Michael Clayton > Michael's Quotes

“Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.”
― Voltaire

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

“How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself and in no instance bypass the discriminations of reason? You have been given the principles that you ought to endorse, and you have endorsed them. What kind of teacher, then, are you still waiting for in order to refer your self-improvement to him? You are no longer a boy, but a full-grown man. If you are careless and lazy now and keep putting things off and always deferring the day after which you will attend to yourself, you will not notice that you are making no progress, but you will live and die as someone quite ordinary.
From now on, then, resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside. And whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable, or highly or lowly regarded, remember that the contest is now: you are at the Olympic Games, you cannot wait any longer, and that your progress is wrecked or preserved by a single day and a single event. That is how Socrates fulfilled himself by attending to nothing except reason in everything he encountered. And you, although you are not yet a Socrates, should live as someone who at least wants to be a Socrates.”
― Epictetus (From Manual 51)

“Human evolution has two steps -
from being somebody to being nobody;
and from being nobody to being everybody.
This knowledge can bring
sharing and caring throughout the world.”
― Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

“Life is a constant process of dying.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“All I know is that I do not know anything”
― Socrates

“Don’t be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.”
― Bertholt Brecht

“If we are merely matter intricately assembled, is this really demeaning? If there's nothing here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“... the river is everywhere at once, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the rapids, in the sea, in the mountains, everywhere at once, and that there is only the present time for it, not the shadow of the past, not the shadow of the future.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“Man's status in the natural world is determined, therefore, by the quality of his thinking.”
― Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages

“Let animals live like animals; let humans live like humans. That's my whole philosophy in a sentence.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“Be noble minded! Our own heart, and not other men's opinions of us, forms our true honor.”
― Friedrich Schiller