Joseph > Joseph's Quotes

“Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.”
― Alan Wilson Watts

“I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.”
― D. H. Lawrence

“Mankind has got to get back to the rhythm of the cosmos.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“I would rather sit still in a state of peace on a stone than ride in the motor-car of a multi-millionaire and feel the peacelessness of the multi-millionaire poisoning me.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“Be thine own palace, or the world's thy jail.”
― John Donne, The Poems of John Donne (Volume 1); Miscellaneous Poems (Songs and Sonnets) Elegies. Epithalamions, or Marriage Songs. Satires. Epigrams. the Progress of the Soul. Notes

“The best teacher is experience and not through someone's distorted point of view”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Der Augenblick ist die einzige Realität, die Realität überhaupt im seelischen Leben. Der gelebte Augenblick ist das Letzte, Blutwarme, Unmittelbare, Lebendige, das leibhaftig Gegenwärtige, die Totalität des Realen, das allein Konkrete. Statt von der Gegenwart sich in Vergangenheit und Zukunft zu verlieren, findet der Mensch Existenz und Absolutes zuletzt nur im Augenblick. Vergangenheit und Zukunft sind dunkle, ungewisse Abgründe, sind die endlose Zeit, während der Augenblick die Aufhebung der Zeit, die Gegenwart des Ewigen sein kann.”
― Karl Jaspers, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen

“But each one of us is guilty insofar as he remained inactive. The guilt of passivity is different. Impotence excuses; no moral law demands a spectacular death. Plato already deemed it a matter of course to go into hiding in desperate times of calamity, and to survive. But passivity knows itself morally guilty of every failure, every neglect to act whenever possible, to shield the imperiled, to relieve wrong, to countervail. Impotent submission always left a margin of activity which, though not without risk, could still be cautiously effective. Its anxious omission weighs upon the individual as moral guilt. Blindness for the misfortune of others, lack of imagination of the heart, inner differences toward the witnessed evil--that is moral guilt.”
― Karl Jaspers

“To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet.”
― Karl Jaspers

“There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness.”
― Franz Kafka

“Anyone who cannot cope with life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate...but with his other hand he can jot down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different and more things than the others; after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor.”
― Franz Kafka

“You are free and that is why you are lost.”
― Franz Kafka, Letter to His Father

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Excessive sorrow laughs. Excessive joy weeps.”
― William Blake

“He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise.”
― William Blake

“Life is but a day;
A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way
From a tree’s summit.”
― John Keats, The Complete Poems

“Nothing ever becomes real 'til it is experienced.”
― John Keats

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

“Excuse me while I kiss the sky.”
― Jimi Hendrix

“Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world”
― Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings: The Classic Guide to Strategy

“...there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
― Christopher McCandless

“As you walk and eat and travel, be where you are. Otherwise you will miss most of your life.”
― Siddhārtha Gautama

“All descriptions of reality are temporary hypotheses.”
― Siddhārtha Gautama

“You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“Man is free at the instant he wants to be.”
― Voltaire

“Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and faithful, and you will accomplish your object. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson