Veronica > Veronica's Quotes

“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“I thought these grapes were ripe, but I see now they are quite sour.”
― Aesop, Aesop’s Fables

“You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

“Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“It is not that we have so little time but that we lose so much. ... The life we receive is not short but we make it so; we are not ill provided but use what we have wastefully.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

“Better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees.”
― Jean Paul Sartre

“Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
― Sigmund Freud

“I want to see mountains again, Gandalf, mountains, and then find somewhere where I can rest. In peace and quiet, without a lot of relatives prying around, and a string of confounded visitors hanging on the bell. I might find somewhere where I can finish my book. I have thought of a nice ending for it: and he lived happily ever after to the end of his days.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“I'm going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

“You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

“Often a very old man has no other proof of his long life than his age.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

“The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, though all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

“You must set your hands to tasks which you can finish or at least hope to finish, and avoid those which get bigger as you proceed and do not cease where you had intended.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

“Can anything be sillier than the point of view of certain people—I mean those who boast of their foresight? They keep themselves very busily engaged in order that they may be able to live better; they spend life in making ready to live! They form their purposes with a view to the distant future; yet postponement is the greatest waste of life; it deprives them of each day as it comes, it snatches from them the present by promising something hereafter. The greatest hindrance to living is expectancy, which depends upon the morrow and wastes to-day. You dispose of that which lies in the hands of Fortune, you let go that which lies in your own.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“If you don't know where you're going, any road'll take you there”
― George Harrison

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”
― Albert Camus

“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”
― Lao Tzu

“Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.”
― Alan Watts

“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”
― Alan Watts

“The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.”
― Alan Watts

“Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.”
― Alan Watts

“A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.”
― Alan Wilson Watts

“For unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax.
There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you will
never be able to enjoy. When your plans mature, you will still be living
for some other future beyond. You will never, never be able to sit back
with full contentment and say, "Now, I've arrived!" Your entire
education has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing
you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now.”
― Alan Wilson Watts

“What I am really saying is that you don’t need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of a galaxy. You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all.”
― Alan Watts

“Half the time you think your thinking you’re actually listening”
― Terence McKenna