Sofo Salia > Sofo's Quotes

“But why? Why do you need prophets to tell you how you ought to live? Why do you need anyone to tell you how you ought to live”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael

“I see now that the path I choose through the maze makes me what I am. I am not only a thing, but also a way of being—one of many ways—and knowing the paths I have followed and the ones left to take will help me understand what I am becoming.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love. This is something else I've discovered for myself very recently. I present it to you as a hypothesis: Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis. And I say that the mind absorbed in and involved in itself as a self-centered end, to the exclusion of human relationships, can only lead to violence and pain.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.”
― Allen Saunders

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”
― Leonard Cohen

“Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.”
― José Saramago, Blindness

“Interviewer: 'So Frank, you have long hair. Does that make you a woman?'
Frank Zappa: 'You have a wooden leg. Does that make you a table?”
― Frank Zappa

“As long as one is escaping from loneliness, there is no essential difference between the worship of God and addiction to alcohol. Socially, there may be a difference; but psychologically, the man who runs away from himself, from his own emptiness, whose escape is his search for God, is on the same level as the drunkard.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, On Love and Loneliness: A Compelling Investigation of Intimate Relationships, Isolation, and Self-Knowledge

“Self-knowledge is the beginning of wisdom, which is the ending of fear.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, On Love and Loneliness: A Compelling Investigation of Intimate Relationships, Isolation, and Self-Knowledge

“The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.”
― J. Krishnamurti

“When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti

“You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti

“It is truth that liberates, not your effort to be free.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, The First and Last Freedom

“The history of mankind is the history of our misunderstandings with god, for he doesn't understand us, and we don't understand him.”
― José Saramago, Caim

“No one is just one person, you, for example, are both cain and abel, And you, Oh, I am all women, and all their names are mine, said lilith,”
― José Saramago, Cain

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
― Rumi

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.”
― Rumi

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
― Rumi

“Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.”
― Rumi

“What you seek is seeking you.”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

“Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.”
― Rumi

“When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.”
― Rumi

“My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there.”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

“Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.”
― Rumi

“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“All great and precious things are lonely.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent