Joseph St Charles > Joseph's Quotes

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus

“Ignorance, the root and stem of every evil.”
― Plato

“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”
― Viktor E. Frankl

“The truly terrible thing is that everybody has their reasons.”
― Jean Renoir

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
― Marcel Proust

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become the next moment. By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.”
― Viktor Emil Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself in your way of thinking.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.”
― Karl R. Popper

“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

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”
― Heraclitus

“Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

“The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“As for man, his days are numbered, whatever he might do, it is but wind.”
― Andrew George, The Epic of Gilgamesh

“The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.”
― Edward Gibbon

“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“One must give value to their existence by behaving as if ones very existence were a work of art.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

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

“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength.”
― Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind: And Other Aphorisms

“Cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it.”
― Voltaire

“Humility is the awareness that there’s a lot you don’t know and that a lot of what you think you know is distorted or wrong.”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“Of this one thing make sure against your dying day - that your faults die before you do.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“For over twenty-five centuries we’ve been bearing the weight of superb and heterogeneous civilizations, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own.

This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and even these monuments of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing round us like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood, their only expressions works of art we couldn't understand and taxes which we understood only too well and which they spent elsewhere: all these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind.”
― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

“Everybody wants to save the Earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, All the Trouble in the World

“Don't just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents.”
― Epictetus, The Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness and Effectiveness