“Other readers may be raising another question: ‘It may be true that people who come for psychological help feel empty and hollow, but aren’t these neurotic problems, and not necessarily true for the majority of people?’ To be sure, we would answer, the persons who get to the consulting rooms of psychotherapists and psychoanalysts are not a cross-section of the population. By and large they are the ones for whom the conventional pretenses and defenses of the society no longer work. Very often they are the more sensitive and gifted members of society; they need to get help, broadly speaking, because they are less successful at rationalizing than the ‘well-adjusted’ citizen who is able for the time being to cover up his underlying conflicts. * * * Thus a relatively small number of people – those who come for psychotherapeutic help in the process of their struggle for inner integration – provide a very revealing and significant barometer of the conflicts and tensions under the psychological surface of the society.” (Rollo May in Man’s Search for Himself)

“You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.” (Ayn Rand)

“When one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity; when many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion.” (Robert Pirsig)

“People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid.” (Soren Aabye Kierkegaard)

“The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.” (James Branch Cabell)

“The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.” (Mark Twain)

“The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.” (Samuel Johnson)

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” (Arthur Schopenhauer)

“Few things are harder to put up with than a good example.” (Mark Twain)

“I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” (Sir Stephen Henry Roberts)

“For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.” (Henry Louis Mencken)

“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.” (Albert Einstein)

“We are all atheists about most of the gods humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.” (Richard Dawkins)

“The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don’t have it.” (George Bernard Shaw)

“God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.” (Voltaire)

“Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know, we become insensitive to many things of very great importance. Theology, on the other hand, induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge, where in fact we have ignorance, and by doing so, generates a kind of impertinent insolence towards the universe. Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales. ” (Lord Bertrand Russell)

Jack: “I am glad we are not from Australia!”
Dad: “Why is that?”
Jack: “Because then our team would be losing all the time!” (A reference to the continuing losses of the Wallabies to the All Blacks. He has never seen the All Blacks lose a game.)

“Life is too important to be taken seriously.” Oscar Wilde

Some of my favourite quotes follow.

“Cogito ergo sum.” (Descartes)

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” (Socrates)

“This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou cans’t not be false to any man.” (Hamlet, Act I, Scene iii)

“And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.” (Nietzsche)

“An eye for an eye, and soon the whole world is blind.” (Mahatma Gandhi)

“Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” (Nietzsche)

“What we think, we become.” (Siddhartha Gautama – Buddha)

“In heaven all the interesting people are missing.” (Nietzsche)

“Amor fati.” – Love your fate. (Nietzsche)

“It is better to travel well than to arrive.” (Siddhartha Gautama – Buddha)

“Du sollst der werden, der du bist.” – Become who you are. (Nietzsche)

“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” (Benjamin Franklin) Try telling that to Fatherland Security, Ben!

“But thus I counsel you, my friends: Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. They are people of a low sort and stock; the hangman and the bloodhound look out of their faces. Mistrust all who talk much of their justice! Verily, their souls lack more than honey. And when they call themselves the good and the just, do not forget that they would be pharisees, if only they had — power.” (Nietzsche)

“He is able who thinks he is able.” (Siddhartha Gautama – Buddha)

“A bottle of wine contains more philosophy than all the books in the world.” (Louis Pasteur)

“Finché c’è vita, c’è speranza.” Where there is life, there is hope.

“Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.” (Mark Twain)

“He toa taumata rau.” Bravery has many resting places. (Maori saying)

“Why then ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” (Hamlet, Act 2, Scene ii)

“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.” (Nietzsche)

“A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love.” (Nietzsche)

“After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.” (Nietzsche)

“Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.” (Nietzsche)

“All things are subject to interpretation [and] whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.” (Nietzsche)

“Of all the creatures, man is the most detestable. Of the entire brood, he is the only one that possesses malice. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain. The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.” (Mark Twain)

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” (Marcel Proust)

“If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.” (Marcel Proust)

“We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full.” (Marcel Proust)

“We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.” (Marcel Proust)

“We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.” (Marcel Proust)

“Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.” (Marcel Proust)

“In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.”(Marcel Proust)

“The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.” (Marcel Proust)

“Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)

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

“In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)

“Is man one of God’s blunders? Or is God one of man’s blunders?” (Friedrich Nietzsche)

“Have you heard that it was good to gain the day? I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.” (Walt Whitman)

“Behold I do not give lectures or a little charity, When I give I give myself.” (Walt Whitman)

“All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor.” (Walt Whitman)

“And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death.” (Walt Whitman)

“A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.” (William Butler Yeats)

“All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.” (William Butler Yeats)

“Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.” (William Butler Yeats)

“Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom.
Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.” (Lao Tzu)

“Fear is the mother of morality.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)

“Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)

“The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)

“The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” (Albert Einstein)

“I know my fate. One day there will be associated with my name the recollection of something frightful – of a crisis like no other before on earth, of the profoundest collision of conscience, of a decision evoked against everything that until then had been believed in, demanded, sanctified. I am not a man I am dynamite.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)

“What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, ‘This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust!’ Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, ‘Never have I heard anything more divine’?” (Friedrich Nietzsche)

“The higher we soar, the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)

“Life has no meaning the moment you loose the illusion of being eternal.” (Jean-Paul Sartre)

“Eighty percent of success is showing up.” (Woody Allen)