I collect quotations, and keep them here for my own amusement. Here they are:
- “Men fear thought as they fear nothing else; more than ruin, more even than death... thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and to 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 (The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, 1903-1959) - “Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; and we have instead chosen overwork for some and starvation for the others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were these machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish forever.”
-- Bertrand Russell (In Praise of Idleness) - “No one on their death-bed has ever said "I wish I had spent more time at the office".”
-- Stephen Covey - “We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered. A nation can flounder as readily in the face of moral and spiritual bankruptcy as it can through financial bankruptcy.”
-- Dr. Martin Luther King - “The great epochs of our lives are at the points where we gain the courage to rebaptise our badness as the best in us.”
-- Freidrich Wilhelm Nietschze - “Only those who are leisurely about the things the people of the world are busy about can be busy about the what the people of the world take leisurely.”
-- Chang Ch'ao - “When you are content to simply be yourself and don't compare or compete, everybody will respect you.”
-- Lao Zi - “Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, left free, instinctively complicates life.”
-- Katherine Fullerton Gerould - “I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.”
-- Oscar Wilde - “Perfect simplicity is unconsciously audacious.”
-- George Meredith - “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to savor the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
-- E. B. White - “Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a nice thing to meet.”
-- Henry James - “It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.”
-- George Santayana - “The only difference between a rut and a grave are their dimensions.”
-- Ellen Glasgow - “Civilization is an endless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.”
-- Mark Twain - “The first step in any kind of change is getting a realistic picture of what is really going on.”
-- Cecile Andrews - “Beware of any enterprise requiring new clothes.”
-- Henry David Thoreau - “Those who make their clothes a principal part of them will, in general, become of no more value than their clothes.”
-- William Hazlitt - “In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.”
-- Virginia Woolf - “The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.”
-- Lily Tomlin - “Modern Life conditions us to skim the surface of experience, then quickly move on to something new.”
-- Stephan Rachschaffen - “One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
-- Marcel Proust - “One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.”
-- Carl Sandberg - “Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless intensity that they hurry past it.”
-- Soren Kierkegaard