Dave Hood > Dave's Quotes

“The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widely spread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”
― Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”
― Socrates

“The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“I have one major rule: Everybody is right. More specifically, everybody — including me — has some important pieces of truth, and all of those pieces need to be honored, cherished, and included in a more gracious, spacious, and compassionate embrace.”
― Ken Wilber

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”
― Mark Twain

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
― Socrates

“Tree

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books--

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.”
― jane hirshfield

“Humans see what they want to see.”
― Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief

“The reason I talk to myself is because I’m the only one whose answers I accept.”
― George Carlin

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”
― Confucius

“War is what happens when language fails.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“Poetry is life distilled.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks

“Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?”
― Cornelia Funke

“I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

“The man who wishes to know the "that" which is "thou" may set to work in any one of three ways. He may begin by looking inwards into his own particular thou and, by a process of "dying to self" --- self in reasoning, self in willing, self in feeling --- come at last to knowledge of the self, the kingdom of the self, the kingdom of God that is within. Or else he may begin with the thous existing outside himself, and may try to realize their essential unity with God and, through God, with one another and with his own being. Or, finally (and this is doubtless the best way), he may seek to approach the ultimate That both from within and from without, so that he comes to realize God experimentally as at once the principle of his own thou and of all other thous, animate and inanimate.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy

“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”
― Andre Gide, Autumn Leaves

“Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion."

[The Minotaur]”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.”
― Harold Bloom

“To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.”
― Anthony Burgess, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Essays

“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.”
― Elie Wiesel

“They say philosophers and wise men are indifferent. Wrong. Indifference is a paralysis of the soul, a premature death.”
― Anton Chekhov, Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov

“Participate in your life, don't just bear witness to the rain washing you away.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, We Shadows