A collection of quotes I like. This page gets updated.
“I am going to make everything around me beautiful – that will be my life.”
Elsie de Wolfe
“Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.”
Marcus Aurelius
KrishnamurtiIs society healthy, that an individual should return to it? Has not society itself helped to make the individual unhealthy? Of course, the unhealthy must be made healthy, that goes without saying; but why should the individual adjust himself to an unhealthy society? If he is healthy, he will not be a part of it. Without first questioning the health of society, what is the good of helping misfits to conform to society?
“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin
“Indeed, it is becoming ever more obvious that it is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes.
The supreme danger which threatens individuals, as well as whole nations, is a psychic danger. Reason has proved itself completely powerless, precisely because its arguments have an effect only on the conscious mind and not on the unconscious.
The greatest danger of all comes from the masses, in whom the effects of the unconscious pile up cumulatively and the reasonableness of the conscious mind is stifled. Every mass organization is a latent danger just as much as a heap of dynamite is. It lets loose effects which no man wants and no man can stop.It is therefore in the highest degree desirable that a knowledge of psychology should spread so that men can understand the source of the supreme dangers that threaten them. Not by arming to the teeth, each for itself, can the nations defend themselves in the long run from the frightful catastrophes of modern war. The heaping up of arms is itself a call to war. Rather must they recognize those psychic conditions under which the unconscious [tsunami-like] bursts the dykes of consciousness and overwhelms it.”
– Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self
“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
“Accustom yourself every morning to look for a moment at the sky and suddenly you will be aware of the air around you, the scent of morning freshness that is bestowed on you between sleep and labor. You will find every day that the gable of every house has its own particular look, its own special lighting. Pay it some heed…you will have for the rest of the day a remnant of satisfaction and a touch of coexistence with nature. Gradually and without effort the eye trains itself to transmit many small delights.”
Hermann Hesse
“Culture is not your friend.” Terence Mckenna
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” -Voltaire
“However many holy words you read, however many you speak, what good will they do you if you do not act upon them?” Guatama Buddha
“Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival.”
― Martha Gellhorn
“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.” Charles Bukowski
“Make things as simple as possible but no simpler.” -Albert Einstein
“I like to have space to spread my mind out in.” Virginia Woolf
“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War
“Remember you come here having already understood the necessity of struggling with yourself — only with yourself. Therefore thank everyone who gives you the opportunity.”
–Gurdjieff
“If a man could understand all the horror of the lives of ordinary people who are turning around in a circle of insignificant interests and insignificant aims. If he could understand what they are losing, he would understand that there can only be one thing that is serious for him – to escape from the general law [matrix forces], to be free. What can be serious for a man in prison who is condemned to death? Only one thing: How to save himself, how to escape: nothing else is serious.”
– Gurdjieff
“If greed were not the master of modern man–ably assisted by envy–how could it be that the frenzy of economism does not abate as higher “standards of living” are attained, and that it is precisely the richest societies which pursue their economic advantage with the greatest ruthlessness? How could we explain the almost universal refusal on the part of the rulers of the rich societies–where organized along private enterprise or collective enterprise lines–to work towards the humanisation of work? It is only necessary to assert that something would reduce the “standard of living” and every debate is instantly closed. That soul-destroying, meaningless, mechanical, monotonous, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of of “bread and circuses” can compensate for the damage done–these are facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence–because to deny them would be too obviously absurd and to acknowledge them would condemn the central preoccupation of modern society as a crime against humanity.”
― E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered