A collection of favourite quotes that I keep adding to as I discover more!
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.
-- Carl Sagan
Reality is that which, when you stop believing it, doesn't go away.
-- Philip K. Dick
What we need is not the will to believe, but the will to find out.
-- Betrand Russel
A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write--in short, what people can be they must be.
-- Abraham Maslow
The main thing to remember is that as long as you're in the herd, you're going where it's going, and the herd is always going in circles.
-- Jed McKenna
When the student is ready the teacher will appear. When the student is truly ready the teacher will disappear.
-- Tao Te Ching
If the voice in your head is you, who is the one listening to it?
-- Byron Katie
Creativity is seeing what others see and thinking what no one else ever thought.
-- Albert Einstein
The only devils in this world are those running around inside our own hearts, and that is where all our bettles should be fought.
-- Mahatma Gandhi
You can't change your friends but you can change your friends.
-- ANON
Don’t preach what you do not practise.
-- Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right.
-- Henry Ford
Depression is pulling back the curtain and seeing things as they are.
-- Jed McKenna
Everything is energy and that's all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics.
-- Albert Einstein
Truth is infinitely simple, delusion is infinitely complex.
-- Jed McKenna
Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
-- Howard Thurman
A Problem Well Stated is Half Solved
-- Charles Kettering
We don’t laugh because we’re happy, we are happy because we laugh.
-- William James
Don’t sweat the small stuff... and it’s all small stuff.
-- Richard Carlson
Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
-- Marthe Troly-Curtin
Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
-- Naval Ravikant
When a person can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.
-- Viktor E. Frankl
So many of us choose our path out of fear disguised as practically.
-- Jim Carrey
Comparison is the thief of joy
-- Theodore Roosevelt
Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have.
-- Rabbi Hyman Schachtel
A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs – jolted by every pebble in the road.
-- Henry Ward Beecher
Stupidity: You think you know everything, without questioning.
Intelligence: You question everything you think you know.
-- Richard Feynman
It's easy to break down and destroy. The heroes are those who make peace and build.
-- Nelson Mandela
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
-- Serenity Prayer
Happiness is there when you remove the sense of something missing in your life.
-- Naval Ravikant
What you do on your bad days matters more than what you do on your good days.
-- Kevin Kelly
What progress we are making; in the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Nowadays they are content with burning my books.
-- Sigmund Freud
Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.
-- Aristotle
Entertainment is terrified of losing you, and is willing to change itself to be more to your taste. Art doesn’t give a fuck whether it loses you — if you’re lost, that’s your problem.
-- Martin Blank
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
-- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Authenticity is the reduction of phoniness toward the zero point.
-- A. H. Maslow
Every positive thought essentially holds within it a negative thought.
-- Naval Ravikant
I realized that until I knew what was important right now, what was important right now was to figure out what was important right now!
-- Kyle Kowalski
The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it.
-- Chinese Proverb
All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.
-- Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Making art is not selfish; it’s for the rest of us. If you don’t do your thing, you are cheating us.
-- Kevin Kelly
If you could just sit for 30 minutes and be happy you are successful, but very few of us get there.
-- Navel Ravikant
Speak confidently as if you are right, but listen carefully as if you are wrong.
-- Kevin Kelly
To make something generic is to make the simple things complex.
-- Adam Keys
Some people die at 25 and aren't burried until 75.
-- Benjamin Franklin
If you were not actively engaged in making yourself miserable, you would be happy.
-- Anthony De Mello
It doesn't matter how much you polish the underside of the banister.
-- Randy Pausch
Life-hack: when in bed, meditate. Either you will have a deep meditation or fall asleep. Victory either way.
-- Navel Ravikant
The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
-- Stephen R. Covey
Be kind to unkind people. They need it the most.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.
-- Sigmund Freud
There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.
-- Shakespeare
Escape competition through authenticity.
-- Naval Ravikant
You can be in the back seat and travel to a place a hundred times. But until you take the driver's seat you'll never know the way.
-- Nash Vail
The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.
-- Charlie Munger
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
-- Victor Frankl
You can't stop the wave but you can learn to surf.
-- Jon Kabat-Zinn
I cannot face the idea of life without work. What would one do when ideas failed or words refused to come? It is impossible not to shudder at the thought.
-- Sigmund Freud
Much greatness in life comes out of suffering. You have to view the negative before you can aspire to and appreciate the positive.
-- Naval Ravikant
Reality is just too real for most of us, so we temper it with the mind.
-- Michael A. Singer
Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.
-- Sigmund Freud
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.
-- ANNON
No one who distains the key will be able to unlock the door.
-- Sigmund Freud
Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The idea is to die young as late as possible.
-- Ashley Montagu
Free education is abundant, all over the Internet. It's the desire to learn that's scarce.
-- Naval Ravikant
If you have to eat a frog, don't spend too much time looking at it first and if you have to eat 3 of them DON'T START WITH THE SMALL ONE.
-- Randy Pausch
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
-- Dorothy Parker, (attributed)
There are almost 7 billion people on this planet. Somehow I hope there will be almost 7 billion companies.
-- Naval Ravikant
All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
-- Pablo Picasso
The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.
-- Oscar Wilde
We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept - our own selves - that we love.
-- Fernando Pessoa
Don't take yourself too seriously. You're just a monkey with a plan.
-- Navel Ravikant
Anger is a hot coal you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at somebody.
-- Buddha
Health, love and your mission, in that order. Nothing else matters.
-- Navel Ravikant
Expose Your Ignorance. Tomorrow I need to look stupider and feel better about it. This staying quiet and trying to guess what’s going on isn’t working so well.
-- Aras Atasaygin on Apprenticeship Patterns
The only sin is ignorance and the only absolution is clear-seeing.
-- Jed McKenna
Those attacking wealth creation are often just seeking status.
-- Naval Ravikant
But I was largely motivated by anxiety, a ceaseless feeling that I had to find some way, any way, to make more money.
-- Daniel Higginbotham, Stepping off the Happiness Machine
When you let the nose of the camel into the tent, the rest of him tends to follow.
-- Ben Moseley, Out of the Tarpit
The only thing that really matters in life is your relationships to other people.
-- George Vaillant, March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study
Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.
-— Rumi
Boredom is fear of rocking the boat.
-- Abraham Hicks
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
--Blaise Pascal
The purpose of life is to discover your gift. The work of life is to develop it. The meaning of life is to give your gift away.
-- David Viscott
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.
-- Ernest Hemingway
If you hate a person then you are defeated by them.
-- Confucius
Would I still be interested in learning this thing if I couldn’t ever tell anybody about it? That’s how I know it’s real. That’s how I know it’s something I actually want to know.
-- Naval Ravikant
The clearer our insight into what is beyond good and evil, the more we can embody the good.
-- Lao Tzu
The powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
-- Walt Whitman
Man is basically good not evil.
-- Abraham Maslow
Mankind is the only species in the universe that has found a way to measure something that doesn't exist (time!).
-- Dolores Cannon
We say that we want peace of mind but what we really want is peace from mind.
-- Naval Ravikant
Stop thinking, and end your problems.
-- Lao Tzu
I was once asked why I don't participate in anti-war demonstrations. I said that I will never do that, but as soon as you have a pro-peace rally, I'll be there.
-- Mother Teresa
Happy to live, happy to let go. No attachement, no fear.
-- Anthony De Mello
The greatest help is wholeheartedly trusting people to resolve their own problems. A true philanthropist, like a good parent, brings people to the point where they can help themselves.
-- Stephen Mitchell
Art is just creativity. It’s just anything that’s done for its own sake.
-- Naval Ravikant
You can preach a better sermon with your life than your lips.
-- Oliver Goldsmith
You really begin to enjoy things when you're unattached, because attachment brings anxiety.
-- Anthony De Mello
The most important thing I can tell you is to relish writing in obscurity.
-- Michelle Kuo
We are all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.
-- Charles Bukowski
We could never learn to be brave and patient if there were only joy in the world.
-- Helen Keller
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
-- Francois Voltaire
The world is made of stories, not atoms
-- Muriel Rukeyser
The secret of happiness is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.
-- Socrates
Busy remaking the world, man forgot to remake himself.
-- Andrei Platonov
Whether it's business, exercise, romance, friendship, whatever, I think the meaning of life is to do things for their own sake.
-- Naval Ravikant
Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.
-- Miles Kington
Unhappy is he who depends on success to be happy.
-- Alex Dias Ribeiro
The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.
-- Alan Watts
Death destroys a man: the idea of death saves him.
-- E.M. Forster
The most surprising thing is that you wouldn’t let anyone steal your property, but you consistently let people steal your time, which is infinitely more valuable.
-- Seneca
Life isn’t as serious as the mind makes it out to be.
-- Eckhart Tolle
Joy comes to us from those whom we love even when they are absent.
-- Seneca
You should think of the word 'depressed' as 'deep rest' Your body needs to be depressed. It needs deep rest from the character that you’ve been trying to play.
-- Jim Carrey
I delight in my own inprovement every day.
-- Epictetus
I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter
-- Blaise Pascal
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the rest of the world calls a butterfly.
-- Jed Mc Kenna
Sit down, shut up and ask yourself, “What’s true?” until you know.
-- Jed McKenna
No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.
-- Mary Shelley
Truth does not need to be sought because it isn't lost.
-- Jed McKenna
Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
-- C.G. Jung
I do not konw how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?
-- Thoreau
To find yourself, think for yourself.
-- Socrates
Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing, there is a field. I'll meet you there.
-- Rumi
Depression is fear with hope removed.
-- Jed McKenna