I have never thought that a Christian would be free of suffering, umfundisi. For our Lord suffered. And I come to believe that he suffered not to save us from suffering, but to teach use how to bear suffering. For he knew there is no life without suffering.

Cry, the Beloved Country Alan Paton

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

God is Power

1984 George Orwell

You don't care what others think - which might be understandable. But you don't care even to make them think as you do?

You really do believe all that. If it's actually believing, or whatever it is you do that takes its place.

The Fountainhead Ayn Rand

Which, because of its reliance on a super natural agency, cannot be disproved.

Biology Textbook

There are more things in heaven and hell, Horatio Than are dreampt in your philosophy

Hamlet Shakespear

And then Richards put the matter at once out of his mind, for he had a private instinct that a proof once established is better left so.

Mark Twain

When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully concious, fully aware of yourself. You are always less than an individual.

Dune by Frank Herbart

Maybe this man, who didn't believe in love, realized by the time his hair was white that in his heart was something which could be called love.

Zhang Jie

Who knows where thoughts come from, they just appear.

Empire Records (Movie)

How much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatalogical mind of His when He robbed old people of their bowl movements?

At the field a heavy silence prevailed, overpowering motion like a ruthless insensate spell holding in thrall the only beings who might be able to break it.

They have the right to do anything we can't stop them from doing

Catch 22 Joseph Heller

If you want to be reborn, let yourself die. If you want to be given everything, give everything up.

Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.

When they know that they don't know, people can find their own way.

Tao

Nice, selfless people don't restore my faith in humanity, they restore my faith in randomness

Fang - some random guy on the web

...this quality [to] spring(s) from a very common infirmity of human nature, inclining us to be more curious and conceited in matters where we have least concern, and for which we are least adapted by study of nature.

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

Social control is self control

Sociology Exam answer by Dr. Nippes

"I don't think-"
"Then you shouldn't talk"

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

We need to be really bothered once in a while.

Look at the world out there, my God, my God, look at it out there, outside me, out there beyond my face and the only way to really touch it is to put it where it's finally me, where it's in the blood, where it pumps around a thousand times ten thousand a day.

Farenheight 451 by Ray Bradbury

and if one day my wisdom should desert me - ah, it loves to fly away - then may my pride too fly with my folly

Must not all things that can happen have already happened, been done, run past

Always love your neighbour as yourselves - but first be such as love themselves

Nothing is true, everything is permitted

Let accidents come to me, they are innocent as little children.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche

The question I’m asking is, are we happier? As a human race, is the world fundamentally a better place because of science and technology? We shop at home, we surf the web, but at the same time, we feel emptier, lonelier, and more cut off from each other than at any other time in history... (gets drowned out by Pulses from outer space).

Contact (the movie)

Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster. ... When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do it's a hollow victory. In order to sustain the victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again, dirven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M Pirsig

"Hell, I'm relieved to hear you say that," said Ford.
"Why?"
"Because I thought I must be going mad."
"Perhaps you are. Perhaps you only thought I said it."

Don't Panic!

The Hitchhiker's Guid to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

The scientist may not be sure of the answer, but he's often sure he can find one. And that's a condition which is clearly not enjoyed by philosophy.

Walden Two by B. F. Skinner

"Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules."
"Yes, sir. I know it is. I know it."
Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it's a game, all right - I'll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren't any hot-shots, then what's a game about it? Nothing, No game.

The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

Book 2 passage 14:
The Master said, 'He who learns but does not think, is lost.' He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.

The Analects of Confucius Translated/Annotated by Arthur Waley

I prefer nothing, unless it is true.

Euthypthro by Plato

If, that is to say, truth rather than majority opinion is to settle these questions.

Plato's Republic

but believing is not up to us, for it [what we believe in] must be either true or false.

On the Soul Aristotle

He has learned much who knows much suffering

Song of Roland

To be completely honest with oneself is good practice.

Freud (From The Freud Reader Edited by Peter Gay)

so if you are introspective then BE introspective ... all the way ... you come through the bottom and out the other side

In M.B. Bowers. (1974). Retreat from sanity: The structure of emerging psychosis. Baltimore: Penguin. Case David

creating, instead of individualism, a mass-produced mask of individuality.

words are only the tools of meanings.

Childhood and Society by Erik H. Erikson

As long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong?

Fortune program on ccil.org

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.

and to subdue By force, [those] who reason for their law refuse

Paradise Lost by John Milton

For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.

For what is prayer but the expansion of yourself into the living ether?

If aught I say is truth, that truth shall reveal itself in a clearer voice, and in words more kin to your thoughts.

The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran

It's such a lie that you should do what's in your heart. If we all did what was in our heart, the world would grind to a halt.

And you know this has nothing to do with the truth. Nobody is interested in the truth. All they care about is what they want to believe.

My so Called Life (TV show)

and all religions are in their deepest foundations systems of cruelties

but whoever thinks in words thinks as a speaker and not as a thinker

On the Genealogy of Morality by Friedrich Nietzsche

Thus people today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as something inviolable, just as God and Fate were treated in past ages.

If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.

It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein

"If others heard me talking out loud they would think that I am crazy," he said aloud. "But since I am not crazy, I do not care."

"I told the boy I was a strange old man," he said. "Now is when i must prove it."
The thousand times he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

You could feel good in pain, and that was something not everybody knew.

An imperfect human heart, perfectly shattered, was her conclusion. A condition so common as to be virtually universal, rendering issues of right and wrong almost incidental.

Nobody's Fool by Richard Russo

Science wants to know nothing of the nothing. But even so it is certain that when science tries to express its proper essence it calls upon the nothing for help.

What is Metaphysics by Martin Heidegger

If one person complains he just makes it that much harder for the others.

they must have been thinking about how bad all this is. That's what's really wearing them down. The thought.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maitenance by Robert Pirsig

Color shines and wants only to shine. When we analyze it in rational terms by meansuring its wavelengths, it is gone.

The Origin of the Work of Art by Martin Heidegger

My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity

Walden by Henery David Thoreau

Only he who already understands is able to listen.

Being and Time by Martin Heidegger

At first only poetry was spoken; there was no hint of reasoning until much later

Rousseau

"That last thing is what you can't get, Carlo. Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once for all"
"No, no , no, you're talking absolute bullshit and Wolfean romantic posh!"

On the Road Jack Kerouac

I was talking about time. It's so hard for me to believe in it.

The only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine.

losing the feeling of it made him want to cry and think deep thoughts that struck nothing solid

Beloved by Toni Morrison

"I don't know what you mean by 'glory'," Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't -- till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'"
"But glory doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument'," Alice objected.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all."

Ccil Fortune database

you can't go on defending your patterns of reasoning forever. There comes a point where faith takes over.

Godel Escher Bach an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstader

For if it is not the function of the philosophyer, who is it who will inquire whether Socrates and Socrates seated are the same thing.

For it is impossible that there should be demonstration of absolutely everything (there would be an infinite regress, so that there would still be no demonstration)

For learning proceeds for all in this way -- through that which is less knowable by nature to that which is more knowable

Metaphysics Aristotle