D > D's Quotes

“All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.”
― Anatole France, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard

“To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything.”
― Anatole France

“The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of the mind for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.”
― Anatole France

“An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't.”
― Anatole France

“When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.”
― Anatole France

“Awaken people's curiosity. It is enough to open minds, do not overload them. Put there just a spark.”
― Anatole France

“For a man’s life would become intolerable, if he knew what was going to happen to him. He would be made aware of future evils, and would suffer their agonies in advance, while he would get no joy of present blessings since he would know how they would end. Ignorance is the necessary condition of human happiness, and it has to be admitted that on the whole mankind observes that condition well. We are almost entirely ignorant of ourselves; absolutely of others. In ignorance, we find our bliss; in illusions, our happiness.”
― Anatole France, The Gods Will Have Blood

“Challenge a person's beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing, and power. And when those beliefs are based on nothing but faith, they are chronically fragile. No one gets upset about the belief that rocks fall down as opposed to up, because all sane people can see it with their own eyes. Not so for the belief that babies are born with original sin or that God exists in three persons or that Ali is the second-most divinely inspired man after Muhammad. When people organize their lives around these beliefs, and then learn of other people who seem to be doing just fine without them--or worse, who credibly rebut them--they are in danger of looking like fools. Since one cannot defend a belief based on faith by persuading skeptics it is true, the faithful are apt to react to unbelief with rage, and may try to eliminate that affront to everything that makes their lives meaningful.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

“Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.”
― Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“who wishes to fight must first count the cost”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“The wise warrior avoids the battle.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.”
― Bruce Lee

“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”
― Bruce Lee

“A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.”
― Bruce Lee

“Mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage to admit them.”
― Bruce Lee

“If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.”
― Bruce Lee

“Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable.”
― Bruce Lee

“If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you'll never get it done.”
― Bruce Lee

“It is not a daily increase, but a daily decrease. Hack away at the inessentials.”
― Bruce Lee

“Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it.”
― Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do

“Empty your cup so that it may be filled; become devoid to gain totality.”
― Bruce Lee

“The More we value things, the less we value ourselves”
― Bruce Lee

“The stillness in stillness is not the real stillness; only when there is stillness in movement does the universal rhythm manifest.”
― Bruce Lee

“Not all those who wander are lost.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“What’s the world’s greatest lie?” the boy asked. “It’s this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That’s the world’s greatest lie.”
― Paulo Coehlo

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”
― Philip K. Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

“If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others.”
― Philip K. Dick

“Do not be afraid of your difficulties.Do not wish you could be in other circumstances than you are. For when you have made the best of an adversity, it becomes the stepping stone to a splendid opportunity.”
― H.P. Blavatsky

“Whatever plane our consciousness may be acting in, both we and the things belonging to that plane are, for the time being, our only realities. As we rise in the scale of development we perceive that during the stages through which we have passed we mistook shadows for realities, and the upward progress of the Ego is a series of progressive awakenings, each advance bringing with it the idea that now, at last, we have reached "reality"; but only when we shall have reached the absolute Consciousness, and blended our own with it, shall we be free from the delusions produced by Maya [illusion]. ”
― H. P. Blavatsky