"When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door."

Weil, Simone on problems   

"When a man is wrong and won't admit it, he always gets angry."

Haliburton, Thomas C. on men
24 fans of this quote   

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"If you are bitten by a snake, what's the best thing to do? Remain calm, separate the poison from the rest of your body, suck the poison out. Worst thing to do: get upset, chase and kill snake. Same when someone strikes out at you verbally. Remain calm, don't try to strike back at the other person. Don't let the poison spread throughout your system."

Unknown, Source on failure
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"Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything."

Shaw, George Bernard on change
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"The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves. We cannot force love."

Hazlitt, William on love
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"Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation."

Baudelaire, Charles on reason
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"The common good of a collective -- a race, a class, a state -- was the claim and justification of every tyranny ever established over men. Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism? Does the fault lie in men's hypocrisy or in the nature of the principle? The most dreadful butchers were the most sincere. The believed in the perfect society reached through the guillotine and the firing squad. Nobody questioned their right to murder since they were murdering for an altruistic purpose. It was accepted that man must be sacrificed for other men. Actors change, but the course of the tragedy remains the same. A humanitarian who starts with the declarations of love for mankind and ends with a sea of blood. It goes on and will go on so long as men believe that an action is good if it is unselfish. That permits the altruist to act and forces his victims to bear it. The leaders of collectivist movements ask nothing of themselves. But observe the results."

Rand, Ayn on country
3 fans of this quote   

"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."

Einstein, Albert on music
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"Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living."

Kierkegaard, Søren on life
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"Civilization rests on a set of promises; if the promises are broken too often, the civilization dies, no matter how rich it may be, or how mechanically clever. Hope and faith depend on the promises; if hope and faith go, everything goes."

Agar, Herbert on promises
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"Hope is the companion of power, and mother of success; for who so hopes strongly has within him the gift of miracles."

Smiles, Samuel on hope
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"Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense."

Buddha on value
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"There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes."

Kundera, Milan on passion
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"Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of withering, of tarnishing."

Nin, Anais on love
27 fans of this quote   

"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

Nietzsche, Friedrich on fights and fighting
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"I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more --the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort --to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires --and expires, too soon, too soon --before life itself."

Conrad, Joseph on youth
31 fans of this quote   

"The word Christianity is already a misunderstanding -- in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross."

Nietzsche, Friedrich on jesus christ
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"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality."

Shaw, George Bernard on credulity