Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house, a world; and beyond its world a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you: build, therefore, your own world.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Within oneself deliverance must be searched for, because each man makes his own prison.
-Edwin Arnold

Some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship power, some worship God, & over these ideals they dispute & cannot unite- but they all worship money.
-Mark Twain

To go willingly into a battle that cannot be won is either incredibly courageous or incredibly stupid.
-Nick Knack

The intellect of a man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if he take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
-William Butler Yeats

How is it they live in such harmony the billions of stars – when most men can barely go a minute without declaring war in their minds about someone they know.
-Thomas Aquinas

But you have to learn to smother the living breathing soul, go deaf to it, and this violence to the self is what is commonly called sanity in the places where i have lived.
-Philip O Ceallaigh

I know now that there is no one thing that is true- it is all true.
-Ernest Hemingway

Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.
-Oscar Ameringer

Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory.
-William Barclay

To know thyself is important, but to love thyself is divine.
-Nick Knack

A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.
-Jean de La Fontaine

For there is no one so great or mighty that he can avoid the misery that will rise up against him when he resists and strives against God.
-John Calvin

I like to have a thing suggested rather than told in full. When every detail is given, the mind rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the desire to use its own wings.
-Thomas Bailey Aldrich

A man has to hate and love all at once,
With the same eyes to cry and to laugh
With the same hands to throw stones
And to gather them,
Make love in war and war in love.
-Yehuda Amichai

All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.
-T. E. Lawrence

All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.
-Henry David Thoreau

Only those who look with the eyes of children can lose themselves in the object of their wonder.
-Eberhard Arnold

Art cannot exist without nature, and man can give nothing to his fellow man but himself.
-Wilhelm Shlegel

Courage leads to the stars, fear towards death.
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca (the younger)

All art is based in non-comformity.
-Ben Shahn

The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.
-William Somerset Maugham

I hope for nothing.
I fear nothing.
I am free.
-Nikos Kazantzakis

The present is never our goal- the past and present are our means- the future alone is our goal. Thus, we never live but hope to live, and always hoping to be happy, it is inevitable that we will never be so.
-Blaise Pascal

Where great wealth is, there are also all manner of sins; for through great wealth comes pride, through pride, dissension, through dissention, wars, through wars poverty, through poverty, great distress and misery. Therefore, they that are rich, must yield a strict and great account; for to whom much is given, of him much will be required.
-Martin Luther

Today is the tomorrow I was so worried about yesterday.
-Unknown

For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities and are often more influenced by things that seem than by those that are.
-Niccolo’ Machiavelli

A poem should not mean
But be.
-Archibald MacLeish

Love and fear exlude each other.
-Macrobius

Beauty plus pity- that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.
-Vladimir Nabokov

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than the ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
-Sir Isaac Newton

Silence and patience, these are my super powers.
-Jeff Owens

That which can be conceived can be achieved.
-James Allen

Love is a kind of warfare.
-Ovid

Silence is man’s chief learning.
-Palladas

Pride works frequently under a dense mask, and will often assume the garb of humility.
-Adam Clarke

Not to decide is to decide.
-Harvey Cox

It is the heart which experiences God, and not reason. This, then, is faith: God felt by the heart, not reason.
-Blaise Pascal

Age does not depend upon years, but upon temperament and health. Some men are born old, and some never grow so.
-Tryon Edwards

Mind moves matter.
-Virgil

We must remember that Satan has his miracles too.
-John Calvin

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
-Herman Melville

Ain’tcha heard? Love is a verb.
-Nick Knack

All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
-Edgar Allen Poe

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
-Voltaire

I never could believe that Providence had sent a few men into the world, ready booted and spurred, to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden.
-Richard Rumbold

Simplicity is the essence of the great, the true, and the beautiful in art.
-George Sand

Dreadful is the mysterious power of Fate; there is no escape from it by wealth or war, by walled city, or dark, sea-beaten ships.
-Sophocles

I cry out for order and find it only in art.
-Helen Hayes

As if a man’s soul were not too small to begin with, they have dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the train.
-Robert Lewis Stevenson

When a true genius appears in this world you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
-Jonathan Swift

This is the seal of the absolute and sublime destiny of man- that he knows what is good and what is evil; that his destiny is his very ability to will either good or evil.
-George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The greatest friend of truth is Time, her greatest enemy is Prejudice, and her constant companion is Humility.
-Charles Caleb Colton

Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self; for what we wish, we readily believe.
-Demosthenes

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that it does not break it kills.
-Ernest Hemingway

Life… is like a festival; just as some come to the festival to compete, some to ply their trade, but the best people come as spectators, so in life the slavish men go hunting for fame or gain, the philosophers for truth.
-Pythagoras

Speech is the mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so is he.
-Plublilius Syrus

Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.
-Walt Whitman

My aim in my life is to make pictures and drawings, as many and as well as I can; then, at the end of my life, I hope to pass away, looking back with love and tender regret, and thinking, “Oh the pictures I might have made.”
-Vincent Van Gogh

There can be no hope without fear, and no fear without hope.
-Baruch Spinoza

It takes a very long time to become young.
-Pablo Picasso

Amongst all things, knowledge is truly the best thing: from its not being liable ever to be stolen, from its not being purchasable, and from its being imperishable.
-The Hitopadesa

The artist’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one… Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written.
-William Faulkner

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
-George Bernard Shaw

Rise, like lions after slumber,
In unvanquished number,
Shake the chains to earth like dew,
Which in sleep had fall’n on you-
Ye are many- they are few.
-Percy Bysshe Shelly

Whoever controls the language, the images, controls the race.
-Allen Ginsberg

It is much more difficult than one thinks not to believe in God.
-Andre’ Gide

They say that knowledge is power. I used to think so, but I now know that they mean money.
-Lord Byron

For that which is born death is certain, and for the dead birth is certain. Therefore grieve not over that which is unavoidable.
-The Bhagavad-Gita

Hunger I can endure; love I cannot.
-Claudian

Love is a dog from hell.
-Charles Bukowski

It is curious that money, which is the most valuable thing in life, excepis excipiendis, should be the most fatal corrupter of music, literature, painting and all the arts. As soon as any art is pursued with a view of money, then farewell, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, to all the hope of genuine good work.
-Samuel Butler

Man is what he believes.
-Anton Chekhov

As always victory finds a hundred fathers but defeat is an orphan.
-Count Galeazzo Ciano

It is from self-hatred that consciousness emerges. I hate myself: I am absolutely a man.
-B. M. Cioran

One should hate themselves more- their art would be better.
-Nick Knack

No wealth in the world can help humanity forward, even in the hands of the most devoted workers in this cause… Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus, or Ghandi armed with the money-bags of Carnegie?
-Albert Einstein

A tragic irony of life is that we so often achieve success or financial independence after the chief reason for which we sought it has passed away.
-Ellen Glasgow

An object in possession seldom retains the same charm that it had in pursuit.
-Pliny the Younger

I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, security– out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism, in which rebellion against the world as it is, and myself as I am, are submerged in listless self-satisfaction.
-John Steinbeck

Money is a new form of slavery, and distiguished from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal, that there is no human relation between master and slave.
-Leo Tolstoy

I have often said, and oftener think, that this world is a comedy for those who think, and a tragedy for those who feel.
-Horace Walpole

Every word you speak is a painting, on display for others to interpret, so be mindful of the pictures you are creating.
-Knick Nack

He who shoots at the mid-day sun, though he be sure he shall never hit the mark, yet as sure as he is, he shall shoot higher than he who aims at a bush.
-Sir Phillip Sidney

I can see how sincere, how passionately proletarian a religious prophet may be, that is the fate which sooner or later befalls him in a competitive society– to be founder of an organization of fools, conducted by knaves, for the benefit of wolves.
-Upton Sinclair

A fixed idea ends in madness or heroism.
-Victor Hugo

Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.
-Anne Sexton

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him.
-Carl Gustav Jung

Time makes more converts than reason.
-Thomas Paine

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
-Dylan Thomas

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
-Henry David Thoreau

It is hardly granted by God to love and to be wise.
-Publilius Syrus

If one judges love by most of its results, it is closer to hatred than friendship.
-Francois De La Rouchefoucauld

Beauty will save the world.
-Fyodor Dostoyevski

Love is not all;…
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
-Edna St. Vincent Millay

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
-Aldous Huxley

…no man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Probably all laws are useless; for good men do not want laws at all, and bad men are made no better by them.
-Demonax

The great artist is the simplifier.
-Henri Frederic Amiel

What is man’s chief enemy? Each man is his own.
-Anacharsis

The ironic thing about man is that he is what he believes, but so often fails to believe it.
-Nick Knack

Of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of wealth; the tyranny of plutocracy.
-J.P. Morgan

Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca

To be in the world and yet not of the world is the highest perfection…
-James Allen

You have not converted a man, because you have silenced him.
-John Morley

You must be one man, good or bad; you must develop either your Governing Principle, or your outward endowments; you must study either your inner man , or outward things- in a word, you must choose between the position of a philosopher and that of a mere outsider.
-Epicurus

If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even cucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.
-Thomas Carlyle

Women and God are the two rocks on which a man must either anchor or be wrecked.
-Frederick William Robertson

Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald

All human wisdom is summed up in two words: wait and hope.
-Alexandre Dumas

There are three classes of citizens. The first are the rich, who are indolent and yet always crave more. The second are the poor, who have nothing, are full of envy, hate the rich, and are easily led by demagogues. Between the two extremes lie those who make the state secure and uphold the laws.
-Euripides

The only way to throw off the chains of slavery is to throw off the chains of fear.
-Nick Knack

During the whole period of written history, it is not the workers but the robbers who have been in control of the world.
-Scott Nearing

There are only two kinds of men: those righteous who believe themselves sinners; the others sinners who believe themselves righteous.
-Blaise Pascal

The truth must essentially be regarded as in conflict with this world; the world has never been so good, and will never become so good that the majority will desire the truth.
-Soren Kierkegaard

And man has actually invented God… the marvel is that such an idea, the idea of the necessity of God, could enter the head of such a savage, vicious beast as man.
-Fyodor Dostoyevski

All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers… Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in which he was born.
-Francois De Salignac De La Mothe-Fenelon

I have found that it is best to speak to children as if they were grown ups, and to grown ups as if they were children.
-Nick Knack

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
-Calvin Coolidge

And again: No more gods! no more gods! Man is King, Man is God!- But the great Faith is Love.
-Arthur Rimbaud

Many go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.
-Henry David Thoreau

Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Just walk beside me and be my friend.
-Albert Camus

Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.
-Thomas Paine

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we may enter another.
-Anatole France

There’s only one time and place that I don’t want to die, and that’s on stage.
-Nick Knack

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it’s about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration it creates.
-Mordecai Richler

In the realm of ideas everything depends upon enthusiasm… in the real world all rests on perseverance.
-Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Do what you feel in your heart to be right- for you’ll be criticized anyway. You’ll be damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.
-Eleanor Roosevelt

Those who wish to sing always find a song.
-Plato

Art is not a thing; it is a way.
-Elbert Hubbard

Let me ask you something, what is not art?
-Unknown

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.
-Socrates