Katie > Katie's Quotes

“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
― Fitzgerald F. Scott, The Great Gatsby

“A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. ”
― William S. Burroughs

“Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.”
― Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Back, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

“It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when they have lost their way.”
― Rollo May

“Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?
We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.”
― Freidrich Neitzsche

“I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
― Socrates

“It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.”
― Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot

“The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Heres Tom with the Weather.”
― Bill Hicks

“I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“The first duty of a man is to think for himself”
― Jose Marti

“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
― Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

“I know that pain is the most important thing in the universes. Greater than survival, greater than love, greater even than the beauty it brings about. For without pain, there can be no pleasure. Without sadness, there can be no happiness. Without misery there can be no beauty. And without these, life is endless, hopeless, doomed and damned.
Adult. You have become adult.”
― Harlan Ellison, Paingod and Other Delusions

“The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible.”
― Albert Einstein

“Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“If you only had 48 hours left to live, would you spend it like you normally spend your weekends? If not, why spend 2/7th of your life wasting your free time? After all, free time isn’t free. Free time is the most expensive time you have, because nobody pays for it but you. But that also makes it the most valuable time you have, as you alone stand to reap the profits from spending it wisely.”
― Jarod Kintz, I Should Have Renamed This

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”
― Plato

“The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world...

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.”
― Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

“On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.”
― George Orwell, All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”
― Alan Wilson Watts

“I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Know thyself? If I knew myself, I'd run away.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe