siddhant. > siddhant.'s Quotes

“He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it's a joke.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part I

“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“He who has overcome his fears will truly be free.”
― Aristotle

“Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.”
― Aristotle

“Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“We are our choices.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“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

“Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?”
― Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”
― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“What if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other. You have a choice in life: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness in brief or as much displeasure as possible as the price for an abundance of subtle pleasures and joys”
― Nietzsche

“I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and the impossible.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.”
― Hermann Hesse

“Not in his speech, not in his thoughts, I see his greatness, only in his actions, in his life.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“Liberals tend to understand that a person can be lucky or unlucky in all matters relevant to his success. Conservatives, however, often make a religious fetish of individualism. Many seem to have absolutely no awareness of how fortunate one must be to succeed at anything in life, no matter how hard one works. One must be lucky to be able to work. One must be lucky to be intelligent, physically healthy, and not bankrupted in middle age by the illness of a spouse. Consider the biography of any “self-made” man, and you will find that his success was entirely dependent on background conditions that he did not make and of which he was merely the beneficiary. There is not a person on earth who chose his genome, or the country of his birth, or the political and economic conditions that prevailed at moments crucial to his progress. And yet, living in America, one gets the distinct sense that if certain conservatives were asked why they weren’t born with club feet or orphaned before the age of five, they would not hesitate to take credit for these accomplishments.”
― Sam Harris, Free Will

“I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow; but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.”
― Agatha Christie

“Once Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly. A butterfly fluttering happily around— was he revealing what he himself meant to be? He knew nothing of Zhou. All at once awakening, there suddenly he was — Zhou. But he didn't know if he was Zhou having dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhou. Between Zhou and the butterfly there must surely be some distinction. This is known at the transformation of things.”
― Zhuangzi, Chuang-Tzu: The Inner Chapters

“If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans?”
― Peter Singer, Animal Liberation

“दोनों की मुलाक़ात छत्तरपुर के मन्दिर में हुई। मगर अच्छा लगता था उन्हें जामा मस्जिद में बैठना। इतिहास से साझा होने के बहाने वर्तमान का यह एकान्त। ‘करीम’ से खाकर दोनों मस्जिद की मीनार पर ज़रूर चढ़ते। भीतर के सँकरे रास्ते से होते हुए ऊँचाई से दिल्ली देखने का डर और हाथों को पकड़ लेने का भरोसा। स्पर्श की यही ऊर्जा दोनों को शहरी बना रही थी। चलते-चलते टकराने की जगह भी तो बहुत नहीं दिल्ली में!”
― Ravish Kumar, Ishq mein shahar hona

“Experience life in all possible ways --
good-bad, bitter-sweet, dark-light,
summer-winter. Experience all the dualities.
Don't be afraid of experience, because
the more experience you have, the more
mature you become.”
― Osho

“Listen to your being. It is continuously giving you hints; it is a still, small voice. It does not shout at you, that is true. And if you are a little silent you will start feeling your way. Be the person you are. Never try to be another, and you will become mature. Maturity is accepting the responsibility of being oneself, whatsoever the cost. Risking all to be oneself, that's what maturity is all about.”
― Osho

“Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers,
but to be fearless in facing them.

Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but
for the heart to conquer it.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, Collected Poems and Plays of Rabindranath Tagore

“I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.”
― Tagore

“Let me light my lamp", says the star, "And never debate if it will help to remove the darkness”
― Rabindranath Tagore

“To quench my longing I bent me low
By the streams of the spirits of Peace that flow
In that magical wood in the land of sleep.”
― Sarojini Naidu

“If God were to hold all Truth concealed in his right hand, and in his left only the steady and diligent drive for Truth, albeit with the proviso that I would always and forever err in the process, and to offer me the choice, I would with all humility take the left hand.”
― Gotthold Lessing