“Accidents never happen when the room is empty. Everyone understands this. Everyone needs a place. People like to think war means something.”— Richard Siken, psychologytomorrowmagazine.com
“The theory of linguistic relativity posits that language itself — the specific tongue that we happen to speak — shapes our thoughts and perceptions. Those who believe in linguistic determinism, the strictest version, might argue that a culture that lacks a term for a certain emotion — a particular s…”— Emily Anthes, John Cassidy, newyorker.com
“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the co…”— Frantz Fanon, amazon.com
“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.”— C.G. Jung, amazon.com
“Freedom is the only worthy goal in life. It is won by disregarding things that lie beyond our control.”— Epictetus, amazon.com
“Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a fini…”— Simone de Beauvoir, amazon.com
“It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing — they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that m…”— Stephen Fry, amazon.com
“For me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday and lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.”— Neil deGrasse Tyson, amazon.com
“Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting,…”— Charles Bukowski, amazon.com
“An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched.”— Albert Camus, amazon.com
“It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”— Ralph Waldo Emerson, amazon.com
“If you want to be happy, you need to stop chasing happiness. Happiness is a byproduct of doing things that are challenging, meaningful, beautiful and worthwhile. It is wiser to spend a life chasing knowledge, or the ability to think clearly and with more dimension, than it is to just chase what “fee…”— Brianna Wiest, soulanatomy.org
“Everybody wants what feels good. Everyone wants to live a carefree, happy and easy life, to fall in love and have amazing sex and relationships, to look perfect and make money and be popular and well-respected and admired and a total baller to the point that people part like the Red Sea when you wal…”— Mark Manson, markmanson.net
“No one ever gets talker's block. No one wakes up in the morning, discovers he has nothing to say and sits quietly, for days or weeks, until the muse hits, until the moment is right, until all the craziness in his life has died down. Why then, is writer's block endemic? The reason we don't get talker…”— Seth Godin, sethgodin.typepad.com
“The first lesson — great men are always the kindest. The second lesson was that they nearly always lead the simplest lives.”— Stefan Zweig, amazon.com
“Life's barely long enough to get good at one thing. If that long. So be careful what you get good at.”— Kurt Vonnegut, amazon.com
“The notion that a human being should be constantly happy is a uniquely modern, uniquely American, uniquely destructive idea.”— Andrew Weil, drweil.com
“As I have seen repeatedly in my own life and you can see with even a cursory study of history, problems are not solved with an uncontrollable flash of genius or creativity, but with sober reflection, strategy and execution. We don’t go in fueled by adrenaline, guns blazing. Rather, a solution is a w…”— Ryan Holiday, Ryan Holiday, thoughtcatalog.com