Reason

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.
--Thomas Paine

Mistakes

Mistakes are lodged like harpoons and fish hooks in an intelligent person's soul.
--Ed Sanders

Becoming

If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that.
--Johann von Goethe

Preferences

Having preferences means having weaknesses.
--Magnus Carlsen (chess Grandmaster)

Preference & Fact

The only people who are wrong are those who try to pretend that "preference" and "fact" are synonyms.
--Lisa K.

Death

Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
--Epicurus

Joy

Nothing makes me feel better--calmer, clearer and happier--than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It's actually something deeper than mere happiness: it's joy.
--Pico Iyer

Marketing Game

It's sad, isn't it, that nowhere in the complex machinations of politicians, in the development of their campaign strategies, is there the slightest hint of a nod towards what's best for America. It's all a blatant marketing game.
--Clavis

Very Fast

When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.
--Marshall McLuhan

The Surface

Too much is made of the value of plumbing the depths. The nice thing about kayaking is that you ride the surface, which is akin to dealing with the task at hand.
--Roger Rosenblatt

Happy

People are as happy as they make up their minds to be.
--Abraham Lincoln

Questions & Answers

Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.
--Anonymous

A Kiss

You speak of a kiss as if it were the commonest thing in the world, as if it were an amenity as banal as a razor blade. (As if it grew on trees.)
--Kara Vanderbijl

Human

The severely disabled challenge us by their existence. They implicitly ask, "Do you consider me human?" They suggest how arduous it is to be human. They remind us of death.
--Roger Rosenblatt

Unsupported

There are many men who are fond of making an unsupported statement under the apprehension that they have posited an argument.
--F.C. Lane

Walls

Walls are geometry put into humanity's service. True, they create divisions and distinctions, but so does reason.
--Costica Bradatan

Rest

Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest.
--Thomas Merton

Liberty

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty.
--Abraham Lincoln

Sufffering

Suffering is part of life and it's not a bad thing, it is an essential thing in life.
--Rick Santorum (town hall meeting in Iowa, November 18, 2011)

Enmeshed

It is precisely our enmeshments that make us who we are and give our lives meaning.
--Kathy Rudy