Michel de Montaigne

The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness.

On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.

I do not care so much what I am to others as I care what I am to myself.

I quote others only in order the better to express myself.

When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.

He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.

If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways.

Learned we may be with another man's learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own.

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.

I am afraid that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, and that we have more curiosity than understanding. We grasp at everything, but catch nothing except wind.

Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.

Quentin R. Bufogle

If you're gonna burn a bridge behind you, make sure you've crossed it first.

I want an avowed atheist in the White House. When time comes to push that button, I want whoever's making the decision to understand that once it's pushed, it's over. Finito. They're not gonna have lunch with Jesus. Won't be deflowering 72 virgins on the great shag carpet of eternity, or reincarnated as a cow. I want someone making that decision who believes life on this Earth isn't just a dress rehearsal for something better -- but the only shot we get.

99% of all problems can be solved by money -- and for the other 1% there's alcohol.

I was eating a steak at a local restaurant last night, when a random woman said: "Y'know, you'd be much better off being a vegetarian." "Are you crazy?" I said, "The cow was a vegetarian and look what happened to it!

Our love affair with guns has nothing to do with tyranny, or militias, or self-preservation. Just ask any NRA member the following: If Jesus Christ himself were to come down off the cross and grant you one wish, would you opt for a world without guns -- or the one we live in now? If every gun owner truly feared for their life and liberty, the answer would be obvious. But it's not about life and liberty. It's all about the sheer hard-on of owning a gun.

After listening to Rick Santorum, I'm now for late-term abortions (say up to age 53).

If a person has no conscience, it's called being a sociopath. If a corporation has no conscience, it's called capitalism.

If Heaven actually exists, I don't need anyone to be my real estate broker. After all, what is religion but an attempt to sell you a share in the ultimate gated community?

I was planning on procrastinating today . . . but never got around to it.

Baruck Spinoza II

The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of the peace.

The more you struggle to live, the less you live. Give up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing. Instead, surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure....you are above everything distressing.

No matter how thin you slice it, there will always be two sides.

If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.

Everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare.

Peace is not the absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition of benevolence, confidence, justice.

The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.

There can be no hope without fear, and no fear without hope.

When a man is prey to his emotions, he is not his own master.

Marcus Aurelius

Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.

You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.

Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.

Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.

When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love ...

The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.

If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed.

Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself in your way of thinking.

Eleanor Roosevelt

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

A woman is like a tea bag; you never know how strong it is until it's in hot water.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway.

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death.

The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.

Many people will walk in and out of your life, but only true friends will leave footprints in your heart.

We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.

To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.

You can often change your circumstances by changing your attitude.

Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art. 

Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

Gregory Maguire

People who claim that they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us... It's people who claim that they're good, or any way better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.”

Remember this: Nothing is written in the stars. Not these stars, nor any others. No one controls your destiny

Happy endings are still endings.

Where I'm from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren't true... we call it history.

Books fall open, you fall in. When you climb out again, you're a bit larger than you used to be.

One never learns how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her. Is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil?

In the lives of children, pumpkins turn into coaches, mice and rats turn into men. When we grow up, we realize it is far more common for men to turn into rats.

As long as people are going to call you lunatic anyway, why not get the benefit of it? It liberates you from convention.

You confuse not speaking with not listening.

The eye is always caught by light, but shadows have more to say.

Not everyone is born a witch or a saint. Not everyone is born talented, or crooked, or blessed; some are born definite in no particular at all. We are a fountain of shimmering contradictions, most of us. Beautiful in the concept, if we're lucky, but frequently tedious or regrettable as we flesh ourselves out.

Nicole Krauss

Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.

When will you learn that there isn't a word for everything?

Yhere are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone.

What about you? Are you happiest and saddest right now that you've ever been?" "Of course I am." "Why?" "Because nothing makes me happier and nothing makes me sadder than you.

I want to say somewhere: I've tried to be forgiving. And yet. There were times in my life, whole years, when anger got the better of me. Ugliness turned me inside out. There was a certain satisfaction in bitterness. I courted it. It was standing outside, and I invited it in

At the end, all that's left of you are your possessions. Perhaps that's why I've never been able to throw anything away. Perhaps that's why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived.

Rosa Luxemburg

Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.

Being human means throwing your whole life on the scales of destiny when need be, all the while rejoicing in every sunny day and every beautiful cloud.

The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.

Tomorrow the revolution will 'rise up again, clashing its weapons,' and to your horror it will proclaim with trumpets blazing: I was, I am, I shall be!

What do you want with these special Jewish pains? I feel as close to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations in Putamayo and the blacks of Africa with whose bodies the Europeans play ball… I have no special corner in my heart for the ghetto: I am at home in the entire world, where there are clouds and birds and human tears.

Europe, it is true, is a geographical and, within certain limits, an historical cultural conception. But the idea of Europe as an economic unit contradicts capitalist development in two ways. First of all there exist within Europe among the capitalist States – and will so long as these exist – the most violent struggles of competition and antagonisms, and secondly the European States can no longer get along economically without the non-European countries. ... At the present stage of development of the world market and of world economy, the conception of Europe as an isolated economic unit is a sterile concoction of the brain. ...

Donna Tartt

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.

Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty?

Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.

Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.

A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.

I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.

And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.

Ronald Wright

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

If civilization is to survive, it must live on the interest, not the capital, of nature.

Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up.

Civilization is an experiment, a very recent way of life in the human career, and it has a habit of walking into what I am calling progress traps.

Even today, some opt for the comforts of mystification, preferring to believe that the wonders of the ancient world were built by Atlanteans, gods, or space travelers, instead of by thousands toiling in the sun. Such thinking robs our forerunners of their due, and us of their experience. 

Our practical faith in progress has ramified and hardened into an ideology -- a secular religion which, like the religions that progress has challenged, is blind to certain flaws in its credentials. Progress, therefore, has become 'myth' in the anthropological sense. By this I do not mean a belief that is flimsy or untrue.