Jack Malcolm > Jack's Quotes

“Nothing goes perfectly for us. But... being incomplete is what pushes us onward to the next something... If we were even perfectly satisfied, what meaning would the rest of our lives hold, right?”
― Inoue Takehiko

“The art of being a slave is to rule one's master.”
― Diogenes

“What we do now echoes in eternity.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“When the Soul wants to experience something she throws out an image in front of her and then steps into it.”
― Meister Eckhart

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?”
― Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics

“Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man. ”
― Martin Heidegger

“Death smiles at us all; all we can do is smile back.”
― Marcus Aurelius

“The time is at hand when you will have forgotten everything; and the time is at hand when all will have forgotten you. Always reflect that soon you will be no one, and nowhere.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Nothing is more scandalous than a man that is proud of his humility.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
― Mark Twain

“In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.”
― Carl Jung

“The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me. Or, conversely, I myself am a question which is addressed to the world, and I must communicate my answer, for otherwise I am dependent upon the world’s answer.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune. ”
― Carl Gustav Jung

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

“Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.”
― C.G. Jung

“It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours.”
― Diogenes of Sinope

“I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“There were many terrible things in my life and most of them never happened.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“I am afraid. Not of life, or death, or nothingness, but of wasting it as if I had never been.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“Thank God for books and music and things I can think about.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“This is time for us. Memory. A nostalgia. The pain of absence. But it isn't absence that causes sorrow. It is affection and love. Without affection, without love, such absences would cause us no pain.
For this reason, even the pain caused by absence is in the end something good and even beautiful. Because it feeds on that which gives meaning to life.”
― Carlo Rovelli, L'ordine del tempo

“The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“We are perhaps the only species on Earth to be conscious of the inevitability of our individual mortality. I fear that soon we shall also have to become the only species that will knowingly watch the coming of its own collective demise, or at least the demise of its civilization.”
― Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Do not indulge in dreams of having what you have not, but reckon up the chief of the blessings you do possess, and then thankfully remember how you would crave for them if they were not yours.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Preoccupied with a single leaf... you won't see the tree. Preoccupied with a single tree... you'll miss the entire forest. Don't be preoccupied with a single spot. See everything in it's entirety... effortlessly. That is what it means to truly "see.”
― Takehiko Inoue

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
― Carl Sagan