Truth - Quotes

Truth comes as conqueror only to those who have lost the art of receiving it as friend. - Rabindranath Tagore

Truth could be violent, could strip you of dignity and hope just as quickly as a gun. - Laurel K. Hamilton

Truth does not belong to the order of power, but shares an original affinity with freedom. - Michel Foucault

Truth doesn't always heal a wounded soul. - Maxim Gorky

Truth is generally the best vindication against slander. - Abraham Lincoln

Truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it and ignorance may deride it, but, in the end, there it is. - Sir Winston Churchill

Truth is like a corrosive that will eat its way into the hardest of stone. - Unknown

Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain’t goin’ away. - Elvis Presley

Truth is like the town whore. Everybody knows her, but nonetheless, it's embarrassing to meet her on the street. - Wolfgang Borchert

Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing the matter with this, except that it ain't so. - Mark Twain

Truth is more deceptive than falsehood, for it is more frequently presented by those from whom we do not expect it, and so has against it a numerical presumption. - Ambrose Bierce

Truth is not only a man's ornament but his instrument; it is the great man's glory, and the poor man's stock: a man's truth is his livelihood, his recommendation, his letters of credit. - Benjamin Whichcote

Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be outraged by silence. - Henri Frederic Amiel

Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is, and you must bend to its power or live a lie. - Miyamoto Musashi

Truth is only path out of tangled web. - Charlie Chan

Truth is only visible to those who are able to question everything that they have been taught to believe. - Unknown

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t. - Mark Twain

Truth is that which does not contaminate you, but empowers you. Therefore, there are degrees of truth, but, generically, truth is that which can do no harm. It cannot harm. - Gary Zukav

Truth is the bread of a noble manhood. - Henry Ward Beecher

Truth is the breath of life to human society. It is the food of the immortal spirit. Yet a single word of it may kill a man as suddenly as a drop of prussic acid. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Truth is the daughter of time. - Aulus Gellius

Truth is the one thing in nature always consistent with itself, and it is the one guide given to us in steering on the ocean of fate. - Arthur Lynch

Life - Quotes

Life is so short. We spend so much time sweating the small stuff; worrying, comparing, wishing, wanting and waiting for something bigger and better instead of focusing on all the simple blessings that surround us everyday. Life is so fragile and all it takes is a simple moment to change everything you take for granted. Focus on what’s important and be grateful. - Melanie Koulouris

The adventure of life is to learn. The purpose of life is to grow. The nature of life is to change. The challenge of life is to overcome. The essence of life is to care. The opportunity of life is to serve. The secret of life is to dare. The spice of life is to befriend. The beauty of life is to give. - Unknown

Life doesn’t always introduce you to the people you want to meet. Sometimes, life puts you in touch with the people you need to meet to help you, to hurt you, to leave you, to love you, and to gradually strength you into the person you were meant to become. - Unknown

Life will always have a different plan for you. If you don’t give up, you will eventually get to your destination. But towards the end of your life, you may look back and realize that it was never really about the destination; it was the journey that counted. - King Samuel Benson

Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement, (to) get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never threat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed. - Abraham Joshua Heschel

More on Life Here, and the book The Mystery of Life - a collection of quotes on and pertaining to life.

Beauty - Quotes

Real beauty is to be true to oneself. - Laetitia Casta

Sometimes awful things have their own kind of beauty. - Carlos

That which is striking and beautiful is not always good, but that which is good is always beautiful. - Ninon de L'Enclos

The beautiful is always bizarre. – Charles Baudelaire

The beautiful things of the earth become more dear as they elude pursuit. - Thomas Hardy

The beauty of the natural world lies in the details. - Natalie Angier

The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express. - Francis Bacon

The fairest cheek hath oftentimes a soul leprous as sin itself. - Thomas Dekker

The kind of beauty I want is the hard-to-get kind that comes from within – strength, courage, dignity. - Ruby Dee

The more beautiful the serpent, the more fatal its sting. - William Scott Downey

The power of finding beauty in the humblest things makes home happy and life lovely. - Louisa May Alcott

The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There are sometimes beauties in a character which would never have appeared but for a defect, and defects which would never have appeared but for a beauty. - Fluke Greville

There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles. - Unknown

There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting. - John Kenneth Galbraith

There is likely to be beauty wherever proportion exists. - Austin O’Malley

There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion. - Edgar Allan Poe

There is nothing more beautiful than someone who goes out of their way to make life beautiful for others. - Mandy Hale

There is nothing that makes its way more directly to the soul than beauty. - Joseph Addison

There's nothing more inspiring than the complexity and beauty of the human heart. - Cynthia Hand

This is the essence of beauty – the possession of a quality which excites the human organism to functioning harmonious with its own nature. - Ethel Puffer Howes

Those who contemplate the beauty of the Earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. - Rachel Carson

To have beauty is to have only that. But to have goodness is to be beautiful too. - Unknown

To look at a thing is quite different from seeing a thing, and one does not see anything until one sees its beauty. - Miss Mabel Chiltern

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty. - Maya Angelou

What you do, the way you think, makes you beautiful. - Scott Westerfeld

Belief - Quotes

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good ground for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones. - Bertrand Russell

Many people have died for their beliefs. The real courage is living and suffering for what you believe. - Christopher Paolini

Maturity of mind is best shown in slow belief. - Baltasar Gracian

Men that believe only what they understand can write their creed on a postage stamp. - Austin O’Malley

Most people are too slow to believe, but once you get them going, they believe too much. - Lewis F. Korns

Never underestimate the power of the human mind to believe what it wants to believe, no matter the conflicting evidence. - Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson

Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know. - Michel de Montaigne

Oftimes our belief, if in another, we would regard a superstition. - Lewis F. Korns

One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interests. - John Stuart Mill

Our beliefs about what we are and what we can be precisely determine what we will be. - Anthony Robbins

That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false. - Paul Valéry

The belief that there is only one truth and that oneself is in possession of it seems to me the deepest root of all evil that is in the world. - Max Born

The fact that a belief has a good moral effect upon a man is no evidence whatsoever in favour of its truth. - Bertrand Russell

The investigator should have a robust faith – and yet not believe. - Claude Bernard

The less you know the more you believe. - U2

Art - Quotes

Keep doing what you like to do. That's all [art] is. - Cory Arcangel

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art. - Oscar Wilde

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. - Oscar Wilde

No masterpiece was ever created by a lazy artist. - Unknown

One of the pleasures of art is that it enables the mind to move in unanticipated directions, to make connections that may be in some sense errors but are fruitful nonetheless. - Donald Barthelme

Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is. - Jackson Pollock

Painting is silent poetry. - Plutarch

Performance art is about joy, about making something that’s so full of kind of a wild joy that you really can’t put into worlds. - Laurie Anderson

Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life? - Aldous Huxley

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art. - Tom Stoppard

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. - Aristotle

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again. - William Faulkner

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. - Ursula LeGuin

The artist does not really create; he discovers. - Lyman Abbott

The artist finds a greater pleasure in painting than in having completed the picture. - Lucius Seneca

The artist is a receptacle for the emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web. - Pablo Picasso

That art is best which suggests most. - Austin O’Malley

The artist is justified by his art. - Lewis Foreman Day

The artist is not a man who describes, but a man who feels. - E. E. Cummings

Advertisement - Quotes

The fact is that much of advertising's power comes from this belief that advertising does not affect us. The most effective kind of propaganda is that which is not recognized as propaganda. Because we think advertising is silly and trivial, we are less on guard, less critical, than we might otherwise be. It's all in fun, it's ridiculous. While we're laughing, sometimes sneering, the commercial does its work. - Jean Kilbourne

The main purpose of advertising is to undermine markets. If you go to graduate school and you take a course in economics, you learn that markets are systems in which informed consumers make rational choices. That's what's so wonderful about it. But that's the last thing that the state corporate system wants. It is spending huge sums to prevent that. - Noam Chomsky

The weakest link in any advertising program is its credibility. An advertising message has little believability with the average person. Advertising is taken for what it is – a biased message paid for by a company with a selfish interest in what the consumer consumes. - Al Ries & Laura Ries

There are huge advertising budgets only when there's no difference between the products. If the products really were different, people would buy the one that's better. Advertising teaches people not to trust their judgment. Advertising teaches people to be stupid. - Carl Sagan

Too little advertising is like sowing too little seed. A farmer in planting corn puts a number of grains into each hill and is satisfied if one good healthy stalk comes from each planting. It’s the constant advertiser that is bound to attract attention. It’s the succession of bright, catchy advertisements that refuse to be ignored. That time must be allowed for the fruit to grow, ripen and be gathered is as true as that wheat cannot be reaped the day after it is sown. - Bryon W. Orr

When advertising is great advertising, it fastens on the myths, signs, and symbols of our common experience and becomes, quite literally, a benefit of the product.... As a result of great advertising, food tastes better, clothes feel snugger, cars ride smoother. The stuff of semiotics becomes the magic of advertising. - Curt Suplee

mind - Quotes

It is only when the mind is controlled and is kept to the right road of orderly progress that it becomes useful for its possessor and for society. A disorderly mind is a liability both to its owner and to others, all the havoc wrought in the world is wrought by men who have not learned the way of mind control, balance and poise. - K. Sri Dhammananda

The most distinctive mark of a cultured mind is the ability to take another’s point of view; to put one’s self in another’s place, and see life and its problems from a point of view different from one’s own. To be willing to test a new idea; to be able to live on the edge of difference in all matters intellectually; to examine without heat the burning question of the day; to have imaginative sympathy, openness and flexibility of mind, steadiness and poise of feeling, cool calmness of judgment, is to have culture. - A. H. R. Fairchild

The propensity to excessive simplification is indeed natural to the mind of man, since it is only by abstraction and generalisation, which necessarily imply the neglect of a multitude of particulars, that he can stretch his puny faculties so as to embrace a minute portion of the illimitable vastness of the universe. - James Frazer

Refuse to think in terms of this or that. All pain needs investigation. The mind is nothing else but the self. Assumption obscures reality without destroying it. All separation, every kind of estrangement and alienation is false.. Your being a person is due to the illusion of space and time. The mind creates time and space and takes its own creations for reality. - Unknown

Your unconscious mind is not a sink of horror and depravity. That's a Victorian notion, and a terrifically destructive one. It crippled most of the best minds of the nineteenth century, and hamstrung psychology all through the first half of the twentieth. Don't be afraid of your unconscious mind! It's not a black pit of nightmares. Nothing of the kind! It is the wellspring of health, imagination, creativity. What we call 'evil' is produced by civilization, its constraints and repressions, deforming the spontaneous, free self-expression of the personality. The aim of psychotherapy is precisely this, to remove these groundless fears and nightmares, to bring up what's unconscious into the light of rational consciousness, examine it objectively, and find that there is nothing to fear. - Ursula K. le Guin

The mind of man is a scene of perpetual instability and commotion, ruffled by every breeze of passion and agitated by every impulse of hope; it floats with giddy security on the ebullitions of fancy, and sinks with precipitation in the cavities of despair; it pursues with avidity the emotions of sense, and listens with rapture to the murmurs of restraint; it hears with pious reverence the counsels of reason, and follows with lucid submission the dictates of pleasure: always fickle and undetermined, it looks for quiet, sometimes in remonstrance, sometimes in acquiescence; it often mixes with confusion, that it may establish peace, and often regulates quietude by turbulent uproar. - Norman MacDonald

The mind, when compelled, by education or other circumstances, to receive irrational doctrines, has yet a power of keeping them, as it were, on its surface, of excluding them from its depths, of refusing to incorporate them with its own being; and when burdened with a mixed and incongruous system, it often discovers a sagacity which reminds us of the instinct of inferior animals, in selecting the healthful and nutritious portions, and in making them its daily food. - William E. Channing

The immortal mind, superior to his fate, amid the outrage of external things, firm as the solid base of this great world, rests on his own foundation. Blow, ye winds! Ye waves! ye thunders! roll your tempests on! Shake, ye old pillars of the marble sky! Till at its orbs and all its worlds of fire be loosen'd from their seats; yet still serene, the unconquer'd mind looks down upon the wreck; and ever stronger as the storms advance, firm through the closing ruin holds is way, when nature calls him to the destin'd goal. - Mark Akenside

Humour

Poverty - Quotes

I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer. - Benjamin Franklin

Riches and ease, it is perfectly clear, are not necessary for man's highest culture, else had not the world been so largely indebted in all times to those who have sprung from the humbler ranks. An easy and luxurious existence does not train men to effort or encounter with difficulty; nor does it awaken that consciousness of power which is so necessary for energetic and effective action in life. Indeed, so far from poverty being a misfortune, it may, by vigorous self-help, be converted even into a blessing; rousing a man to that struggle with the world in which, though some may purchase ease by degradation, the right-minded and true-hearted will find strength, confidence, and triumph. - Samuel Smiles

What keeps some persons poor? and what has made some others rich? The true answers to these queries would often make the poor man more proud of his poverty, than the rich man is of his wealth, and the rich man more justly ashamed of his wealth, than the poor man unjustly now is, of his poverty. - Charles Caleb Colton

Whatever may be said of the dangers of riches, the dangers of poverty are tenfold greater. A condition in which one is exposed to continual want, not only of the luxuries but of the veriest necessaries of life, as well as to disease and discouragement, is exceedingly unfavourable to the exercise of the higher functions of the mind and soul. The poor man is hourly beset by troops of temptations which the rich man never knows. - William Mathews

Pleasure - Quotes

How much pleasure will you allow yourself? Many people have an invisible quota in their minds for the amount of joy they will permit themselves to experience. They become so busy living life that they view pleasure as a luxury they simply do not have time for. Things like lovemaking or playing take a back-seat to the everyday motions of living. However, your life simply will not work as well when you deny yourself pleasure. The old adage of all work and no play making you dull is quite true; you may find yourself living a rather colorless life if you do not pause every now and then to indulge your senses. Pleasure is like the oil that keeps the machine of your life running smoothly. Without it, the gears stick and you will most likely break down. - Cherie Carter-Scott

Pleasure is the structure of society. From childhood until death we are secretly, cunningly or obviously pursuing pleasure. So whatever our form of pleasure is, I think we should be very clear about it because it is going to guide and shape our lives. It is therefore important for each one of us to investigate closely, hesitantly and delicately this question of pleasure, for to find pleasure, and then nourish and sustain it, is a basic demand of life and without it existence becomes dull, stupid, lonely and meaningless. - Jiddu Krishnamurti

Pleasure to me is wonder – the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability. To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral; the past in the present; the infinite in the finite; these are to me the springs of delight and beauty. - H. P. Lovecraft

The pleasure of any incident, whether it is of a sunset, or sexual, or any sensory pleasure, is recorded and thought over. So thought as pleasure plays a tremendous part in our life. Something happened yesterday which was a most lovely thing, a most happy event, it is recorded; thought comes upon it, chews it and keeps on thinking about it and wants it repeated tomorrow, whether it be sexual or otherwise. So thought gives vitality to an incident that is over. - Jiddu Krishnamurti

The pleasure-pain mechanism in the body of man – and in the bodies of all the living organisms that possess the faculty of consciousness – serves as an automatic guardian of the organism's life. The physical sensation of pleasure is a signal indicating that the organism is pursuing the right course of action. The physical sensation of pain is a warning signal of danger, indicating that the organism is pursuing the wrong course of action, that something is impairing the proper function of its body. - Ayn Rand

Your body can be one of the greatest sources of pleasure when you open your five senses fully and experience the physical wonder of being alive. Pleasure can come in the form of sight, like when you see a magnificent sunset, or taste, like when you eat a favourite food. It can come as a glorious musical sound or the soft touch of a lover. The only secret to learning the lesson of pleasure is to make time and space for it in your life. - Cherie Carter-Scott