Spiritual Quotations & Wisefool Press Artwork
Nothing is hidden.
-TENKEI
If you wish to drown, do not torture yourself with shallow water.
-BULGARIAN PROVERB
It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.
-EUGENE IONESCO
People mistakenly assume that their thinking is done by their head; it is actually done by the heart which first dictates the conclusion, then commands the head to provide the reasoning that will defend it.
-ANTHONY DE MELLO
Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.
-DOUGLAS ADAMS
What you’re looking for is what is looking.
-WEI WU WEI
It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.
-JONATHAN SWIFT
There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.
-HANNAH ARENDT
I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.
-A.M. LINDBERGH
If somebody thinks they’re a hedgehog, presumably you just give them a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.
-DOUGLAS ADAMS
I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.
-EUGENE IONESCO
To enter one’s own self, it is necessary to go armed to the teeth.
-PAUL VALERY
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure is disagreeable and therefore not popular.
-C.G. JUNG
The enlightened man is capable of perceiving both unity and multiplicity without the least contradiction between them.
-HUANG PO
There is no god higher than truth.
-MAHATMA GANDHI
Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.
-LEONARDO DA VINCI
Winston Smith: How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four. O’Brien: Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.
-GEORGE ORWELL, 1984
You are rewarding a teacher poorly if you remain always a pupil.
-NIETZSCHE
If you think you’re free, there’s no escape possible.
-RAM DASS
Truth is by nature self-evident. As soon as you remove the cobwebs of ignorance that surround it, it shines clear.
-MAHATMA GANDHI
This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
-GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
-GEORGE ORWELL
The man of wisdom is devoid of ego even though he may appear to use it. His vacant or fasting mind is neither doing anything nor not doing anything. He is outside of volition, neither this nor that. He is everything and nothing.
-RAMESH BALSEKAR
Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.
-ALDOUS HUXLEY
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
-MARCEL PROUST
Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.
-KATHERINE MANSFIELD
Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
-ALDOUS HUXLEY
What we need is not the will to believe but the will to find out.
-BERTRAND RUSSELL
A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.
-NIETZSCHE
There is Buddha for those who don’t know what he is. There is no Buddha for those who know what he is.
-BUDDHIST PROVERB
Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
-C.G. JUNG
If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either.
-RUSSIAN PROVERB
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, THEAETETUS
The Sages, men of vision, have never asked anyone to believe anything. Belief is nothing but concept. The Sages have always merely pointed at the Truth, which the disciple must then realize himself.
-RAMESH BALSEKAR
The perfect man has no self; the spiritual man has no achievement; the sage has no name.
-CHUANG TZU
Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.
-LEO TOLSTOY
All books are either dreams or swords, You can cut, or you can drug, with words.
-AMY LOWELL
I do not know how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?
-THOREAU
A donkey with a load of holy books is still a donkey.
-SUFI PROVERB
I count religion but a childish toy, And hold there is no sin but ignorance.
-CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE
I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.
-FREDERICK DOUGLASS, ESCAPED SLAVE
It is always the false that makes you suffer, the false desires and fears, the false values and ideas, the false relationships between people. Abandon the false and you are free of pain; truth makes happy, truth liberates.
-NISARGADATTA MAHARAJ
Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
-ALDOUS HUXLEY
There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.
-SHAKESPEARE
To find yourself, think for yourself.
-SOCRATES
All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.
-NIETZSCHE
If you’re going through hell, keep going.
-WINSTON CHURCHILL
Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.
-MARK TWAIN
The best way out is always through.
-ROBERT FROST
Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.
-GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of a person we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation–a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.
-KAFKA
All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of anything, you kill it. Nothing survives being thought of.
-OSCAR WILDE
Books, not which affords us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institutions — such I call good books.
-THOREAU
Truth is the cry of all, but the game of the few.
-BISHOP BERKELEY
It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we’re alive — to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are.
-ELISABETH KUBLER-ROSS
I honor those who try to rid themselves of any lying, who empty the self and have only clear being there.
-RUMI
There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.
-LOUIS L’AMOUR
We shall not cease from exploring, And the end of our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
-T.S. ELIOT
What is to give light must endure burning.
-VIKTOR FRANKL
Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.
-JOSEPH CONRAD
The only devils in this world are those running around inside our own hearts, and that is where all our battles should be fought.
-MAHATMA GANDHI
Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.
-RUMI
Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.
-NIETZSCHE
You can see a lot by just looking.
-YOGI BERRA
Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.
-NIETZSCHE
Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know.
-MONTAIGNE
The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.
-H.L. MENCKEN
Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once a week.
-GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Winston Smith: What is in Room 101? O’Brien: You know what is in Room 101, Winston. Everyone knows what is in Room 101.
-GEORGE ORWELL, 1984
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought, which they seldom use.
-SOREN KIERKEGAARD
The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of nonessentials.
-LIN YUTANG
Magna est veritas et praevalet. Great is truth, and mighty above all things.
-APOCRYPHA
Discontent is the first necessity of progress.
-THOMAS EDISON
One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison.
-BERTRAND RUSSELL
When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.
-LAO TZU
The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting.
-PIERRE ABELARD
Advance and do not fear the thorns in the path, for they draw only corrupt blood.
-KHALIL GIBRAN
No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
-NIETZSCHE
War is cruel. There is no use trying to reform it. But the crueler it is, the sooner it’s over.
-GENERAL W.T. SHERMAN
If you’re going to tell people the truth, be funny or they’ll kill you.
-BILLY WILDER
