Bono

My name is Bono, and I am a rock star.

We let our own pathetic excuses about how it's "difficult" justify our own inaction. Be honest. We have the science, the technology, and the wealth. What we don't have is the will, and that's not a reason that history will accept...

To me betraying the age means exposing its conceits, it's foibles; it's phony moral certitudes. It means telling the secrets of the age and facing harsher truths.

The world is more malleable than you think and it's waiting for you to hammer it into shape.

I really remember John Lennon's Imagine. I guess I'm twelve; that's one of my first albums. That really set fire to me. It was like he was whispering in your ear — his ideas of what's possible. Different ways of seeing the world.

Idealism is under siege beset by materialism, narcissism and all the other isms of indifference.

Sing the melody line you hear in your own head. Remember, you don't owe anybody any explanations, you don't owe your parents any explanations, you don't owe your professors any explanations.

Primo Levi

I’m a normal man with a good memory who fell into a maelstrom and got out of it more by luck than by virtue, and who from that time on has preserved a certain curiosity about maelstroms large and small, metaphorical and actual.

Nothing can be said: nothing sure, nothing probable, nothing honest. Better to err through omission than through commission: better to refrain from steering the fate of others, since it is already so difficult to navigate one's own.

Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.

For me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law, the principle of order in me, around me, and in the world.

The trade of chemist (fortified, in my case, by the experience of Auschwitz), teaches you to overcome, indeed to ignore, certain revulsions that are neither necessary or congenital: matter is matter, neither noble nor vile, infinitely transformable, and its proximate origin is of no importance whatsoever. Nitrogen is nitrogen, it passes miraculously from the air into plants, from these into animals, and from animals into us; when its function in our body is exhausted, we eliminate it, but it still remains nitrogen, aseptic, innocent.

It is a pretty structure isn’t it?

Jack London

A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.

I love the flesh. I'm a pagan. “Who are they who speak evil of the clay? The very stars are made of clay like mine!”

Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.

I am. I was. I am not. I never am.

Darn the wheel of the world! Why must it continually turn over? Where is the reverse gear?

I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

Life? Bah! It has no value. Of cheap things it is the cheapest.

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.

Robert Pirsig

Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.

The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.

What keeps the world from reverting to the Neandertal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos... the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man. . .

You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You're a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.

The world of underlying form is an unusual object of discussion because it is actually a mode of discussion itself.

When you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he's insane, which is not to see him at all. To see him you must see what he saw and when you are trying to see the vision of an insane man, an oblique route is the only way to come at it.

John Lennon

The thing the sixties did was to show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn't the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility.

Imagine there's no countries,
It isnt hard to do,
Nothing to kill or die for,
No religion too,
Imagine all the people
living life in peace...

Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.
It's getting hard to be someone but it all works out.
It doesn't matter much to me.

Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn't insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.

The more I see the less I know for sure.

There's nothing you can do that can't be done
Nothing you can sing that can't be sung
Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game It's easy. All you need is love.

There are places I remember
All my life though some have changed
Some forever not for better
Some have gone and some remain

William Butler Yeats

Man is in love and loves what vanishes,
What more is there to say?

In dreams begin responsibilities.

O heart, be at peace, because
Nor knave nor dolt can break
What's not for their applause…

Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots.

Everything that's lovely is but a brief, dreamy, kind of delight.

Oscar Wilde

Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.

I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.

A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

I am not young enough to know everything.

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.

Lao Tzu

If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to. If you are not afraid of dying, there is nothing you cannot achieve.

A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.

Silence is a source of great strength.

The words of truth are always paradoxical.

At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want.

Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.

He who is contented is rich.

Health is the greatest possession. Contentment is the greatest treasure. Confidence is the greatest friend. Non-being is the greatest joy.

Pythagoras

A thought is an idea in transit.

There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.

As long as man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other.

Do not say a little in many words but a great deal in a few.

Virtue is harmony.

Educate the children and it won't be necessary to punish the men.

Number is the ruler of forms and ideas, and the cause of gods and daemons.

Friends are as companions on a journey, who ought to aid each other to persevere in the road to a happier life.

Reason is immortal, all else mortal.

Frederick Soddy

Chemistry has been termed by the physicist as the messy part of physics, but that is no reason why the physicists should be permitted to make a mess of chemistry when they invade it.

In the first place, the preparation of the Nobel lecture which I am to give has shown me, even more clearly than I knew before, how many others share with me, often, indeed, have anticipated me, in the discoveries for which you have awarded me the prize.

Man cannot influence in this respect the atomic forces of Nature.

Nature is in austere mood, even terrifying, withal majestically beautiful.

Scientific men can hardly escape the charge of ignorance with regard to the precise effect of the impact of modern science upon the mode of living of the people and upon their civilisation.

With all our mastery over the powers of Nature we have adhered to the view that the struggle for existence is a permanent and necessary condition of life.

The pure air and dazzling snow belong to things beyond the reach of all personal feeling, almost beyond the reach of life. Yet such things are a part of our life, neither the least noble nor the most terrible.