Thought Provoking Quotes

Futures can and do change, something as simple as you're supposed to turn right down a street one day... In your bones u know it, and yet for reasons no one understands, you decide to debunk fate and go left. Now instead of meeting your spouse of your dreams and having a house full of kids, you get flattened by an ice-cream truck and spend the next 5 years in physical therapy recovering from the injuries; or worse you die from it. And all cause you exercised free will and turned the opposite way on a whim.

... one would like to be both [loved and feared], but as it is difficult to combine both love and fear, if one has to choose between them it is far safer to be feared than loved

Getting through life without a lot of money, possessions, and/or friends is admirable, especially if it is by choice.

Your mockers will only have your attention only if you give them your attention

My life is like an O Henry story....the funniest girl in the world and the boy who never laughs.

To which hand do I choose to strike with when both hands are guided by the same heart?

Life would have been beautiful if there weren't any problems.

There are symbolic dreams-dreams that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities-realities that symbolize a dream

How can the removal of beauty from a world so lacking in beauty be anything but tragic?

If you love someone, you don't act like they annoy you. You like them, and you try and make them think they're the most important person in the world to you.

At first the brain weighs a potential partner, and if the partner fits our ancestral wish list, we get a spike in the release of sex chemicals that makes us dizzy with a rush of unavoidable infatuation. It's the first step down the primeval path of pair-bonding.

Some people might enjoy drain water if they were told it was vodka.

Man is the master of Woman" - this statement may have been a glorious fact of primitive life in the wild, but it is nothing but an obnoxious stain on psyche of the thinking humanity.

That's a lot of what the ghetto is, a reflection of poor self esteem

Many a parent, sad to say, has used their child as an opportunity for them, the parent, to do, through their child, something or some of the things that they, the parent, did not do or did not do successfully.

Many a death was precipitated by the food, the job, or the medication whose main function was to postpone it.

What life is this? Living in a world of hatred and lies, breathing the same air the dead breathed once, knowing we will wake up one day and find ourselves gone from time and space, and yet we still breathe the air without trembling from the thought.

But was that not the task you set me? To defend the helpless against the strong?" "Indeed it was Master Weed. But who is to say who is helpless, and who is strong?" .........."If you seek the power to alter fate, you must also bear responsibility for the consequences. For you cannot change the fate of only one being; all fates are intertwined." "I performed the task," I protest. "I did what you bid me do." "You defended the weak from the strong." Larkspur speaks as if from far away. "But who will defend these poor weak infants against you!?

My mentor used to say that no one can make us feel badly about ourselves unless we allow it. He lectured me endlessly that the biggest offenders to shrink our self-worth weren't others, but ourselves.

If perception is limited by experience and knowledge, what deems my actions “correct” or my thoughts as moral?

Love yourself' is not 'Lust yourself.

What we feel is a choice.

But only a leper shows its sins to the world.

Many a survivor of a plane crash who is or was against cannibalism and had never eaten human flesh once found themselves in a situation where they had to either eat human flesh, or go the way of all flesh.

I don't understand," Belle cried. "I gave you gold. You only gave me grief.

Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.

The greatest of all faults is to imagine you have none".

I've been thinking about that book about the boys who crash on the island....Lord of the Flies what about it....You know how you said it wasn't a true measure of humanity since there were no girls and you wondered how it would be different if there had been girls...Maybe girls need an island to find themselves. Maybe they need a place where no one's watching them so they can be who they really are.

Although they probably know that some children were used and some children are used as miners, most adults are ignorant of the chocolate industry’s use of minors.

If there so many hurdles in your life to achieve something, you have to believe God firmly.Because He is creating a wonderful story to inspire people through you, that couldn't be done with a single stroke of success.

For a sane person to sincerely be happy that someone has succeeded, they have to either be profiting or likely to profit from that person’s success, or be that person.

There's still a question I must put to you," said the cunger woman. "Can you give up Joshua to keep him?

The law isn't merciful.

Disasters are called natural, as if nature were the executioner and not the victim

Though people sort of need your permission to talk to you, they do not really need one to talk about you.

As long as there's life, there's hope.

Around the lunch table everyone seems to have given something up---dairy, meat, gluten, sugar, carbs. Only in a land of plenty could people voluntarily go without so much.

If he is not the word of God, then God never spoke.

I like to walk in the woods and see what Mother Nature is wearing.

In reality most human beings are not, to most human beings, more important than money.

The idiotic industry of an ant building his hill in the path of a glacier, and imagining that he is free.

It goes without saying that even those of us who are going to hell will get eternal life—if that territory really exists outside religious books and the minds of believers, that is. Having said that, given the choice, instead of being grilled until hell freezes over, the average sane human being would, needless to say, rather spend forever idling in an extremely fertile garden, next to a lamb or a chicken or a parrot, which they do not secretly want to eat, and a lion or a tiger or a crocodile, which does not secretly want to eat them.

Some pasts exist as a fog that rolls in and out of the present, formed not by air that condenses into mist but memories that condense into tiny doors that open to forgotten moments. Maybe you glance at a stranger on a crowded street who reminds you of a childhood friend or hear a song that was popular the first summer you fell in love, and in the space of that single beat of time you are flung backward to a who or when long past. And yet it is only for that one beat. Those tiny doors never remain open for long for most of us. They ensure our former times are kept as relics, and the dust upon them is wiped clean only occasionally

Even when we do not actively participate in our destiny, we are still on a chosen path. Life has a way of making decisions for us.

So, is it harder to dream about what you don´t have than to live in fear of losing what you do?

More often than not, expecting to lose weight without first losing the diet that made the weight loss necessary is like expecting a pig to be spotless after hosing it down while it was still rolling in mud.

A slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and-whip grading, a mule mentality which said, “If you don’t whip me, I won’t work.” He didn’t get whipped. He didn’t work.

And what greater might do we possess as human beings than our capacity to question and to learn?

The human heart: its expansions and contractions its electrics and hydraulics the warm tides that move and fill it. For years Art had studied it from a safe distance from many perspectives...he listened in fascination and revulsion, in envy and pity. He dispensed canned wisdom, a little scripture. He sent them on their way with a prayer.

We're all monsters. We're all careless and cruel in the end.

Most human beings strongly believe that money is way less important than the life of a human being, but in reality five hundred, fifty, or even five dollars are way more important to the lives of most human beings than the lives of most human beings.

In a way, a garden is the most useless of creations, the most slippery of creations: it is not like a painting or a piece of sculpture—it won’t accrue value as time goes on. Time is its enemy’ time passing is merely the countdown for the parting between garden and gardener.

The second most dangerous thing about money is that it leaves most of the people who have a lot of it with the unshakable belief that they are intelligent and well informed. The most dangerous thing about it is that it leaves most of the people who do not have a lot of money with the very same belief.

Man sees what he knows, not what he seesShort story, The Mallard

My love, you are always on my mind. I love you so much.

Sometimes I wonder if any of us are cut out for the lives we lead.

Living in peace has transformative power!

It was like trying to think about what he’d be thinking if he never existed. He wouldn’t be thinking about what he was thinking. He just wouldn’t exist. It wouldn’t hurt.

More often than not, an inspirational or motivational speaker is someone who makes money from telling us that we can do all of the things that we can do … and pretty much all of the things that we cannot do.

There's a societal push for conformity in all ways. There's less tolerance of difference. And so maybe for some people having a label is better. It can confer a sense of hope and direction. (interview with Allen Frances)