Phil Osophy > Phil's Quotes

“It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.”
― Vincent Van Gogh

“...and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?”
― Vincent Willem van Gogh

“There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.”
― Vincent Van Gogh

“A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke”
― Vincent Van Gogh

“Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.”
― Vincent Van Gogh

“The sadness will last forever.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is a grass in the beginning.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it.”
― Vincent Van Gogh

“I’m trying now to exaggerate the essence of things, and to deliberately leave vague what’s obvious.”
― Vincent Van Gogh, Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh - III vols

“I wish they would take me as I am.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“The trouble with life isn't that there is no answer, it's that there are so many answers”
― Ruth Fulton Benedict

“I long to speak out the intense inspiration that comes to me from the lives of strong women.”
― Ruth Benedict

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

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer , Studies in Pessimism: The Essays

“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”
― Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being

“Where does a thought go when it's forgotten?”
― Sigmund Freud

“Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. The ethical commands, to which religion seeks to lend its weight, require some other foundations instead, for human society cannot do without them, and it is dangerous to link up obedience to them with religious belief. If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.”
― Sigmund Freud , Moses and Monotheism

“Man is many things, but he is not rational.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The attempt to escape from pain, is what creates more pain.”
― Gabor Maté

“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”
― Sigmund Freud

“While the repression of a memory is a psychological process, the suppression of feeling is accomplished by deadening a part of the body or reducing its motility so that feeling is diminished. The repression of the memory is dependent upon and related to the suppression of feeling, for as long as the feeling persists, the memory remains vivid. Suppression entails the development of chronic muscular tension in those areas of the body where the feeling would be experienced. In the case of sexual feeling, this tension is found in and about the abdomen and pelvis”
― Alexander Lowen, Fear Of Life

“We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.”
― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

“You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.”
― Terence McKenna

“If your mind carries a heavy burden of past, you will experience more of the same. The past perpetuates itself through lack of presence. The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“The moment you become aware of the ego in you, it is strictly speaking no longer the ego, but just an old, conditioned mind-pattern. Ego implies unawareness. Awareness and ego cannot coexist.”
― Eckhart Tolle

“How can a three-pound mass of jelly that you can hold in your palm imagine angels, contemplate the meaning of infinity, and even question its own place in the cosmos? Especially awe inspiring is the fact that any single brain, including yours, is made up of atoms that were forged in the hearts of countless, far-flung stars billions of years ago. These particles drifted for eons and light-years until gravity and change brought them together here, now. These atoms now form a conglomerate- your brain- that can not only ponder the very stars that gave it birth but can also think about its own ability to think and wonder about its own ability to wonder. With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe has suddenly become conscious of itself. This, truly, it the greatest mystery of all.”
― V.S. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human

“We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together.”
― Terence McKenna