Kevin > Kevin's Quotes

“The rain is falling all around,
It falls on field and tree,
It rains on the umbrellas here,
And on the ships at sea.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child's Garden of Verses

“If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment ... all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think”
― Socrates

“PIPPIN: I didn't think it would end this way.

GANDALF: End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it.

PIPPIN: What? Gandalf? See what?

GANDALF: White shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.

PIPPIN: Well, that isn't so bad.

GANDALF: No. No, it isn't.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

“Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Some lose all mind and become soul,insane.
some lose all soul and become mind, intellectual.
some lose both and become accepted”
― Charles Bukowski

“Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.”
― Charles Bukowski

“There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going to let anybody see you.”
― Charles Bukowski

“How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 8:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so? ”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
― L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
― J. Krishnamurti

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“No one has ever properly understood me, I have never fully understood anyone; and no one understands anyone else”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“Books, purchasable at low cost, permit us to interrogate the past with high accuracy; to tap the wisdom of our species; to understand the point of view of others, and not just those in power; to contemplate--with the best teachers--the insights, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history. They allow people long dead to talk inside our heads. Books can accompany us everywhere. Books are patient where we are slow to understand, allow us to go over the hard parts as many times as we wish, and are never critical of our lapses. Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“The chief deficiency I see in the skeptical movement is its polarization: Us vs. Them — the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you're sensible, you'll listen to us; and if not, to hell with you. This is nonconstructive. It does not get our message across. It condemns us to permanent minority status.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“When we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the skeptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“The universe is true for us all and dissimilar to each of us.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time [volumes 1 to 7]

“I longed for nothing more than to behold a stormy sea, less as a mighty spectacle than as a momentary revelation of the true life of nature;”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: The Complete Masterpiece

“One unerring mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.”
― John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

“We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.”
― Confucius