Famous Quotes & Sayings

Thomas Merton

I am beginning to realize that "sanity" is no longer a value or an end in itself. If modern people were a little less sane, a little more doubtful, a little more aware of their absurdities and contradictions, perhaps there might be the possibility of their survival.

Thomas Merton

Violence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us.

Thomas Merton

For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God's will, to be what God wants us to be.

Thomas Merton

We live on the brink of disaster because we do not know how to let life alone. We do not respect the living and fruitful contradictions and paradoxes of which true life is full.

Thomas Merton

We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.

Thomas Merton

Only the man who has had to face despair is really convinced that he needs mercy. Those who do not want mercy never seek it. It is better to find God on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt the need of forgiveness. A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless than one that always verges on despair.

Thomas Merton

The only thing to seek in contemplative prayer is God; and we seek Him successfully when we realize that we cannot find Him unless He shows Himself to us, and yet at the same time that He would not have inspired us to seek Him unless we had already found Him.

Thomas Merton

The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds

Thomas Carlyle

Great is wisdom; infinite is the value of wisdom. It cannot be exaggerated; it is the highest achievement of man.

Thomas Carlyle

Once the mind has been expanded by a big idea, it will never go back to its original state.

Tony Kushner

It's the fear of what comes after the doing that makes the doing hard to do.

Stendhal

I do not feel I have wisdom enough yet to love what is ugly.

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Proverbs contradict each other. That is the wisdom of a nation.

Sigmund Freud

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Sigmund Freud

None believes in his own death. In the unconscious everyone is convinced of his own immortality.

Shirley Hazzard

Going to Europe, someone had written, was about as final as going to heaven. A mystical passage to another life, from which no-one returned the same. Those returning in such ships were invincible, for they had managed it and could reflect ever after on Anne Hathaway's Cottage or the Tower of London with a confidence that did generate at Sydney. There was nothing mythic at Sydney; momentous objects, beings and events all occurred abroad or in the elsewhere of books.

Richard Branson

I am convinced that companies should put staff first, customers second and shareholders third - ultimately that's in the best interest of customers and shareholders.

Remy de Gourmont

The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it.

Remy de Gourmont

For two thousand years Christianity has been telling us: life is death, death is life; it is high time to consult the dictionary.

Robert A. Heinlein

Yield to temptation. It may not pass your way again.

Robert A. Heinlein

I never learned from a man who agreed with me.

Robert A. Heinlein

Ninety percent of all human wisdom is the ability to mind your own business.

Robert A. Heinlein

You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once.

Robert A. Heinlein

Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.

Thomas J. Watson

Wisdom is the power to put our time and our knowledge to the proper use.

Thomas Keneally

I thought I'd definitely be a writer, whatever I did.

Thomas Keneally

I must apologise because I know all writers have memories of being on the outer because it's the children on the side of the playground who become the dangerous writers.

Raymond Queneau

Happy nations have no history. History is the study of mankind's misfortune.

Victor Hugo

When a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door.

Victor Hugo

The greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation's effort, than the inspired flash of a man of genius...

Victor Hugo

We are in the hands of those gods, those monsters, those giants: our thoughts.

Victor Hugo

The word is the Verb, and the Verb is God.

Victor Hugo

Nature is pitiless; she never withdraws her flowers, her music, her fragrance, and her sunlight from before human cruelty or suffering.