Vincent > Vincent's Quotes

“Crucial for man is his attitude toward failure: whether it remains hidden from him and overwhelms him only objectively at the end or whether he perceives it unobscured as the constant limit of his existence; whether he snatches at fantastic solutions and consolations or faces it honestly, in silence before the unfathomable. The way in which man approaches his failure determines what he will become.”
― Karl Jaspers, Way to Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy

“Potential," I said, "doesn't mean a thing. You've got to do it. Almost every baby in a crib has more potential than I have.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

“The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight,
but they, while their companions slept,
were toiling upward in the night.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Every effort to understand destroys the object studied in favor of another object of a different nature; this second object requires from us a new effort which destroys it in favor of a third, and so on and so forth until we reach the one lasting presence, the point at which the distinction between meaning and the absence of meaning disappears: the same point from which we began.”
― Claude Lévi-Strauss

“The pleasure hides the austerity of the toil.”
― Horace, The Satires of Horace and Persius

“Men, it is in vain that you seek within yourselves the cure for your miseries. All your intelligence can only bring you to realize that it is not within yourselves that you will find either truth or good.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“Where one can no longer love, there one should pass by.”
― Nietzsche Friedrich Wilhelm, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“He who had never actually seen a river, the first time he did so took it for the ocean, since we think that the biggest things that we know represent the limits of what Nature can produce in that species.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Respect yourself and others will respect you.”
― Confucius, The Sayings of Confucius

“What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more. Sure he that made us with such large discourse, looking before and after, gave us not that capability and god-like reason to fust in us unused.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, First Part

“So the problem is not so much to see what nobody has yet seen, as to think what nobody has yet thought concerning that which everybody sees.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Faith is a state of openness or trust.

To have faith is like when you trust yourself to the water. You don’t grab hold of the water when you swim, because if you do you will become stiff and tight in the water, and sink. You have to relax, and the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging, and holding on.

In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe becomes a person who has no faith at all. Instead they are holding tight. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.”
― Alan W. Watts

“By oneself the evil is done, and it is oneself who suffers: by oneself the evil is not done, and by one's Self one becomes pure. The pure and the impure come from oneself: no man can purify another.”
― Gautama Buddha, The Dhammapada

“If you have the ability to love, love yourself first.”
― Charles Bukowski

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature & Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol 1

“Do not search for the truth;
only cease to cherish opinions.”
― SENG-TS'AN

“Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise; seek what they sought.”
― Matsuo Bashō

“What one can be, one must be!”
― Abraham H. Maslow

“The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.”
― William James

“Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”
― Zen saying

“nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose”
― Mary Shelley

“Every one of us is an aperture through which the whole cosmos looks out.”
― Alan W. Watts

“Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized.”
― Albert Einstein, The World As I See It

“Borges said there are only four stories to tell: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power and the voyage. All of us writers rewrite these same stories ad infinitum.”
― Paolo Coelho

“The role of the artist is to not look away.”
― Akira Kurosawa

“If we affirm one moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event - and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”
― Wittgenstein Ludwig

“No day shall erase you from the memory of time”
― Virgil

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
― H. Jackson Brown Jr., P.S. I Love You