(Collected in chronological order starting in high school)
“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.” – T.E. Lawrence
“We are pragmatists. We don’t stick to any ideology. Does it work? Let’s try it, and if it does work, fine, let’s continue it. If it doesn’t work, toss it out, try another one. We are not enamored with any ideology.” – Lee Kuan Yew
“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.” ― Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
“Science flies you to the moon. Religions flies you into buildings.”
"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him"
"He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors."
“life is a perpetual resistance to what is habitual and customary. … Such a life is a perpetual suffering, a constant tearing oneself away from that part of oneself which is given over to habit and is a prisoner to nature.” -José Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on the Quixote (1914)
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.”
“They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.” – Mexican proverb
“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage…” – Lao Tzu
If you cook a potato, it becomes soft. But if you cook an egg, it becomes hard. Which are you?”
All his life has he looked away to the future, the horizon. Never his mind on where he was.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” ― Theodore Roosevelt
“Like our stomachs, our minds are hurt more often by overeating than by hunger.” (Ut stomachis sic ingeniis nausea sepius nocuit quam fames. — Petrarch
*forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit Some day, perhaps, remembering even this will be a pleasure
We all yearn for transcendence, for immortal life, to be part of the future.
The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.
The unexamined life is not worth living.