Welcome

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies--"God damn it, you've got to be kind."

--Kurt Vonnegut

Theory

Human beings are pattern-seeking animals who will prefer even a bad theory or a conspiracy theory to no theory at all.

--Christopher Hitchens

The Opposite

The opposite of faith is not doubt: It is certainty. It is madness.

--Anne Lamott

In Search

Life is the transcendent, psychic object constructed by human reality in search of its own foundation.

--Jean-Paul Satre

Control Environment

Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point in all response is the desire to control environment.

--John Dewey

Mentally Faithful

It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving: it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

--Thomas Paine

No Help

Indeed, you were kicked off the edge of a precipice when you were born, and it's no help to cling to the rocks falling with you.

--Alan W. Watts

Panics

Financial panics don't happen during depressions. They happen on the brink of depressions.

--James Grant (editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer)

The True Division

I began to see that the true division of importance in the world is not between different countries. The important division is between those who are committed to reason, to working out things, to understanding other people, to peaceful resolution of their differences...and those who don't think that.

--Justice Stephen Breyer

Spirit Of Love

You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have really lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love.

--Henry Drummond

The Sea Is Dangerous

The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reasons for remaining ashore.

--Vincent Van Gogh

Extremely Similar

TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

--David Foster Wallace

As I Get Older

As I get older, and small pleasures can be hard to come by, I value the things that brought me happiness, any kind of happiness, a little more, the way you treasure the memory of a face or a place that you may not see again.

--Gary Kamiya

Duty

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

--George Bernard Shaw

Failure

Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. You don't fail overnight. Instead, failure is a few errors in judgment, repeated every day.

--Jim Rohn

Our Own

One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And, the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

--Eleanor Roosevelt

Tangent

God is the tangential point between zero and infinity.

--Alfred Jarry

Society vs. Government

Society, in every form, is a blessing; government, even in its best form, is but a necessary evil.

--Thomas Paine

Not Virtuous

It is not virtuous in any way to put yourself down, or to punish yourself, because you do not feel you have lived up to your best behavior at any given time.

--Seth