bookster > bookster's Quotes

“No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“She had studied the universe all her life, but had overlooked its clearest message: For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”
― Carl Sagan, Contact

“The Jihad of this age is to strive in upholding the word of Islam, to refute the objections of the opponents, to propagate the excellences of the Islamic faith, and to proclaim the truth of the Holy Prophet, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, throughout the world. This is Jihad till God Almighty brings about other conditions in the world.”
― Mirza Ghulam Ahmad

“Indeed, the line between perceiving and hallucinating is not as crisp as we like to think. In a sense, when we look at the world, we are hallucinating all the time. One could almost regard perception as the act of choosing the one hallucination that best fits the incoming data.”
― V.S. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human

“The world is in some essential sense a construct. Human knowledge is radically interpretive. There are no perspective-independent facts. Every act of perception and cognition is contingent, mediated, situated, contextual, theory-soaked. Human language cannot establish its ground in an independent reality. Meaning is rendered by the mind and cannot be assumed to inhere in the object, in the world beyond the mind, for that world can never be contacted without having already been saturated by the mind's own nature. That world cannot even be justifiably postulated. Radical uncertainty prevails, for in the end what one knows and experiences is to an indeterminate extent a projection.”
― Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View

“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”
― Anaïs Nin

“And if this disenchanted vision were elevated to the status of being the only legitimate vision of the nature of the cosmos upheld by an entire civilization, what an incalculable loss, an impoverishment, a tragic deformation, a grief, would ultimately be suffered by both knower and known.
”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

“Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren't having any of those.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

“The common denominator of all jokes is a path of expectation that is diverted by an unexpected twist necessitating a complete reinterpretation of all the previous facts — the punch-line…Reinterpretation alone is insufficient. The new model must be inconsequential. For example, a portly gentleman walking toward his car slips on a banana peel and falls. If he breaks his head and blood spills out, obviously you are not going to laugh. You are going to rush to the telephone and call an ambulance. But if he simply wipes off the goo from his face, looks around him, and then gets up, you start laughing. The reason is, I suggest, because now you know it’s inconsequential, no real harm has been done. I would argue that laughter is nature’s way of signaling that "it’s a false alarm." Why is this useful from an evolutionary standpoint? I suggest that the rhythmic staccato sound of laughter evolved to inform our kin who share our genes; don’t waste your precious resources on this situation; it’s a false alarm. Laughter is nature’s OK signal.”
― V.S. Ramachandran, A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers

“Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
― Anaïs Nin, Incest: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1932-1934

“And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“It is good to recall that three centuries ago, around the year 1660, two of the greatest monuments of modern history were erected, one in the West and one in the East; St. Paul's Cathedral in London and the Taj Mahal in Agra. Between them, the two symbolize, perhaps better than words can describe, the comparative level of architectural technology, the comparative level of craftsmanship and the comparative level of affluence and sophistication the two cultures had attained at that epoch of history. But about the same time there was also created—and this time only in the West—a third monument, a monument still greater in its eventual import for humanity. This was Newton's Principia, published in 1687. Newton's work had no counterpart in the India of the Mughals.”
― Abdus Salam, Ideals and Realities: Selected Essays of Abdus Salam

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Humanity's "progress of knowledge" and the "evolution of consciousness" have too often been characterized as if our task were simply to ascend a very tall cognitive ladder with graded hierarchical steps that represent successive developmental stages in which we solve increasingly challenging mental riddles, like advanced problems in a graduate exam in biochemistry or logic. But to understand life and the cosmos better, perhaps we are required to transform not only our minds but our hearts. For the whole being, body and soul, mind and spirit, is implicated. Perhaps we must go not only high and far but down and deep. Our world view and cosmology, which defines the context for everything else, is profoundly affected by the degree to which all out faculties–intellectual, imaginative, aesthetic, moral, emotional, somatic, spiritual, relational–enter the process of knowing. How we approach "the other," and how we approach each other, will shape everything, including out own evolving self and the cosmos in which we participate.”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.… Man is something that must be overcome.”
― Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind

“A letter always seemed to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend.”
― Emily Dickinson

“Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

“These illustrations suggest four general maxims[...].
The first is: remember that your motives are not always as altruistic as they seem to yourself.
The second is: don't over-estimate your own merits.
The third is: don't expect others to take as much interest in you as you do yourself.
And the fourth is: don't imagine that most people give enough thought to you to have any special desire to persecute you.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

“To all the talented young men who wander about feeling that there is nothing in the world for them to do, I should say: 'Give up trying to write, and, instead, try not to write. Go out into the world; become a pirate, a king in Borneo, a labourer in Soviet Russia; give yourself an existence in which the satisfaction of elementary physical needs will occupy almost all your energies.' I do not recommend this course of action to everyone, but only to those who suffer from the disease which Mr Krutch diagnoses. I believe that, after some years of such an existence, the ex-intellectual will fin that in spite of is efforts he can no longer refrain from writing, and when this time comes his writing will not seem to him futile.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

“The secret of happiness is very simply this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile”
― Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

“The feeling is one born of a too easy satisfaction of natural needs. The human animal, like others, is adapted to a certain amount of struggle for life, and when by means of great wealth homo sapiens can gratify all his whims without effort, the mere absence
of effort from his life removes an essential ingredient of happiness. The man who acquires easily things for which he feels only a very moderate desire concludes that the attainment of desire does not bring happiness. If he is of a philosophic dispositi on, he concludes that human life is essentially wretched, since the man who has all he wants is still unhappy. He forgets that to be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

“We must not allow other people’s limited perceptions to define us.”
― Virginia Satir

“You differ from a great man in only one respect: the great man was once a very little man, but he developed one important quality: he recognized the smallness and narrowness of his thoughts and actions. Under the pressure of some task that meant a great deal to him, he learned to see how his smallness, his pettiness endangered his happiness. In other words, a great man knows when and in what way he is a little man. A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know. He hides his pettiness and narrowness behind illusions of strength and greatness, someone else's strength and greatness. He's proud of his great generals but not of himself. He admires an idea he has not had, not one he has had. The less he understands something, the more firmly he believes in it. And the better he understands an idea, the less he believes in it.”
― Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!

“Verily, Allah enjoins justice, and the doing of good to others; and giving
like kindred; and forbids indecency, and manifest evil, and wrongful
transgression. (The Holy Quran, an-Nahl 16:91)

This verse sets forth three gradations of doing good.
The first is the doing of good in return for good.
This is the lowest gradation and even an average person
can easily acquire this gradation that he should do good
to those who do good to him.
The second gradation is a little more difficult than
the first, and that is to take the initiative in doing
good out of pure benevolence. This is the middle
grade. Most people act benevolently towards the
poor, but there is a hidden deficiency in benevolence,
that the person exercising benevolence is conscious
of it and desires gratitude or prayer in return for his
benevolence. If on any occasion the other person
should turn against him, he considers him ungrateful.
On occasion he reminds him of his benevolence or
puts some heavy burden upon him.

The third grade of doing good is graciousness as
between kindred. God Almighty directs that in this
grade there should be no idea of benevolence or any
desire for gratitude, but good should be done out of
such eager sympathy as, for instance, a mother does
good to her child. This is the highest grade of doing
good which cannot be exceeded. But God Almighty
has conditioned all these grades of doing good with
their appropriate time and place. The verse cited
above clearly indicates that if these virtues are not
exercised in their proper places they would become
vices.”
― Mirza Ghulam Ahmad

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories