41 Random Quotes

Stupidity cannot be cured with money, through education or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. But stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.

— Robert Heinlein

I can't myself raise the wind that might blow us, or this ship, into a better world. But at least I can put up the sail so that when the wind comes, I can catch it.

— E.F. Schumacher «Good Work»

We don't grow through certainty, we grow through doubt. So ambiguity is unavoidable for anyone who's really being honest about their life and about the nature of the universe. Today's certainty becomes tomorrow's imprisonment.

— James Hollis «A Summons to a Deeper Life»

Ever since happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets. Trying to find you.

— Hafez

It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned.

— Zadie Smith «Generation Why? »

Nothing impresses clients like a gazebo. Not even a lizard garden.

— Bert Harris

Courage is to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart

— Brene Brown «“The Power of Vulnerability”»

A crank is a very elegant device. It's small, it's strong, it's lightweight, energy efficient, and it makes revolutions.

— E.F. Schumacher «Dark Ecology»

“Romanticizing the past” is a familiar accusation, made mostly by people who think it is more grown-up to romanticize the future.

— Paul Kingsnorth «Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist»

Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

— Martin Luther King Jr.

In order to disobey, one must have the courage to be alone, to err, and to sin.

— Erich Fromm «On Disobedience and Other Essays
» in #daring, #teaching & #wilding

This is the dreadful situation that young people are in. I think of them and I say well, the situation you're in now is a situation that's going to call for a lot of patience. And to be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial.

— Wendell Berry « Hopes for Humanity»

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.

— Hunter S. Thompson

I guess that the source of all suffering is a sense of separation between you and everything else. That separation is always fictitious but that fiction is always very powerful. Sometimes, you kneel before it. It is a fiction, though, and it has to be dissolved like all other fictions.

— Leonard Cohen «Having Lunch With Leonard Cohen, Sabotage Times»

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon, I put it back again.

— Oscar Wilde in #crying, #laughing & #working

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and it looks like work.

— Thomas Edison

I want to live a savage life, of bared teeth and beauty and love.

— Twm Gwynne in #daring & #wilding

The way to truth lies through the destruction of the false. To destroy the false, you must question your most inveterate beliefs. Of these the idea that you are the body is the worst. With the body comes the world, with the world — God, who is supposed to have created the world and thus it starts — fears, religions, prayers, sacrifices, all sorts of systems — all to protect and support the child-man, frightened out of his wits by monsters of his own making. Realize that what you are cannot be born nor die and with the fear gone, all suffering ends.

— Nisargadatta Maharaj «I Am That»

We’re grandparents falling out of the sky.

— Lance Mountain «Until the Wheels Fall Off» in #laughing

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity, or it becomes the practice of freedom. The means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

— Paulo Freire «Pedagogy of the Oppressed
» in #teaching & #wilding

I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own.

— Andy Warhol

Beethoven once remarked that the music he had written was nothing compared with the music he had heard.

— Heinz Pagels

It is not man who pursues truth, but truth man.

— Lev Shestov «The Zen TV Experiment»

You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.

— Albert Einstein

We are trying to make the world a better place, but that is not necessarily what we accomplish. Many of the problems which preoccupy us are basically insoluble.

— George Soros

What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism, all else is publicity.

— Unknown

In singing and dancing is the voice of the Law.

— Hakuin

This subreddit wouldn’t exist if probiotics or yogurt fixed everyone’s health problems.

— Eleanorina «r/zerocarb» in #eating, #healing & #laughing

Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.

— Warren Buffett in #teaching & #working

Everybody wants to change others. Nobody wants to be changed.

— Naval Radikant «@naval»

We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.

— Orson Scott Card «Speaker for the Dead»

Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart give yourself to it.

— Fake Buddha «Your work is to discover your world and then with all your heart give yourself to it»

The thorn bush is the mother of the Oak.

— Arthur Standish «1613
» in #healing, #teaching & #wilding

We are generally agreeable to meeting new people and eating their food.

— Daniel Spector

Life begets life. Energy creates energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich.

— Sarah Bernhardt

I mean we're a lawless people, that's what makes us a free people in a way.

— Maurice MacGowan «The Great Hunger: The Life & Songs Of Shane MacGowan. Shane's father talking about Ireland.
» in #travelling & #wilding

Love needs no protection; it is its own protection.

— Emma Goldman

There are only eight five minute jobs in a day.

— Adrian Turner

If your plan is for one year plant rice. If your plan is for ten years plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years educate children.

— Confucius

It was difficult at first, but gradually it got easier, and finally, I had enough confidence that I wasn’t afraid

— Richard Feynman in #teaching & #working

Believe those who seek the truth. Doubt those who find it.

— André Gide