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Leftovers

Death & Dying

Ignorance & Lies

Religion & Belief

Thought & Thinking

Death & Dying

Let death be daily before your eyes, and you will never entertain
any abject thought, nor too eagerly covet anything.

Epictetus

All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever present perils of life.

Herman Melville

Always go to other people's funerals,
otherwise they won' t come to yours.

Yogi Berra

Once the game is over, the king and
the pawn go back into the same box.

Italian proverb

Live, so you do not have to look back
and say: "God, how I have wasted my life."

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

In the attempt to defeat death man has been inevitably obliged to defeat life, for the two are inextricably related. Life moves on to death, and to deny one is to deny the other.

Henry Miller

To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they knew quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?

Socrates

While I thought that I was learning how to live,
I have been learning how to die.

Leonardo da Vinci

Someday I'll be a weather-beaten skull
...resting on a grass pillow,
Serenaded by a stray bird or two.
Kings and commoners end up the same,
No more enduring than last night's dream.

Ryokan

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

William Shakespeare
Macbeth

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I have not lived.

Henry David Thoreau

But I tell you death is negligence. It is ignorance and vigilance is immortality. Death is a tiger crouching in the brush; we create children for death. But death cannot devour a man who has shaken off his dust; it is powerless against eternity. The wind, life, flow from the infinite, the moon drinks the breath of life, the sun drinks the moon, and the infinite drinks the sun. The wise man soars between worlds. When his body is destroyed, when no trace of it remains, then death itself is destroyed and he contemplates infinity. I said farewell to myself and I see myself in all beings. I am all that is not yet here, all that is yet to come. I am the ancestor. I am space. The cause of my birth is myself. I am the limit of everything; tireless, indestructible.

Ascetic, The Mahabharata
Jean-Claude Carrièrre

For dust you are and to dust you will return.

Bible
Genesis 3:19

Ignorance & Lies

We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.

Rabindranath Tagore

To know that you do not know is the best.
To pretend to know when you do not know
...is a disease.
Only when one recognizes this disease as a
...disease can one be free from the disease.
The sage is free from the disease.
Because he recognizes this disease to be
...disease, he is free from it.

Tao Te Ching

Man is a god clothed in rags, he is a master of the universe going about begging a crust of bread. He is a king prostrated before his own servants, a prisoner walled in by his own ignorance. He could be free. He has only to walk out of his self-constructed prison, for none holds him there but himself.

Paul Twitchell

It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than
to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Carl Sagan

Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort
and advantage. He lives by makebelieve.

W. Somerset Maugham

Nothing is so firmly believed as what is least known.

Michel de Montaigne

"Doublethink" means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

George Orwell, 1984

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

Friedrich Nietzsche

None are so hopelessly enslaved as
those who falsely believe they are free.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The most common of all follies is to believe passionately
in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

H. L. Mencken

It is impossible for a man to learn
what he thinks he already knows.

Epictetus

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We
don't know because we don't want to know.

Aldous Huxley

Ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head.

Michel de Montaigne

To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always
been premature, and it remains premature today.

Isaac Asimov

War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.

George Orwell, 1984

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge.

Alfred North Whitehead

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not
ignorance — it is the illusion of knowledge.

Daniel Boorstin

An age is called Dark, not because the light fails
to shine, but because people refuse to see it.

James Michener

If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.

Matthew 15:14

We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black
seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

H. P Lovecraft

Religion & Belief

Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each
man wishes, that he also believes to be true.

Demosthenes

Belief like any other moving body follows
the path of least resistance.

Samuel Butler

At the core of all well-founded belief,
lies belief that is unfounded.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Believe nothing just because a so-called wise person said it. Believe nothing just because a belief is generally held. Believe nothing just because it is said in ancient books. Believe nothing just because it is said to be of divine origin. Believe nothing just because someone else believes it. Believe only what you yourself test and judge to be true.

Buddha

Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.

Robert Anton Wilson

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.

Albert Einstein

I prefer rationalism to atheism. The question of God and other objects-of-faith are outside reason and play no part in rationalism, thus you don't have to waste your time in either attacking or defending.

Isaac Asimov

Every time a child says, I don't believe in fairies,
there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead.

Sir James Barrie

In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

Mark Twain

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.

John Updike

You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe.

Carl Sagan

When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realized that the Lord doesn't work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me.

Emo Philips

Thought & Thinking

Those who know how to think need no teachers.

Mahatma Gandhi

Follow not truth too near the heels, lest it dash out thy teeth.

George Herbert

Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do.

Bertrand Russell

Most of one's life is one prolonged
effort to prevent oneself thinking.

Aldous Huxley

There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

William Shakespeare

Thought must be divided against itself
before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

Aldous Huxley

What is the hardest thing in the world? To think.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is no expedient to which a man will
not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.

Thomas Alva Edison

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.

Albert Einstein

If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come
out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion,
by which deep insights can be winnowed from deep nonsense.

Carl Sagan

All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth — more than ruin — more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.

Bertrand Russell

Few people think more than two or three times a year. I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

George Bernard Shaw

All deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea, while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.

Herman Melville

How can you determine whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?

Plato

All that we are is the result of what we have thought.
The mind is everything. What we think, we become.

Buddha

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.

Thomas H. Huxley

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are
the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.

John Maynard Keynes

If a man sits down to think, he is immediately asked if has a headache.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you would be a real seeker after truth, you must at
least once in your life doubt, as far as possible, all things.

Rene Descartes

To find yourself, think for yourself.

Socrates

 

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