Hey guys, I’ve spent the last 7 years compiling this list. It’s helped me tremendously and I hope it will do the same for you. Please enjoy.
Few are guilty, but all are responsible.
—Abraham Joshua Heschel
We’re all puppets, Laurie. I’m just a puppet who can see the strings.
—Alan Moore
Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.
—Albert Camus
Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.
—Albert Camus
In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
—Albert Camus
There’s a time when a man needs to fight, and a time when he needs to accept that his destiny is lost, that the ship has sailed, and that only a fool would continue. The truth is, I’ve always been a fool.
—Albert Finney
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
In everything, there is a share of everything.
—Anaxagoras
We thought: we’re poor, we have nothing, but when we started losing one after the other so each day became remembrance day, we started composing poems about God’s great generosity and — our former riches.
—Anna Akhmatova
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.
—Anne Frank
He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.
—Aristotle
If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.
—Baruch Spinoza
I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
—Bertrand Russell
That which you most need will be found where you least want to look.
—Carl Jung
No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of it for anyone else.
—Charles Dickens
The brave man is he who overcomes not only his enemies but his pleasures.
—Democritus
Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone.
—Ella Wheeler Wilcox
I’d rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right.
—Elon Musk
If true confessions are written with tears, then my tears would drown the world, as the fire in my soul would reduce it to ashes.
—Emil Cioran
Freedom is secured not by the fulfilling of one’s desires, but by the removal of desire.
—Epictetus
Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.
—Frank Herbert
And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of – namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Truth serves life.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky
The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky
Only one man ever understood me, and he didn’t understand me.
—G. W. F. Hegel
Everyone gets a vote, even the people of the past, we call that tradition.
—G.K. Chesterton
The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.
—Galileo Galilei
We live in the best of all possible worlds.
—Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Society grows when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.
—Greek Proverb
I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member
—Groucho Marx
Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.
—Immanuel Kant
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.
—James Branch Cabell
Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Hell is other people.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
In choosing for myself I choose for all men.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.
—Jimmy Wales
We are the Dead. Short days ago. We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie, In Flanders fields.
—John McCrae
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
—John Stuart Mill
I don’t want the best for you, I want the best for what wants the best for you, because you don’t know what you want. I’m not on the side of you that’s aiming towards your defeat, I’m on the side that’s struggling towards the light, and that’s the definition of love.
—Jordan Peterson
If you don’t believe in God then you believe in nothing, and religious people will keep their gods while you keep your nothing.
—Jordan Peterson
If you fulfill your obligations every day you don’t have to worry about the future.
—Jordan Peterson
Nihilism means there is no meaning to anything, but the opposite is just as true, that there is meaning to everything.
—Jordan Peterson
The past is not necessarily what it was even though it has already been.
—Jordan Peterson
Religion is the sign of the oppressed … it is the opium of the people.
—Karl Marx
He holds nothing back from life; therefore he is ready for death, as a man is ready for sleep after a good day’s work.
—Lao Tzu
There are 3 types of leaders in this world: The leader that’s loved, the leader that’s hated, and the leader that people barely know he exists, when the work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.
—Lao Tzu
All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.
—Leo Tolstoy
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
—Leo Tolstoy
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
—Leo Tolstoy
He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.
—Leo Tolstoy
Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.
—Leo Tolstoy
The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and will forever be beautiful, is Truth.
—Leo Tolstoy
The graveyard is the richest place on earth, because it is here that you will find all the hopes and dreams that were never fulfilled.
—Les Brown
I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Be the change you wish to see in the world.
—Mahatma Gandhi
You shall receive everything you ever wanted when you no longer want it anymore.
—Marcel Proust
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
—Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
—Mark Twain
Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture.
—Martin Amis
Compassion is the idea that hell may need people like you.
—Minh Bui
God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us.
—Niccolo Machiavelli
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
—Niels Bohr
Life imitates art.
—Oscar Wilde
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
—Oscar Wilde
Even though I’m no better than a beast, don’t I have the right to live?
—Park Chan-wook
You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.
—Plato
Man is the measure of all things.
—Protagoras
Earth laughs in flowers.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
I think therefore I am.
—René Descartes
If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
—René Descartes
All losers are romantics. It’s what keeps us from blowing our brains out.
—Richard Kadrey
In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life — It goes on.
—Robert Frost
Instagram girls in yoga pants; search preference: revealed.
—Sam Harris
Even while they teach, men learn.
—Seneca the Younger
One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.
—Sigmund Freud
The problem for us is not whether our desires are satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire.
—Slavoj Žižek
The only thing I know is that I know nothing.
—Socrates
The unexamined life is not worth living.
—Socrates
Life must be understood backward. But it must be lived forward.
—Søren Kierkegaard
We are too weak to discover the truth by reason alone.
—St. Augustine
This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.
—T. S. Eliot
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive at where we started and know the place for the first time.
—T. S. Eliot
What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. Footsteps echo in the memory. Down the passage which we did not take. Towards the door we never opened. Into the rose-garden.
—T. S. Eliot
Leisure is the mother of philosophy.
—Thomas Hobbes
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
—Thomas Jefferson
His formulated thoughts are gems for the modern world.
—Unknown
Someone once told me the definition of Hell: The last day you have on earth, the person you became will meet the person you could have become.
—Unknown
How many who knew the path of their lives would still choose to live it?
—Unknown
As we move towards machines, the ones that come after us, we shall call them gods.
—Van Trinh
Destiny gives a sense of familiarity.
—Van Trinh
Man is that being who invented the gas chambers in Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer on his lips.
—Viktor E. Frankl
All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
—Voltaire
There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.
—William James
With all things being equal, the simplest explanation tends to be the right one.
—William of Ockham
Few are guilty, but all are responsible.
—Abraham Joshua Heschel
We’re all puppets, Laurie. I’m just a puppet who can see the strings.
—Alan Moore
Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.
—Albert Camus
Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.
—Albert Camus
In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
—Albert Camus
There’s a time when a man needs to fight, and a time when he needs to accept that his destiny is lost, that the ship has sailed, and that only a fool would continue. The truth is, I’ve always been a fool.
—Albert Finney
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
In everything, there is a share of everything.
—Anaxagoras
We thought: we’re poor, we have nothing, but when we started losing one after the other so each day became remembrance day, we started composing poems about God’s great generosity and — our former riches.
—Anna Akhmatova
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.
—Anne Frank
He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.
—Aristotle
If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.
—Baruch Spinoza
I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
—Bertrand Russell
That which you most need will be found where you least want to look.
—Carl Jung
No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of it for anyone else.
—Charles Dickens
The brave man is he who overcomes not only his enemies but his pleasures.
—Democritus
Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone.
—Ella Wheeler Wilcox
I’d rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right.
—Elon Musk
If true confessions are written with tears, then my tears would drown the world, as the fire in my soul would reduce it to ashes.
—Emil Cioran
Freedom is secured not by the fulfilling of one’s desires, but by the removal of desire.
—Epictetus
Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.
—Frank Herbert
And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of – namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Truth serves life.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky
The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky
Only one man ever understood me, and he didn’t understand me.
—G. W. F. Hegel
Everyone gets a vote, even the people of the past, we call that tradition.
—G.K. Chesterton
The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.
—Galileo Galilei
We live in the best of all possible worlds.
—Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Society grows when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.
—Greek Proverb
I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member
—Groucho Marx
Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.
—Immanuel Kant
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.
—James Branch Cabell
Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Hell is other people.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
In choosing for myself I choose for all men.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.
—Jimmy Wales
We are the Dead. Short days ago. We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie, In Flanders fields.
—John McCrae
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
—John Stuart Mill
I don’t want the best for you, I want the best for what wants the best for you, because you don’t know what you want. I’m not on the side of you that’s aiming towards your defeat, I’m on the side that’s struggling towards the light, and that’s the definition of love.
—Jordan Peterson
If you don’t believe in God then you believe in nothing, and religious people will keep their gods while you keep your nothing.
—Jordan Peterson
If you fulfill your obligations every day you don’t have to worry about the future.
—Jordan Peterson
Nihilism means there is no meaning to anything, but the opposite is just as true, that there is meaning to everything.
—Jordan Peterson
The past is not necessarily what it was even though it has already been.
—Jordan Peterson
Religion is the sign of the oppressed … it is the opium of the people.
—Karl Marx
He holds nothing back from life; therefore he is ready for death, as a man is ready for sleep after a good day’s work.
—Lao Tzu
There are 3 types of leaders in this world: The leader that’s loved, the leader that’s hated, and the leader that people barely know he exists, when the work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.
—Lao Tzu
All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.
—Leo Tolstoy
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
—Leo Tolstoy
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
—Leo Tolstoy
He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.
—Leo Tolstoy
Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.
—Leo Tolstoy
The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and will forever be beautiful, is Truth.
—Leo Tolstoy
The graveyard is the richest place on earth, because it is here that you will find all the hopes and dreams that were never fulfilled.
—Les Brown
I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Be the change you wish to see in the world.
—Mahatma Gandhi
You shall receive everything you ever wanted when you no longer want it anymore.
—Marcel Proust
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
—Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
—Mark Twain
Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture.
—Martin Amis
Compassion is the idea that hell may need people like you.
—Minh Bui
God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us.
—Niccolo Machiavelli
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
—Niels Bohr
Life imitates art.
—Oscar Wilde
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
—Oscar Wilde
Even though I’m no better than a beast, don’t I have the right to live?
—Park Chan-wook
You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.
—Plato
Man is the measure of all things.
—Protagoras
Earth laughs in flowers.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
I think therefore I am.
—René Descartes
If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
—René Descartes
All losers are romantics. It’s what keeps us from blowing our brains out.
—Richard Kadrey
In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life — It goes on.
—Robert Frost
Instagram girls in yoga pants; search preference: revealed.
—Sam Harris
Even while they teach, men learn.
—Seneca the Younger
One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.
—Sigmund Freud
The problem for us is not whether our desires are satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire.
—Slavoj Žižek
The only thing I know is that I know nothing.
—Socrates
The unexamined life is not worth living.
—Socrates
Life must be understood backward. But it must be lived forward.
—Søren Kierkegaard
We are too weak to discover the truth by reason alone.
—St. Augustine
This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.
—T. S. Eliot
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive at where we started and know the place for the first time.
—T. S. Eliot
What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. Footsteps echo in the memory. Down the passage which we did not take. Towards the door we never opened. Into the rose-garden.
—T. S. Eliot
Leisure is the mother of philosophy.
—Thomas Hobbes
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
—Thomas Jefferson
His formulated thoughts are gems for the modern world.
—Unknown
Someone once told me the definition of Hell: The last day you have on earth, the person you became will meet the person you could have become.
—Unknown
How many who knew the path of their lives would still choose to live it?
—Unknown
As we move towards machines, the ones that come after us, we shall call them gods.
—Van Trinh
Destiny gives a sense of familiarity.
—Van Trinh
Man is that being who invented the gas chambers in Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer on his lips.
—Viktor E. Frankl
All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
—Voltaire
There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.
—William James
With all things being equal, the simplest explanation tends to be the right one.
—William of Ockham