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God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please, you can never have both. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. - II Corinthians 3:6

There is nothing noble about being superior to some other men. The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self. - Hindustani proverb

I'm not in the business of validating people's preconceptions and stroking their mindset and giving them an hour and a half of diversion. I like to rock. I like to get in there and fuck with their heads. - Paul Schrader, screenwriter/director (Taxi Driver, Last Temptation of Christ)

Freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. - Will and Ariel Durant

Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play. - Heraclitus

If you are afraid of being lonely, don¹t try to be right. - Jules Renard

It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions. - T.H. Huxley

Live dangerously. - Nietzsche

Doctrines, scriptures, sutras, essays, are not to be regarded as systems to be followed. They merely contribute to understanding. They should be for us a source of stimulation, and nothing more... Adopted, rather than used as a stimulus, they are a hindrance. - Why Lazurus Laughed by Wei Wu Wei

We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us. - Churchill

What you take in by visionary experience you must give out by love and intelligence in daily life. - Aldous Huxley

There seem to two kinds of searchers: those who seek to make their ego something other than it is, i.e. holy, happy, unselfish (as though you could make a fish unfish), and those who understand that all such attempts are just gesticulation and play-acting, that there is only one thing that can be done, which is to disidentify themselves with the ego, by realizing its unreality, and by becoming aware of their eternal identity with pure being. - Fingers Pointing Toward the Moon by Wei Wu Wei

When you give someone a book of philosophy, it's like making them a present of a list of chores to be carried out. - Kenneth Smith

The whole fabric of society will go to wrack if we really lay hands of reform on our rotten institutions. From top to bottom the whole system is a fraud, all of us know it, laborers and capitalists alike, and all of us are consenting parties to it. - Henry Adams, 1910

To the living, one owes respect. To the dead, one only owes the truth. - Voltaire

Only the shallow know themselves. - Oscar Wilde

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all. - Oscar Wilde

The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary. - Franz Kafka

Energy is the only life. - William Blake

I and my public understand each other very well: it does not hear what I say, and I don¹t say what it wants to hear. - Karl Kraus