Mary Shelley II

Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.

Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.

No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.

Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.

If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear!

How dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to be greater than his nature will allow.

Solitude was my only consolation - deep, dark, deathlike solitude.

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.

The world to me was a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own.

Satan has his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and detested.

When falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness?

How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of life even in the excess of misery!

Malcolm Gladwell

Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.

The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.

We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for.

Who we are cannot be separated from where we're from.

Those three things - autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people will agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.

The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.

It's not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It's whether or not our work fulfills us. Being a teacher is meaningful.

In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.

Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.

In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.

Simone Weil 

All sins are attempts to fill voids.

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.

A beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows it is not.

Love is not consolation. It is light.

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be obtained only by someone who is detached.

Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.

Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.

Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.

Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity.

Stephen Colbert

If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don't want to do it.

If our Founding Fathers wanted us to care about the rest of the world, they wouldn't have declared their independence from it.

Agnostics are just atheists without balls.

If I had a dime for everytime that I was wrong, I'd be broke.

There's an old saying about those who forget history. I don't remember it, but it's good.

It is a well known fact that reality has liberal bias.

Equations are the devil's sentences.

They say the only people who tell the truth are drunkards and children. Guess which one I am.

Here's an easy way to figure out if you're in a cult: If you're wondering whether you're in a cult, the answer is yes.

Remember, Jesus would rather constantly shame gays than let orphans have a family.

Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us.

Women don't want all that. Women just want a partner who is considerate and attentive, who will spoon with them while reciting Keats, and feed them organic yogurt by candlelight on a seaside cliff at sunset.

Clearly, America has no shortage of metaphorical opportunities for the poor.

Ernest Hemingway II

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

Maybe...you'll fall in love with me all over again."
"Hell," I said, "I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?"
"Yes. I want to ruin you."
"Good," I said. "That's what I want too.

I drink to make other people more interesting.

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.

All thinking men are atheists.

It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

Courage is grace under pressure.

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

Amish Tripathi

The opposite of love is not hate, its apathy, when you simply don't bother about that person!

Whether a man is a legend or not is decided by history, not fortune tellers.

A person's ethics and character are not tested in good times. It is only in bad times that a person shows how steadfast he is to his dharma.

The most powerful force in a woman's life is the need to be appreciated, loved and cherished for what she is.

Truth doesn't have to be liked. It only has to be spoken. Speak it out. The truth may hurt you, but it will set you free.

It is your karma to fight evil. It doesn't matter if the people that evil is being committed against don't fight back. It doesn't matter if the entire world chooses to look the other way. Always remember this. You don't live with the consequences of other people's karma. You live with the consequences of your own.

Creation and destruction are the two ends of the same moment. And everything between the creation and the next destruction is the journey of life.

Nothing is more important than life. Nothing. You realise the simplicity of that point only when you confront death everyday.

I don't believe in symbolic gods. I believe that god exists all around us. In the flow of the river, in the rustle of the trees, in the whisper of the winds. He speaks to us all the time. All we need to do is listen.

Sam Harris

The president of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. If he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ridiculous or offensive.

In fact, "atheism" is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a "non-astrologer" or a "non-alchemist." We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.

I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.

Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime.

If you think that it would be impossible to improve upon the Ten Commandments as a statement of morality, you really owe it to yourself to read some other scriptures. Once again, we need look no further than the Jains: Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: 'Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.' Imagine how different our world might be if the Bible contained this as its central precept. Christians have abused, oppressed, enslaved, insulted, tormented, tortured, and killed people in the name of God for centuries, on the basis of a theologically defensible reading of the Bible.

Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence what so ever.

Aristotle II

Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.

What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Hope is a waking dream.

Happiness depends upon ourselves.

No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.

Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.

Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.

Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives - choice, not chance, determines your destiny.

To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.

Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.

He who has overcome his fears will truly be free.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

Learning is not child's play; we cannot learn without pain.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.

Christopher Hitchens II

Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.

That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.

Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.

To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation—is that good for the world?

Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.

What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.

What do you most value in your friends? Their continued existence.

The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.

We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid.

Exceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.

I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with 'you' in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me.

The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals

The governor of Texas, who, when asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that 'if English was good enough for Jesus, then it's good enough for me.

Voltaire II

Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

‎Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.

Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.

Common sense is not so common.

Love truth, but pardon error.

Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it.

I don’t know where I am going, but I am on my way.

Dare to think for yourself.

God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.”

God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.

I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away.