These are not my own quotes; rather, a collection of quotes that I have gathered from music, movies, books and elsewhere on the internet for many years. This website seems like a practical place to curate them.
While I do enjoy collecting quotes, I also think people are prone to use quotes as empty evidence in their arguments — a sort of ‘quote fallacy’. Just because someone once said something, it is not necessarily sensible or relevant to the discussion at hand. However, quotes can certainly be thought-provoking, and collecting them is good practice for paying attention to random wisdom in places you might not expect to find it. If not anything else, let this serve as a documentation of my many inspirations.
Quote Collection:
Literature
“‘I will have no man in my boat,’ said Starbuck, ‘who is not afraid of a whale’. By this, he seemed to mean, not only that the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.” Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
"I could be bound in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." William Shakespeare, Hamlet
"You have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.” Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
"The Population Reference Bureau predicts that the world's total population will double to 7,000,000,000 before the year 2000. I suppose they will all want dignity." Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
"When someone is crying, of course, the noble thing to do is to comfort them. But if someone is trying to hide their tears, it may also be noble to pretend you do not notice them." Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events
"I don't mind getting smacked on the chin. I just don't want to get nibbled to death. There's a difference." - Jim Nolan (John Steinbeck), In Dubious Battle
“This might be an interesting story all by itself. A little Indian boy teaches himself to read at an early age and advances quickly. He reads ‘Grapes of Wrath’ in kindergarten when the other children are struggling through ‘Dick and Jane’. If he’d been anything but an Indian boy living on the reservation, he might have been called a prodigy. But he is an Indian boy living on the reservation and is simply an oddity. He grows into a man who often speaks of his childhood in the third person, as if it will somehow dull the pain and make him sound more modest about his talents.” - Sherman Alexie, Superman and Me
“Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent--which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. On the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important. So that any writer, looking back over even so short a span of time as I am here forced to assess, finds that the things which hurt him and the things which helped him cannot be divorced from each other; he could be helped in a certain way only because he was hurt in a certain way; and his help is simply to be enabled to move from one conundrum to the next--one is tempted to say that he moves from one disaster to the next. When one begins looking for influences one finds them by the score. I haven't thought much about my own, not enough anyway.” James Baldwin
“I think that democratic nations have a natural taste for freedom; left to themselves, they seek it out, become attached to it, and view any departure from it with distress. But they have a burning, insatiable, constant and invincible passion for equality; they want equality in freedom and, if they cannot have it, they want it in slavery. They will endure poverty, subjection, barbarism but they will not endure aristocracy.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
"I give [this watch] to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it." Mr. Compson (William Faulkner), The Sound and the Fury
“Clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life” William Faulkner, The Sound the Fury
"She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind." Sixo (Toni Morrison), Beloved
"You're gold when you're a kid, like green. When you're a kid everything's new, dawn. It's just when you get used to everything that it's day. Like the way you dig sunsets, Pony. That's gold. Keep that way, it's a good way to be." Johnny Cade (S.E. Hinton), The Outsiders
“‘How did you go bankrupt?’ Bill asked. ‘Two ways,’ said Mike. ‘Gradually and then suddenly.’” Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
"Things are rough all over, but it's better that way. That way you can tell the other guy is human too." Ponyboy Curtis (S.E. Hinton), The Outsiders
"Foreign places yield more to one who is himself worth meeting." Beowulf
“For months and months there was, it seemed to me, a mutual feeling between me and the horses of justice, of peace. I fed apples to them both. The look in Blue's eyes was one of unabashed "this is itness." It did not, however, last forever.” - Alice Walker, Am I Blue?
“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.” Mr. Antolini in Catcher in the Rye, citing psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel
"Who can free himself from achievement and from fame, descend and be lost amid the masses of men? He will flow like Tao, unseen, he will go about like Life itself with no name and no home. Simple is he, without distinction. To all appearances he is a fool. His steps leave no trace. He has no power. He achieves nothing, has no reputation. Since he judges no one, no one judges him. Such is the perfect man: his boat is empty." Chuang Tzu
Motivation
"How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself?" Epictetus
“I don't have talent - I have tenacity. I have discipline. I have focus. I know, without any delusion, where I come from and where I can go back to.” Henry Rollins
"I am a slow walker, but I never walk backwards" Abraham Lincoln
"I am a great believer in luck, and I find that the harder I work, the luckier I become." Thomas Jefferson
“Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.” George Washington
"Stand up and force some change or at least fight. And it doesn't need to be a fight of epic proportions or some kind of verbally violent fight; it's just saying: know. Know, that's it." Colin Moriarty
“I understood that if I wish to understand life and its meaning, I must not live the life of a parasite, but must live a real life, and — taking the meaning given to live by real humanity and merging myself in that life — verify it.” Leo Tolstoy
Reason
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." Aristotle
“Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.” Bertrand Russell
“In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time – none, zero.” Charles Munger
“People can’t be knowledgable about everything, but they can be knowledgable about the extent of their own ignorance, even if they have PhDs.” Thomas Sowell
“The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is a friend and an ally - not a 20 percent traitor.” Ronald Reagan
“Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.” - George Bernard Shaw
“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh; otherwise they’ll kill you.” Oscar Wilde
“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.” H.L. Mencken
"Beware that when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." Friedrich Nietzsche
“People usually don't agree with people who don't agree with them” Kanye West
“You need to have two rules in order to have a productive discussion. One is is that a very smart person who is saying something obvious should be assumed to be saying something subtle until proven otherwise and that an intelligent person who is saying something that is wrong should be assumed to be saying something counterintuitive until proven otherwise… those two rules cleaned up a lot of confusions.” Eric Weinstein
“Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it ... he who doesn't ... pays it.” Albert Einstein
"Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than the arguments of its opposers." - William Penn
"Eternity isn't some later time. Eternity isn't a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time! Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking in time cuts out." Joseph Campbell
“We have met the enemy and he is us.” Walt Kelly
“If we contrast the rapid progress of this mischievous discovery [of gunpowder] with the slow and laborious advances of reason, science, and the arts of peace, a philosopher, according to his temper, will laugh or weep at the folly of mankind.” Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1781)
Emotion
"There are two dilemmas that rattle the human skull: How do you hang on to someone who won't stay? And how do you get rid of someone who won't go?" - Danny DeVito
“Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did to me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.” Ishmael (Herman Melville), Moby-Dick
“Love sees sharply; hatred sees even more sharp. But jealousy sees the sharpest, for it is love and hate at the same time.” Arab proverb
“When one door closes another door opens, but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.” Alexander Graham Bell
“Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past.” Lily Tomlin
“A matrimonial union without love is no better than suicide.” John Roebling, Chief Engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge
“Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.” - Epictetus
America
“America is not a crime. It is a disappointment- because it is a hope.” Thomas Finneran
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time - when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), the lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.” Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (in 1995)
“Our contemporaries are ceaselessly agitated by two conflicting passions: they feel the need to be directed as well at the desire to remain free. Since they are unable blot out either of these hostile feelings, they strive to satisfy them both together. They conceive a single, protective, and all-powerful government but one elected by the citizens. They combine centralization with the sovereignty of the people. That gives them some respite. They derive consolation from being supervised by thinking that they have chosen their own supervisors. Every individual tolerates being tied down because he sees that it is not another man nor a class of people holding the end of the chain but society itself. Under this system citizens leave their state of dependence just long enough to choose their masters and then they return to it.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835)
“The very purpose of Congress is to arrive at a national decision by bringing together some 531 individuals, representing 170 million individuals, to achieve consent on the way the nation should go. Were we bound by rigid dogmas, whatever their name, there would be no more cause for assembling Congress than bringing the Soviet Presidium together. We are not so bound, and it is part - a great part - of my philosophy that the Congress reaches a very dubious decision when its choices are made solely by head counts of the partisan division.” Lyndon B Johnson
“As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and complete narcissistic moron.” H.L. Mencken, the Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920
Movies / TV
“I don't need another friend. I already have two. I mean, how many more friends does a guy need?” Sam, Freaks and Geeks
“Do you ever wonder how somebody can even like you? How can Debby like me? She likes me, I mean, she loves me. The biggest problem in our marriage is that she wants me around. She loves me so much that she wants me around all the time. That’s our biggest problem, and I can’t even accept that. Like, that upsets me … I don’t think I can accept her love. There’s something wrong with me.” Paul Rudd in Knocked Up
"You got the makings of greatness in you, but you got to take the helm and chart your own course. Stick to it, no matter the squalls! And when the time comes and you get the chance to really test the cut of your sails, and show what you're made of! Well, I hope I'm there, catching some of the light coming off you that day." John Silver, Treasure Planet
"Pride is not the opposite of shame, but its source. True humility is the only antidote to shame." Uncle Iroh, Avatar: The Last Airbender
“I don't care how many damn dogs you got. It don't amount to jack if they ain't tough enough to bark when they're out alone.” Mugen, Samurai Champloo
“Confidence... It's the food of the wise man, but the liquor of the fool.” Vikram, The Office
“I wanted a relationship without friction.”
“Dude, you need friction to create fire.”
“And that's what we have, we have fire.”
“Dude, I'm in. I'm all in.” Jonah Hill/Channing Tatum, 22 Jump Street
Music
“He kept running and running and running and never looked back, he never realized how far he came." - Tonedeff, The Distance
"Never changed though, I'm just the new version of old me." - Big Sean, Control
"When what goes up comes down, don't blame it on gravity." Mr SOS, Earth's Essence
"Forever begins, just because I thought about it." Common, Forever Begins
"The fastest can't run from who they are, I'd run from self but no man can run that far." Deacon the Villain, To Be For Real
“Everybody lookin' at you crazy/ what you gonna do?/ Lift up your head and keep moving/ or let the paranoia haunt you?” Kendrick Lamar, i
Miscellaneous
“When you can do the common things of life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world." George Washington Carver
“The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company... a church... a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past... we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude... I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it. And so it is with you... we are in charge of our attitudes.” Charles Swindoll
"They tried to bury us. They didn't know we were seeds." Mexican proverb
"You are not required to set yourself on fire to keep other people warm." Random Reddit user
"Don't judge a book by its cover, but be careful of the library it's in." Random Reddit user
"True friends say good things behind your back and bad things to your face." Random internet quote
“Failure’s the best thing in the world… Failure, for me, is the best time to actually take a step… breathe… and think: why did you fail? Were you trying? Was there something you missed? Was it something you couldn’t even control? Was it even your failure - was it someone else’s failure that happened to break what you were doing? Cause that’s the only time when you can actually make an adjustment.” Matt Canoy
“Beware the quiet man. For while others speak he watches. And while others act he plans. And when they finally rest... he strikes" Adam McKay
“A wise man learns more from a fool than a fool learns from a wise man” Proverb told by economist Bryan Caplan