Get outside. Watch the sunrise. Watch the sunset. How does that make you feel? Does it make you feel big or tiny? Because there's something good about feeling both.
Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.
The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him.
All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man had taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.
Nothing astonishes people so much as common sense and plain dealing.
When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practiced man relies on the language of the first.
For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something else.
There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If you have not slept, or if you have slept, or if you have headache, or sciatica, or leprosy, or thunder-stroke, I beseech you, by all angels, to hold your peace, and not pollute the morning.
Solvency is maintained by means of a national debt, on the principle, If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?
We know better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves...
We are the prisoners of ideas.
One lesson we learn early, that in spite of seeming difference, men are all of one pattern. We readily assume this with our mates, and are disappointed and angry if we find that we are premature, and that their watches are slower than ours. In fact, the only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion.
All successful men have agreed in one thing -- they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and last of things.
All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.
Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick or aged. In the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused, when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals.
Wise men are not wise at all hours, and will speak five times from their taste or their humor, to once from their reason.
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.
Nothing external to you has any power over you.
He who would be a man must therefore be a non-conformist.
In conversation the game is, to say something new with old words. And you shall observe a man of the people picking his way along, step by step, using every time an old boulder, yet never setting his foot on an old place.
Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for competitors.
Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely. 'Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.
Courage charms us, because it indicates that a man loves an idea better than all things in the world, that he is thinking neither of his bed, nor his dinner, nor his money, but will venture all to put in act the invisible thought of his mind.
Courage consists in equality to the problem before us.
Thrift is of great revenue.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
In everything truth surpasses the imitation and copy.
Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.
E. M. Cioran
There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
To exist is equivalent to an act of faith, a protest against the truth, an interminable prayer. As soon as they consent to live, the unbeliever and the man of faith are fundamentally the same, since both have made the only decision that defines a being.
To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.
The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.
Fear can supplant our real problems only to the extent --unwilling either to assimilate or to exhaust it --we perpetuate it within ourselves like a temptation and enthrone it at the very heart of our solitude.
What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striven. And since freedom, as has been said, is no more than a sensation, what difference is there between being free and believing ourselves free?
Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish.
God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.
No one can keep his grieves in their prime; they use themselves up.
So much of what I am I got from you. I had no idea how much of it was secondhand.
Peter Townsend
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