Lessons of History

“It is not in our cities or townships, it is not in our agricultural or mining areas, that the Australian attains full consciousness of his own nationality; it is in places like this, and as clearly here as at the centre of the continent. To me the monotonous variety of this interminable scrub has a charm of its own; so grave, subdued, self-centred; so alien to the genial appeal of more winsome landscape, or the assertive grandeur of mountain and gorge. To me this wayward diversity of spontaneous plant life bespeaks an unconfined, ungauged potentiality of resource; it unveils an ideographic prophecy, painted by Nature in her Impressionist mood, to be deciphered aright only by those willing to discern through the crudeness of dawn a promise of majestic day.”
― Joseph Furphy, Such is Life

“Nothing is clearer in history than the adoption by successful rebels of the methods they were accustomed to condemn in the forces they deposed.”
― Will Durant, The Lessons of History

“Australia is increasingly the story of a few large cities, but a thousand half-forgotten townships still view themselves as the emotional heart of the nation.”
― Geoffrey Blainey, A Shorter History of Australia

“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

“All big things come from small beginnings. The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision. But as that decision is repeated, a habit sprouts and grows stronger. Roots entrench themselves and branches grow. The task of breaking a bad habit is like uprooting a powerful oak within us. And the task of building a good habit is like cultivating a delicate flower one day at a time.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones