Alfred North Whitehead

Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination.The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, "Seek simplicity and distrust it."

There is a quality of life which lies always beyond the mere fact of life; and when we include the quality in the fact, there is still omitted the quality of the quality.

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

That knowledge which adds greatness to character is knowledge so handled as to transform every phase of immediate experience.

Consciousness is only the last and greatest of such elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies.

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.

Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.

Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.

Jim Morrison

People are strange when you're a stranger
Faces look ugly when you're alone
Women seem wicked when you're unwanted
Streets are uneven when you're down.

You know the day destroys the night,
Night divides the day,
Tried to run —
Tried to hide —
Break on through to the other side!

This is the strangest life I’ve ever known.

This is it
no more fun
the death of all joy
has come.

I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos-especially activity that seems to have no meaning. It seems to me to be the road toward freedom... Rather than starting inside, I start outside and reach the mental through the physical.

People fear death even more than pain. It's strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over. Yeah, I guess it is a friend.

You've seen your birth, your
life and death; you might recall
all of the rest — (did you
have a good world when you
died?) — enough to base
a movie on?

Ogden Nash

A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of.

Candy
Is Dandy
But liquor
Is quicker.

I believe that people believe what they believe they believe.

I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,
I'll never see a tree at all.

People expect old men to die,
They do not really mourn old men.
Old men are different. People look
At them with eyes that wonder when...
People watch with unshocked eyes;
But the old men know when an old man dies.

We love the kindly wind and hail,
The jolly thunderbolt,
We watch in glee the fairy trail
Of ampere, watt, and volt...

Siddhartha Gautama--Buddha

We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.

To conquer oneself is a greater task than conquering others.

No one saves us but ourselves, no one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path but Buddhas clearly show the way.

To cease from evil, to do good, and to purify the mind yourself, this is the teaching of all the Buddhas.

Meditation brings wisdom; lack of meditation leaves ignorance. Know well what leads you forward and what hold you back, and choose the path that leads to wisdom.

Words have the power to both destroy and heal. When words are both true and kind, they can change our world.

Neither fire, nor moisture, nor wind can destroy the blessing of good deeds, and blessings enlighten the whole world.

Do not go by revelation;
Do not go by tradition;
Do not go by hearsay;
Do not go on the authority of sacred texts;
Do not go on the grounds of pure logic;
Do not go by a view that seems rational;
Do not go by reflecting on mere appearances. . .

Agatha Christie 

I have given them life instead of death, freedom instead of the cords of superstition, beauty and truth instead of corruption and exploitation.

 

An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets the more interested he is in her.

Any woman can fool a man if she wants to and if he's in love with her.

One doesn't recognize the really important moments in one's life until it's too late.
 
Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your actions.  

Dogs are wise. They crawl away into a quiet corner and lick their wounds and do not rejoin the world until they are whole once more.

Everything that has existed, lingers in the Eternity.

Evil is not something superhuman, it's something less than human.

Anais Nin

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.

 Life is so fluid that one can only hope to capture the living moment, to capture it alive and fresh ... without destroying that moment.

All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished.

The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive.

Life shrinks or expands according to one's courage.

I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.

Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds.

Carl Jung

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart ... Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.

No one can flatter himself that he is immune to the spirit of his own epoch, or even that he possesses a full understanding of it.

Consciousness is a precondition of being.

The judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy.

No language exists that cannot be misused... Every Interpretation is hypothetical, for it is a mere attempt to read an unfamiliar text.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

The great decisions of human life have as a rule far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness.

We cannot imagine events that are connected non-causally and are capable of a non-causal explanation. But that does not mean that such events do not exist.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Yesterday, December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

Throughout the nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted.

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation.

I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.

Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.

Throughout the world, change is the order of the day.

Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.

Louis Pasteur

Chance favors the prepared mind.

I am on the edge of mysteries and the veil is getting thinner and thinner.

A bottle of wine contains more philosophy than all the books in the world.
Do not let yourself be tainted with a barren skepticism.

It is surmounting difficulties that makes heroes.

Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity.

The universe is asymmetric and I am persuaded that life, as it is known to us, is a direct result of the asymmetry of the universe or of its indirect consequences. The universe is asymmetric.

Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world. Science is the highest personification of the nation because that nation will remain the first which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence.

There does not exist a category of science to which one can give the name applied science. There are science and the applications of science, bound together as the fruit of the tree which bears it.

Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen Edward Steichen Portrait of Carl Sandburg and his wifeduring a moment.

All politicians should have 3 hats - one to throw into the ring, one to talk through, and one to pull rabbits out of if elected.

Anger is the most impotent of passions. It effects nothing it goes about, and hurts the one who is possessed by it more than the one against whom it is directed.

Arithmetic is where the answer is right and everything is nice and you can look out of the window and see the blue sky - or the answer is wrong and you have to start over and try again and see how it comes out this time.

I doubt if you can have a truly wild party without liquor.

I fell in love, not deep, but I fell several times and then fell out.

I had taken a course in Ethics. I read a thick textbook, heard the class discussions and came out of it saying I hadn't learned a thing I didn't know before about morals and what is right or wrong in human conduct.

I have in later years taken to Euclid, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, in an elemental way.

I have often wondered what it is an old building can do to you when you happen to know a little about things that went on long ago in that building.