BaS > BaS's Quotes

“People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Kierkegaard

“Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”
― thomas paine, Rights of Man

“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
― Anton Chekhov

“Men are the devils of the earth, and the animals are the tormented souls.

- On Religion”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Horrors and Absurdities of Religion

“No one reveals himself as he is; we all wear a mask and play a role.

- On Psychology”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Horrors and Absurdities of Religion

“People do not decide their futures; they decide their habits, and their habits decide their futures.” ― F. M. Alexander”
― Library Mindset, The Art of Laziness: Overcome Procrastination & Improve Your Productivity

“Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
― Socrates

“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“There are no facts, only interpretations.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Man is the cruelest animal.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
― William Shakespear, Hamlet

“I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.”
― Bertrand Russell

“And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence”
― Bertrand Russell

“I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.”
― Bertrand Russell , Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects

“To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.”
― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

“That is the idea -- that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with all its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

You may think that I am going too far when I say that that is still so. I do not think that I am. Take one fact. You will bear with me if I mention it. It is not a pleasant fact, but the churches compel one to mention facts that are not pleasant. Supposing that in this world that we live in today an inexperienced girl is married to a syphilitic man; in that case the Catholic Church says, 'This is an indissoluble sacrament. You must endure celibacy or stay together. And if you stay together, you must not use birth control to prevent the birth of syphilitic children.' Nobody whose natural sympathies have not been warped by dogma, or whose moral nature was not absolutely dead to all sense of suffering, could maintain that it is right and proper that that state of things should continue.

That is only an example. There are a great many ways in which, at the present moment, the church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of progress and improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. 'What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy.”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects

“One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

“People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.”
― Jean Jacques Rousseau