Brain Temple > Brain Temple's Quotes

“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.”
― Carl Sagan

“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

“I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.”
― Baruch Spinoza

“Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Not curiosity, not vanity, not the consideration of expediency, not duty and conscientiousness, but an unquenchable, unhappy thirst that brooks no compromise leads us to truth.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.”
― Leszek Kolakowski, Metaphysical Horror

“The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
― William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

“The Genius Of The Crowd

there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average
human being to supply any given army on any given day

and the best at murder are those who preach against it
and the best at hate are those who preach love
and the best at war finally are those who preach peace

those who preach god, need god
those who preach peace do not have peace
those who preach peace do not have love

beware the preachers
beware the knowers
beware those who are always reading books
beware those who either detest poverty
or are proud of it
beware those quick to praise
for they need praise in return
beware those who are quick to censor
they are afraid of what they do not know
beware those who seek constant crowds for
they are nothing alone
beware the average man the average woman
beware their love, their love is average
seeks average

but there is genius in their hatred
there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you
to kill anybody
not wanting solitude
not understanding solitude
they will attempt to destroy anything
that differs from their own
not being able to create art
they will not understand art
they will consider their failure as creators
only as a failure of the world
not being able to love fully
they will believe your love incomplete
and then they will hate you
and their hatred will be perfect

like a shining diamond
like a knife
like a mountain
like a tiger
like hemlock

their finest art”
― Charles Bukowski

“Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.”
― Walter Lippmann

“There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.”
― John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings

“I believe I am in Hell, therefore I am.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.”
― Bertrand Russell

“The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accordance with nature, in her manner of operation.”
― John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings

“What is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposeless or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life--not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.”
― John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings

“Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“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

“When we can't think for ourselves, we can always quote”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

“Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.”
― John Cage

“There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.”
― John Cage

“Everything we do is music." (Classical Composer)(From: 4'33")”
― John Cage

“Artists talk a lot about freedom. So, recalling the expression "free as a bird," Morton Feldman went to a park one day and spent some time watching our feathered friends. When he came back, he said, "You know? They're not free: they're fighting over bits of food.”
― John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings

“If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.”
― John Cage

“We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”
― Georg Hegel

“To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.”
― HEGEL

“Art does not simply reveal God: it is one of the ways in which God reveals, and thus actualizes, himself.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics