Quote of the Day

Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.

- Theodore Roosevelt

Quote of the Day

The notion of the perfect whole, the ultimate solution in which all good things coexist, seems to me not merely unobtainable--that is a truism--but conceptually incoherent. ......Some among the great goods cannot live together. That is a conceptual truth. We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss.

- Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind

Quote of the Day

The destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialisation, ‘Western civilisation’ or any flaw in human institutions. It is a consequence of the evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate. Throughout all of history and prehistory, human advance has coincided with ecological devastation.

- John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts On Humans And Other Animals

Quote of the Day

Read books you hate. Nothing pushes you more strongly in the direction of your own voice as knowing precisely what you are not.

- Meg Elison

Quote of the Day

When we think about the adaptive fit of a species to its environment, we think about size, speed, coloration, feeding habits, and so on, but we don’t think about thinking. Sure, we talk about brain size as though it were just another morphological variable like height, but we don’t think about thinking in Darwinian terms. Things get weird when you go there.

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What if the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything can only be contemplated by dodos? What if the Ultimate Truths are dodo thoughts?

- More Here

Quote of the Day

Magic's just science that we don't understand yet.

- Arthur C. Clarke

Quote of the Day

As long as you live, keep learning how to live.

- Seneca

Quote of the Day

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.

- Hentry David Thoreau, Walden

Quote of the Day

These things will destroy the human race: politics without principle, progress without compassion, wealth without work, learning without silence, religion without fearlessness, and worship without awareness.

- Anthony de Mello

Quote of the Day

To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape.

- Alan Wilson Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

Quote of the Day

I find I am much prouder of the victory I obtain over myself, when, in the very ardor of dispute, I make myself submit to my adversary’s force of reason, than I am pleased with the victory I obtain over him through his weakness.

- Michel de Montaigne

Quote of the Day

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.

- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Quote of the Day

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Quote of the Day

I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand at the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Quote of the Day

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.

- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, I

Quote of the Day

Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.

- Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Quote of the Day

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought to himself of saying “This is mine”, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders; how much misery and horror the human race would have been spared if someone had pulled up the stakes and filled the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: ‘Beware of listening to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to everyone and that the earth itself belongs to no one!

- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, II, trans. G. D. H. Cole

Quote of the Day

To think of humans as freedom-loving, you must be ready to view nearly all of history as a mistake.

- John Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

Quote of the Day

It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure -- if they are, indeed, so well off -- to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives.

- Walden, Henry David Thoreau

Quote of the Day

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.

- Walden, Henry David Thoreau