Thought-provoking Quotes

How could I have thought that I needed to cure myself in order to fit into the 'real' world? I didn'...

If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it re...

It's better to lose something than never to have had

She said, "Do you have more things that you need, or more that you don't need?" I said, "It depends ...

If we are interested in a writing life - as opposed to a writing career - then we are in it for the ...

...the long train ride was like traveling through limbo. You weren't anywhere when you were on a tra...

...I just gave up trying to be a Christian... Let's face it, I ain't got the knack for holiness. Bes...

And with a practice of writing comes a certain important integrity. A culture filled with bloggers t...

I've been thinking about that book about the boys who crash on the island....Lord of the Flies what ...

There had been something about the island that made the girls forget who they had been. All those ru...

Hasn’t stopped us before. And besides, if they wanted to kill us, we’d be dead by now and would be h...

Like LaVey, I had a also discovered what happens when you say something powerful that makes people t...

Is religion defending our physical integrity or is it just opposed to fashion?

The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers...

It was very bad if the council had resorted to recruiting men. By tradition men were our last line o...

... one would like to be both [loved and feared], but as it is difficult to combine both love and fe...

Yet does illustrating in a new way signify a new way of seeing?

Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us.

And listening to all the things they would do if they had these things, Wang Lung heard only of how ...

What work do I have to do then?" said Will, but went on at once, "No, on second thought, don't tell ...

As long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seeds of murder ...

We choose our next world through what we learn in this one. Learn nothing, and the next world is the...

... the reason why we find some things intuitively easy to grasp and others hard, is that our brains...

All motion is relative. Perhaps it is you who have moved away-by standing still

A slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and-whip grading, a mule mentalit...

What was behind this smug presumption that what pleased you was bad or at least unimportant in compa...

Curious, he thought, how, if you knew a person long enough, he could elicit every kind of emotion fr...

Information is a lot like water; it's hard to hold on to, and hard to keep from leaking away.

We will embarrass our descendants, just as our ancestors embarrass us. This is moral progress.

Challenge a person's beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing, and power. And when those bel...

I have no fear, I have only love

Even the finest sword plunged into salt water will eventually rust.

Greed and corruption isn't in the world.It's in the people".

As long as there's life, there's hope.

The party in Alobar’s head, which agitation and anxiety were throwing, now was crashed by a notion: ...

Perhaps the most terrible (or wonderful) thing that can happen to an imaginative youth, aside from t...

All dreams continue in the beyond.

On their sofas of spice and feathers, the concubines also slept fretfully. In those days the Earth w...

There is a comfort in conformity, a security in control, that is appealing. There is a thrill in dom...

Then we are living in a place abandoned by God," I said, disheartened."Have you found any places whe...

Without language, they have no lies. Thus they have no future.

How many young men fear that there is a monster inside them? People are supposed to fear others, not...

I have never, I think, wanted to 'belong' to a group whose interests were not mine, nor have I resen...

It is deep January. The sky is hard.The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.It is in this solitude, a sy...

Re-examine all that you have been told, dismiss that which insults your soul.

As for fame, fame felt like nothing. Fame was not a sensation like love or hunger or loneliness, wel...

A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?

Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.

And what greater might do we possess as human beings than our capacity to question and to learn?

You yourself may not be luminous, but you are a conductor of light.

Everything that isn't permitted by The Law is forbidden.

At school, new ideas are thrust at you every day. Out in the world, you'll have to find your inner m...

In the end, after kingdoms and armies had fallen, the religions were still fighting, weren't they?

The temptation of the age is to look good without being good.

Lead us not into temptation' often means, among other things, 'Deny me those gratifying invitations,...

Advertising teaches people not to trust their judgment. Advertising teaches people to be stupid.

We sometimes hear of things that can travel faster than light. Something called 'the speed of though...

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

Well, I want novels,' said Tessa. 'Or poetry. Books are for reading, not for turning oneself into li...

We do not remember days, we remember moments.

Vision is also a fickle creature. You can see an object a hundred times, a thousand times, and it re...

The voice says, maybe you don't go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the thing...

If he is not the word of God, then God never spoke.

News is something worth knowing that you didn't know already. (by an "earnest young woman" in his jo...

Not the historians. No, not them. Their greatest crime is that they presume to know what happened, h...

Disasters are called natural, as if nature were the executioner and not the victim

God has made us so that we must be mutually dependent. We may ignore our own dependence, or refuse t...

The humans were protecting their heritage, or so they thought. Strange that Mud Men seem more concer...

Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long...

And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life--not only over...

Even on this level, it is at bottom not deception [men] hate but the dire, inimical consequences of ...

Perhaps no one has yet been truthful enough about what 'truthfulness' is.

... common sense is the one thing that will certainly be wrong.

Suddenly they were both leaping around him, shouting 'Traitor!' and 'Thought-criminal!', the little ...

It's not," Mormont told him. "Gods save us, boy, you're not blind and you're not stupid. When dead m...

In our weeks of talk, movies and friendship, I watched as Wilma turned a medical ordeal into one mor...

To know that we are only angels weighed down by filth, free of guilt? The bacteria in our bellies ar...

Madeleine in her turn stared at him steadily, straight into his eyes, in a profound, strange way, as...

And so it goes. And so it goes. And so it goes. And so it goes goes goes goes goes tick tock tick to...

I never deliberately learned to read, but somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers...

It's just a feeling I have. What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real. My enemy is, among ...

There are symbolic dreams-dreams that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities-real...

According to Aristophanes in Plato's The Banquet, in the ancient world of legend there were three ty...

That's gotta be one of the principles behind reality. Accepting things that are hard to comprehend, ...

The essential ingredients of these struggles for justice are human beings who, if only for a moment,...

People sometimes forget how to be happy due to a "failure to grasp the simple truth that other peopl...

Yet weren't all human beings simply human beings no matter what name you applied to them[?]

I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief.

The real problem has to do with the inability by people to admit that a position they've held a long...

In a way, a garden is the most useless of creations, the most slippery of creations: it is not like ...

The glories of our blood and stateAre shadows, not substantial things;There is no armor against Fate...

The fact is, nothing great or enduring, especially in music, has ever sprung full-fledged and unprec...

When someone dies, it feels like the hole in your gum when a tooth falls out. You can chew, you can ...

If you had to pack your whole life into a suitcase-not just the practical things, like clothing, but...

I remember stories. I connect the dots and then out of that comes a story. And the dots that don't f...

He was a dying man looking down on the surgeons trying to save him.

... if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane.

I missed the future.

What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only c...

At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? ...