"We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life."

Williams, Tennessee on Loneliness
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"Now, on the road to freedom, I was pausing for a moment near Temuco and could hear the voice of the water that had taught me to sing. "

Neruda, Pablo on Childhood
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"I know what I am fleeing from, but not what I am in search of."

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De on Fear
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"Nothing is too high for the daring of mortals: we storm heaven itself in our folly."

Horace on Ambition
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"We were that generation called silent, but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate."

Didion, Joan on Twentieth Century
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"Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled."

Didion, Joan on Twentieth Century
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"When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble."

Didion, Joan on Morality
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"Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd one self place; for where we are is Hell, and where Hell is, there must we ever be."

Marlowe, Christopher on Hell
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"I count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but innocence."

Marlowe, Christopher on Religion
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"All books are either dreams or swords."

Lowell, Amy on Books - Reading
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"For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men lived and worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives."

Lowell, Amy on Books - Reading
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"We have meet the enemy; and he is us."

Kelly, Walt on Enemies
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"The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise."

Gibbon, Edward on Writers and Writing
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"The priesthood in many ways is the ultimate closet in Western civilization, where gay people particularly have hidden for the past two thousand years."

Spong, John on Churches
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"I am deliberate and afraid of nothing."

Lorde, Audre on Fear
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"This life of separateness may be compared to a dream, a phantasm, a bubble, a shadow, a drop of dew, a flash of lightning."

Buddha on Life and Living
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"The whole secret of existence is to have no fear. Never fear what will become of you, depend on no one. Only the moment you reject all help are you freed."

Buddha on Fear
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"Let the wise guard their thoughts, which are difficult to perceive, extremely subtle, and wander at will. Thought which is well guarded is the bearer of happiness."

Buddha on Thoughts and Thinking
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"No one asks you to throw Mozart out of the window. Keep Mozart. Cherish him. Keep Moses too, and Buddha and Lao Tzu and Christ. Keep them in your heart. But make room for the others, the coming ones, the ones who are already scratching on the window-panes."

Miller, Henry on Innovation
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"Hatred does not cease through hatred at any time. Hatred ceases through love. This is an unalterable law."

Buddha on Hatred
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"On life's journey faith is nourishment, virtuous deeds are a shelter, wisdom is the light by day and right mindfulness is the protection by night. If a man lives a pure life, nothing can destroy him."

Buddha on Life and Living
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"Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."

Joyce, James on Life and Living
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This quotation can be viewed in the context of a book

"The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God the herdsman treads them on behind, and I am broken by their passing feet."

Yeats, William Butler on Time and Time Management
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"When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep."

Yeats, William Butler on Nostalgia
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"The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life, or of the work, and if it take the second must refuse a heavenly mansion, raging in the dark."

Yeats, William Butler on Perfection
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"Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary. You may argue against it but you should no more treat it with disrespect than a perfectly cultivated writer would treat (say) the Catholic Church or the Church of Luther no matter how much he disliked them."

Yeats, William Butler on Mystics and Mysticism
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"I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic's heart."

Yeats, William Butler on Fanatics and Fanaticism
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"But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."

Yeats, William Butler on Dreams
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"It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them."

Twain, Mark on Honor
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"A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language."

Bachelard, Gaston on Language
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"Newsmen believe that news is a tacitly acknowledged fourth branch of the federal system. This is why most news about government sounds as if it were federally mandated -- serious, bulky and blandly worthwhile, like a high-fiber diet set in type."

O'Rourke, P. J. on News
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"What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary."

Madison, James on Government
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"Governments, like clocks, go from the motion men give them, and as governments are made and moved by men, so by them they are ruined too. Wherefore governments rather depend upon men, than men upon governments. Let men be good, and the government cannot be bad; if it be ill, they will cure it. But if men be bad, let the government be never so good, they will endeavour to warp and spoil it to their turn. "

Penn, William on Uncategorised
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"Men are not governed by justice, but by law or persuasion. When they refuse to be governed by law or persuasion, they have to be governed by force or fraud, or both."

Shaw, George Bernard on Government
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"The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam..."

Ballard, J. G. on America
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"The government is huge, stupid, greedy and makes nosy, officious and dangerous intrusions into the smallest corners of life -- this much we can stand. But the real problem is that government is boring. We could cure or mitigate the other ills Washington visits on us if we could only bring ourselves to pay attention to Washington itself. But we cannot."

O'Rourke, P. J. on Government
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"The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between."

Mother Teresa on Abortion
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"Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul."

Twain, Mark on Dress
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"Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry."

Twain, Mark on Death and Dying
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"We never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead -- and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier."

Twain, Mark on Death and Dying
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