A > A's Quotes

“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”
― Bertrand Russell

“A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.”
― William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

“The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.”
― Mark Twain

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”
― Albert Einstein

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

“Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep”
― Albert Camus

“The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“I was never aware of any other option but to question everything.”
― Noam Chomsky

“If you reveal your secrets to the wind,
you should not blame the wind for
revealing them to the trees.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Wanderer

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

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

“A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.”
― Alan Watts

“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

“There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.”
― Alan Wilson Watts

“The difference between having a job and having a vocation is that a job is some unpleasant work you do in order to make money, with the sole purpose of making money. There are plenty of jobs because there is still a certain amount of dirty work that nobody wants to do, and that therefore they will pay someone to do it. There is essentially less and less of that kind of work because of mechanisation. If you do a job with the sole purpose of making money, you are absurd, because if money becomes the goal–and it does if you work that way–you begin increasingly to confuse it with happiness or with pleasure. Yes, one can take a handful of crisp one dollar bills and practically water your mouth over it, but this is a kind of person who is confused like a Pavlov dog, who salivates on the wrong bell.”
― Alan W. Watts

“Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy. Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents.”
― Ludwig van Beethoven

“If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
― Galileo Galilei, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina

“I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”
― C.S. Lewis

“I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?”
― C.S. Lewis

“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.”
― C.S. Lewis

“If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“The mind once enlightened cannot again become dark.”
― Thomas Paine, A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal on the Affairs of North America

“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.”
― Thomas Paine, The American Crisis

“In a world without God, who’s to say whose values are right and whose are wrong? There can be no objective right and wrong, only our culturally and personally relative, subjective judgments. Think of what that means! It means it’s impossible to condemn war, oppression, or crime as evil. Nor can you praise generosity, self-sacrifice, and love as good. To kill someone or to love someone is morally equivalent. For in a universe without God, good and evil do not exist—there is only the bare, valueless fact of existence, and there is no one to say you are right and I am wrong.”
― William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision

“Something is objective if it is independent of people’s opinions. If it holds or is true independently of what anybody thinks then it is objective. It is subjective if it is dependent upon people’s opinions.”
― William Lane Craig

“To say that the holocaust was objectively wrong, is to say that the holocaust was wrong even though the Nazis who carried it out thought that it was right, and it would still have been wrong, even if the Nazis had won World War II and succeeded in brainwashing or exterminating everybody who disagreed with them, so that everyone in the world thought that the holocaust was right and good. To say that the holocaust was objectively wrong, means that it's wrong regardless of the outcome of World War II. The premise is that if there is no God, then moral values or duties are not objective in that sense.”
― William Lane Craig

“The most popular form of atheism is a philosophy called naturalism. Naturalism is the view that science and science alone determines what exists. What exists is what our best scientific theories of the world require. If something is not required by our best scientific theories of the world, then it does not exist. But this is devastating for ethics because moral values are not required by science. Science is morally neutral. You cannot find moral values in a test tube. So it follows immediately, from the perspective of naturalism, that moral values do not really exist. They are just subjective illusions of human beings.”
― William Lane Craig

“The statement 'the Shariah says...' is thus automatically misleading, as there is almost always more than one answer to any legal question.”
― Jonathan A.C. Brown

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
― Winston S. Churchill