Quotes4study

Peace can only last where human rights are respected, where the people are fed, and where individuals and nations are free. True peace with oneself and with the world around us can only be achieved through the development of mental peace.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama (date of birth

believe this is because understanding is risky. If I let myself really understand another person, I might be changed by that understanding. And we all fear change. So as I say, it is not an easy thing to permit oneself to understand an individual,

Carl R. Rogers

We cannot avoid conflict, conflict with society, other individuals and with oneself. Conflicts may be the sources of defeat, lost life and a limitation of our potentiality but they may also lead to greater depth of living and the birth of more far-reaching unities, which flourish in the tensions that engender them.

Karl Jaspers

We are told we must choose the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new? It seems to me that one should always be seeking to talk oneself out of these stark oppositions.

Susan Sontag

What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice and the exercise of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing. [ A Declaration of Freedom .]

MacLeish, Archibald.

To joke in the face of danger is the supreme politeness, a delicate refusal to cast oneself as a tragic hero.

Edmond Rostand

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

Oscar Wilde

When death is certain, it is best to sacrifice oneself for a good cause.

Swami Vivekananda

The true way to be deceived is to think oneself more knowing than others.

FRANCIS, DUC DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD. 1613-1680.     _Maxim 127._

The belief that there is only one truth and that oneself is in possession of it, seems to me the deepest root of all that is evil in the world.

Max Born (born 11 December 1882

The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less.

Eldridge Cleaver

It is an act as rare as it is precious, to transact business with many people, without ever forgetting God or oneself.--ST. IGNATIUS.

Various     Thoughts and Counsels of the Saints for Every Day of the Year

Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

Iris Murdoch (born 15 July 1919

There is but one means to extenuate the effects of enemy fire: it is to develop a more violent fire oneself.

Ferdinand Foch (born 2 October 1851

Truth has no path. Truth is living and, therefore, changing. Awareness is without choice, without demand, without anxiety; in that state of mind, there is perception. To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person. Awareness has no frontier; it is giving of your whole being, without exclusion.

Bruce Lee

God comes to us in the likeness of man--there is no other likeness for God. And that likeness is not forbidden, Christ has taught us to see and love God in man. We cannot go further. If we attempt to conceive anything more than human, our mind breaks down. But we can conceive and perceive the Divine in man, and most in those who are risen from the earth. While we live our love is human, and mixed with earthly things. We love and do not love--we even hate, or imagine we do. But we do not really hate any man, we only hate something that surrounds and hides man. What is behind, the true nature of man, we always love. Death purifies man, it takes away the earthly crust, and we can love those who are dead far better than those who are still living: that is the truth. We do not deceive ourselves, we do not use vain words. Love is really purer, stronger, and more unselfish when it embraces those who are risen. That is why the Apostles loved Christ so much better when He was no longer with them. While He lived, Peter could deny Him--when He had returned to the Father, Peter was willing to die for Him. All that is so true, only one must have gone through it, felt it oneself, in order to understand it. If one knows the love one feels for the blessed, one wants no temporary resurrection to account for the rekindled love of the Apostles. They believed that Christ had truly risen, that death had no power over Him, that He was with the Father. Was not that more, far more, than a return to this fleeting life for a few hours, or days, or weeks, or than an ascent through the clouds to the blue sky? Ah! how the great truths have been exchanged for small fancies, the _mira_ for the _miracula_.

Friedrich Max Müller     Thoughts on Life and Religion

It's astonishing how much trouble one can get oneself into, if one works at it. And astonishing how much trouble one can get oneself out of, if one simply assumes that everything will, somehow or other, work out for the best.

Neil Gaiman ~ in ~ The Sandman

If I let myself really understand another person, I might be changed by that understanding. And we all fear change. So as I say, it is not an easy thing to permit oneself to understand an individual,

Carl R. Rogers

Is it possible to become ecstatic amid destruction, rejuvenate oneself through cruelty?

Arthur Rimbaud

I always disagree … when people end up saying that we can only combat Communism, Fascism or what not if we develop an equal fanaticism. It appears to me that one defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one's intelligence. In the same way, a man can kill a tiger because he is not like a tiger and uses his brain to invent the rifle, which no tiger could ever do.

George Orwell

To relate oneself in the spirit of reverence for life to the multiform manifestations of the will-to-live which together constitute the world is ethical mysticism. All profound world-view is mysticism, the essence of which is just this: that out of my unsophisticated and naive existence in the world there comes, as a result of thought about self and the world, spiritual self-devotion to the mysterious infinite Will which is continuously manifested in the universe.

Albert Schweitzer

I believe that love is the main key to open the doors to the "growth" of man. Love and union with someone or something outside of oneself, union that allows one to put oneself into relationship with others, to feel one with others, without limiting the sense of integrity and independence.

Erich Fromm

There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. You cannot talk yourself into it or rouse it by straining at the emotions or by dedicating yourself solemnly to the service of mankind. Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself. This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hating oneself, through calling self love bad names in the universe. It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love.

Alan Watts

In Shari‘ah, as noted above, the obligation is not just to do ethical deeds and refrain from unethical deeds; the obligation is to testify justly for God against evil, even if it is against oneself and loved ones. This is a critical foundation for our covenant with God and for inheriting the earth and continuing on God’s path.

Khaled Abou El Fadl

What can we call ours if God did not vouchsafe it to us from day to day? Yet it is so difficult to give oneself up entirely to Him, to trust everything to His Love and Wisdom. I thought I could say, 'Thy Will be done,' but I found I could not: my own will struggled against His Will. I prayed as we ought not to pray, and yet He heard me. It is so difficult not to grow very fond of this life and all its happiness, but the more we love it, the more we suffer, for we know we must lose it and it must all pass away.

Friedrich Max Müller     Thoughts on Life and Religion

Why not be oneself? That is the whole secret of a successful appearance. If one is a greyhound, why try to look like a Pekingese?.

Edith Sitwell

Art is the one form of human energy in the whole world, which really works for union, and destroys the barriers between man and man. It is the continual, unconscious replacement, however fleeting, of oneself by another; the real cement of human life; the everlasting refreshment and renewal.

John Galsworthy

Lastly, with respect to the old riddle of the freedom of the will. In the only sense in which the word freedom is intelligible to me--that is to say, the absence of any restraint upon doing what one likes within certain limits--physical science certainly gives no more ground for doubting it than the common sense of mankind does. And if physical science, in strengthening our belief in the universality of causation and abolishing chance as an absurdity, leads to the conclusion of determinism, it does no more than follow the track of consistent and logical thinkers in philosophy and in theology, before it existed or was thought of. Whoever accepts the universality of the law of causation as a dogma of philosophy, denies the existence of uncaused phenomena. And the essence of that which is improperly called the freewill doctrine is that occasionally, at any rate, human volition is self-caused, that is to say, not caused at all; for to cause oneself one must have anteceded oneself--which is, to say the least of it, difficult to imagine.

T. H. Huxley     Aphorisms and Reflections from the Works of T. H. Huxley

This venerable name (Theosophy), so well known among early Christian thinkers, as expressing the highest conception of God within the reach of the human mind, has of late been so greatly misappropriated that it is high time to restore it to its proper function. It should be known once for all that one may call oneself a theosophist without ... believing in any occult sciences and black art.

Friedrich Max Müller     Thoughts on Life and Religion

Great happiness makes one feel so often that it cannot last, and that we will have some day to give up all to which one's heart clings so. A few years sooner or later, but the time will come, and come quicker than one expects. Therefore I believe it is right to accustom oneself to the thought that we can none of us escape death, and that all our happiness here is only lent us. But at the same time we can thankfully enjoy all that God gives us, ... and there is still so much left us, so much to be happy and thankful for, and yet here too the thought always rushes across one's brightest hours: it cannot last, it is only for a few years and then it must be given up. Let us work as long as it is day, let us try to do our duty, and be very thankful for God's blessings which have been showered upon us so richly--but let us learn also always to look beyond, and learn to be ready to give up everything,--and yet say, Thy Will be done.

Friedrich Max Müller     Thoughts on Life and Religion

I say one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by an immense, long, deliberate derangement of all the senses.

Arthur Rimbaud

Life engenders life. Energy creates energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich.

Sarah Bernhardt

Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.

Sigmund Freud

"To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance"

- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

In doing penance it is necessary to deprive oneself of as many lawful pleasures as we had the misfortune to indulge in unlawful ones.--ST. GREGORY THE GREAT.

Various     Thoughts and Counsels of the Saints for Every Day of the Year

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.

        -- Friedrich Nietzsche

Fortune Cookie

To accuse others for one's own misfortunes is a sign of want of education.

To accuse oneself shows that one's education has begun.  To accuse neither

>oneself nor others shows that one's education is complete.

        -- Epictetus

Fortune Cookie

Nihilism should commence with oneself.

Fortune Cookie

    ...He who laughs does not believe in what he laughs at, but neither

does he hate it.  Therefore, laughing at evil means not preparing oneself to

combat it, and laughing at good means denying the power through which good is

self-propagating.

        -- Umberto Eco, "The Name of the Rose"

Fortune Cookie

The only happiness lies in reason; all the rest of the world is dismal.

The highest reason, however, I see in the work of the artist, and he may

experience it as such.  Happiness lies in the swiftness of feeling and

thinking: all the rest of the world is slow, gradual and stupid.  Whoever

could feel the course of a light ray would be very happy, for it is very

swift.  Thinking of oneself gives little happiness.  If, however, one feels

much happiness in this, it is because at bottom one is not thinking of

>oneself but of one's ideal.  This is far, and only the swift shall reach

it and are delighted.

        -- Nietzsche

Fortune Cookie

2 + 2 = 5-ism:

    Caving in to a target marketing strategy aimed at oneself after

holding out for a long period of time.  "Oh, all right, I'll buy your

stupid cola.  Now leave me alone."

        -- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated

           Culture"

Fortune Cookie

I always pass on good advice.  It is the only thing to do with it.

It is never any good to oneself.

        -- Oscar Wilde, "An Ideal Husband"

Fortune Cookie

Now Denial:

    To tell oneself that the only time worth living in is the past and

that the only time that may ever be interesting again is the future.

        -- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated

           Culture"

Fortune Cookie

    They are fools that think that wealth or women or strong drink or even

drugs can buy the most in effort out of the soul of a man.  These things offer

pale pleasures compared to that which is greatest of them all, that task which

demands from him more than his utmost strength, that absorbs him, bone and

sinew and brain and hope and fear and dreams -- and still calls for more.

    They are fools that think otherwise.  No great effort was ever bought.

No painting, no music, no poem, no cathedral in stone, no church, no state was

ever raised into being for payment of any kind.  No parthenon, no Thermopylae

was ever built or fought for pay or glory; no Bukhara sacked, or China ground

beneath Mongol heel, for loot or power alone.  The payment for doing these

things was itself the doing of them.

    To wield oneself -- to use oneself as a tool in one's own hand -- and

so to make or break that which no one else can build or ruin -- THAT is the

greatest pleasure known to man!  To one who has felt the chisel in his hand

and set free the angel prisoned in the marble block, or to one who has felt

sword in hand and set homeless the soul that a moment before lived in the body

of his mortal enemy -- to those both come alike the taste of that rare food

spread only for demons or for gods."

        -- Gordon R. Dickson, "Soldier Ask Not"

Fortune Cookie

Survivulousness:

    The tendency to visualize oneself enjoying being the last

person on Earth.  "I'd take a helicopter up and throw microwave ovens

down on the Taco Bell."

        -- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated

           Culture"

Fortune Cookie

The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a

digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top

of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.  To think otherwise is to demean

the Buddha -- which is to demean oneself.

        -- Robert Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"

Fortune Cookie

Lessness:

    A philosophy whereby one reconciles oneself with diminishing

expectations of material wealth: "I've given up wanting to make a

killing or be a bigshot.  I just want to find happiness and maybe open

up a little roadside cafe in Idaho."

        -- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated

           Culture"

Fortune Cookie

Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

        -- Joan Didion, "On Self Respect"

Fortune Cookie

There is a certain impertinence in allowing oneself to be burned for an opinion.

        -- Anatole France

Fortune Cookie

Mental Ground Zero:

    The location where one visualizes oneself during the dropping

of the atomic bomb; frequently, a shopping mall.

        -- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated

           Culture"

Fortune Cookie

Emotional Ketchup Burst:

    The bottling up of opinions and emotions inside oneself so

that they explosively burst forth all at once, shocking and confusing

employers and friends -- most of whom thought things were fine.

        -- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated

           Culture"

Fortune Cookie

It has been said [by Anatole France], "it is not by amusing oneself</p>

that one learns," and, in reply: "it is *____only* by amusing oneself that

one can learn."

        -- Edward Kasner and James R. Newman

Fortune Cookie

"To undertake a project, as the word's derivation indicates, means to cast an

idea out ahead of oneself so that it gains autonomy and is fulfilled not only

by the efforts of its originator but, indeed, independently of him as well.

        -- Czeslaw Milosz

Fortune Cookie

An infallible method of conciliating a tiger is to allow oneself to be

devoured.

        -- Konrad Adenauer

Fortune Cookie

The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on.  It is never any

use to oneself.

        -- Oscar Wilde

Fortune Cookie

"Then, you don't know how, for it is a matter that needs practice. Now listen and learn; in the first place buy good powder, not damp (they say it mustn't be at all damp, but very dry), some fine kind it is--you must ask for _pistol_ powder, not the stuff they load cannons with. They say one makes the bullets oneself, somehow or other. Have you got a pistol?"

Fyodor Dostoyevsky     The Idiot

"What even if for another man's death? Why lie to oneself since all men live so and perhaps cannot help living so. Are you referring to what I said just now--that one reptile will devour the other? In that case let me ask you, do you think me like Dmitri capable of shedding Ćsop's blood, murdering him, eh?"

Fyodor Dostoyevsky     The Brothers Karamazov

"We shall see each other then in the world. We shall meet before I am thirty, when I shall begin to turn aside from the cup. Father doesn't want to turn aside from his cup till he is seventy, he dreams of hanging on to eighty in fact, so he says. He means it only too seriously, though he is a buffoon. He stands on a firm rock, too, he stands on his sensuality--though after we are thirty, indeed, there may be nothing else to stand on.... But to hang on to seventy is nasty, better only to thirty; one might retain 'a shadow of nobility' by deceiving oneself. Have you seen Dmitri to-day?"

Fyodor Dostoyevsky     The Brothers Karamazov

Confused and ever-increasing crowds were running back to where five minutes before the troops had passed the Emperors. Not only would it have been difficult to stop that crowd, it was even impossible not to be carried back with it oneself. Bolkonski only tried not to lose touch with it, and looked around bewildered and unable to grasp what was happening in front of him. Nesvitski with an angry face, red and unlike himself, was shouting to Kutuzov that if he did not ride away at once he would certainly be taken prisoner. Kutuzov remained in the same place and without answering drew out a handkerchief. Blood was flowing from his cheek. Prince Andrew forced his way to him.

Leo Tolstoy     War and Peace

This ideal of glory and grandeur--which consists not merely in considering nothing wrong that one does but in priding oneself on every crime one commits, ascribing to it an incomprehensible supernatural significance--that ideal, destined to guide this man and his associates, had scope for its development in Africa. Whatever he does succeeds. The plague does not touch him. The cruelty of murdering prisoners is not imputed to him as a fault. His childishly rash, uncalled-for, and ignoble departure from Africa, leaving his comrades in distress, is set down to his credit, and again the enemy's fleet twice lets him slip past. When, intoxicated by the crimes he has committed so successfully, he reaches Paris, the dissolution of the republican government, which a year earlier might have ruined him, has reached its extreme limit, and his presence there now as a newcomer free from party entanglements can only serve to exalt him--and though he himself has no plan, he is quite ready for his new role.

Leo Tolstoy     War and Peace

In the Rostovs' staid old-fashioned house the dissolution of former conditions of life was but little noticeable. As to the serfs the only indication was that three out of their huge retinue disappeared during the night, but nothing was stolen; and as to the value of their possessions, the thirty peasant carts that had come in from their estates and which many people envied proved to be extremely valuable and they were offered enormous sums of money for them. Not only were huge sums offered for the horses and carts, but on the previous evening and early in the morning of the first of September, orderlies and servants sent by wounded officers came to the Rostovs' and wounded men dragged themselves there from the Rostovs' and from neighboring houses where they were accommodated, entreating the servants to try to get them a lift out of Moscow. The major-domo to whom these entreaties were addressed, though he was sorry for the wounded, resolutely refused, saying that he dare not even mention the matter to the count. Pity these wounded men as one might, it was evident that if they were given one cart there would be no reason to refuse another, or all the carts and one's own carriages as well. Thirty carts could not save all the wounded and in the general catastrophe one could not disregard oneself and one's own family. So thought the major-domo on his master's behalf.

Leo Tolstoy     War and Peace

"I say assassination and theft, Monsieur le Baron, and I repeat that I am speaking of actual facts. What I have to reveal to you is absolutely unknown. It belongs to unpublished matter. And perhaps you will find in it the source of the fortune so skilfully presented to Madame la Baronne by Jean Valjean. I say skilfully, because, by a gift of that nature it would not be so very unskilful to slip into an honorable house whose comforts one would then share, and, at the same stroke, to conceal one's crime, and to enjoy one's theft, to bury one's name and to create for oneself a family."

Victor Hugo     Les Miserables

Second: To the native Indian of Peru, the continual sight of the snowhowdahed Andes conveys naught of dread, except, perhaps, in the mere fancying of the eternal frosted desolateness reigning at such vast altitudes, and the natural conceit of what a fearfulness it would be to lose oneself in such inhuman solitudes. Much the same is it with the backwoodsman of the West, who with comparative indifference views an unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of tree or twig to break the fixed trance of whiteness. Not so the sailor, beholding the scenery of the Antarctic seas; where at times, by some infernal trick of legerdemain in the powers of frost and air, he, shivering and half shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking hope and solace to his misery, views what seems a boundless churchyard grinning upon him with its lean ice monuments and splintered crosses.

Herman Melville     Moby Dick; or The Whale

"Certainly it is a fraud! Since Mr. Burdovsky is not Pavlicheff's son, his claim is neither more nor less than attempted fraud (supposing, of course, that he had known the truth), but the fact is that he has been deceived. I insist on this point in order to justify him; I repeat that his simple-mindedness makes him worthy of pity, and that he cannot stand alone; otherwise he would have behaved like a scoundrel in this matter. But I feel certain that he does not understand it! I was just the same myself before I went to Switzerland; I stammered incoherently; one tries to express oneself and cannot. I understand that. I am all the better able to pity Mr. Burdovsky, because I know from experience what it is to be like that, and so I have a right to speak. Well, though there is no such person as 'Pavlicheff's son,' and it is all nothing but a humbug, yet I will keep to my decision, and I am prepared to give up ten thousand roubles in memory of Pavlicheff. Before Mr. Burdovsky made this claim, I proposed to found a school with this money, in memory of my benefactor, but I shall honour his memory quite as well by giving the ten thousand roubles to Mr. Burdovsky, because, though he was not Pavlicheff's son, he was treated almost as though he were. That is what gave a rogue the opportunity of deceiving him; he really did think himself Pavlicheff's son. Listen, gentlemen; this matter must be settled; keep calm; do not get angry; and sit down! Gavrila Ardalionovitch will explain everything to you at once, and I confess that I am very anxious to hear all the details myself. He says that he has even been to Pskoff to see your mother, Mr. Burdovsky; she is not dead, as the article which was just read to us makes out. Sit down, gentlemen, sit down!"

Fyodor Dostoyevsky     The Idiot

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