100 excellent quotes and aphorisms by great and famous authors to inspire your thoughts, give new life to your ideas and stimulate your critical thinking skills.
Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish dictatorship.
George Orwell
To find yourself, think for yourself.
Socrates
The believer is happy. The doubter is wise.
Edgar Allan Poe
Associate with people who are likely to improve you.
Seneca
My pain may be the reason for somebody’s laugh. But my laugh must never be the reason for somebody’s pain.
Charlie Chaplin
The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness and the theologian all the stupidity.
Arthur Schopenhauer
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasure of illusion.
Aldous Huxley
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.
Ernest Hemingway
From error to error one discovers the entire truth.
Sigmund Freud
No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.
Aristotle
Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.
Plato
If the literature we are reading does not wake us, why then do we read it? A literary work must be an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us.
Franz Kafka
One cannot step twice in the same river.
Heraclitus
True wisdom lies in one’s confession about the limits of one’s knowledge.
Socrates
People who are aware of, and ashamed of, their prejudices are well on the road to eliminating them.
Gordon Allport
A truth that’s told with bad intent, Beats all the lies you can invent.
William Blake
Wisdom outweighs any wealth.
Sophocles
You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.
Plato
Know that the body is merely a garment. Go, seek the wearer, not the cloak.
Rumi
The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it.
James Bryce
Doubt is the origin of wisdom.
Rene Descartes
Rules for Happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for.
Immanuel Kant
The universities do not teach all things… So a doctor must seek old wives, gypsies, sorcerers, wandering tribes, old robbers and such outlaws and take lessons from them. A doctor must be a traveller… Knowledge is experience.
Paracelsus
Beauty is truth, truth beauty.
John Keats
Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.
Arthur Schopenhauer
You are a little soul carrying about a corpse, as Epictetus used to say.
Marcus Aurelius
Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, havegreat sadness on earth.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
I worked hard. Anyone who works as hard as I did can achieve the same results. The final aim and reason of all music is nothing other than the glorification of God and the refreshment of the spirit.
Johann Sebastian Bach
Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.
Friedrich Nieztsche
The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.
Henrik Ibsen
The art of living well and the art of dying well are one.
Epicurus
Be a free thinker and don’t accept everything you hear as truth. Be critical and evaluate what you believe in.
Aristotle
If my soldiers started thinking, no one would stay in my ranks.
Frederick II King of Prussia
Miserable dictators who rave about a new world order, while governing nations of poor sheep, confirm that we live in the toilet of the universe, animated by the supreme and chaotic entropy of their total stupidity.
Carl William Brown
Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship.
Benjamin Franklin’
Any soldier who fights for money and for a dictator is a waste of society, an object without a brain, only capable of a good action, that of dying.
Carl William Brown
We have art in order not to die of truth.
Friedrich Nieztsche
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
Robert Frost
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in a large group.
George Carlin
Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.
Jorge Luis Borges
One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.
Friedrich Nietzsche
To the poor Chomsky, about what he said on ChatGPT, I would answer with an aphorisms by Carmelo Bene, who once said: “A work is not by an author, and neither is life”.
Carl William Brown
The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
Bertrand Russell
Frederick II King of Prussia once said: “If my soldiers started thinking, no one would stay in my ranks.”. That’s why a dictator who favors war is without brain just as well, capable of nothing, but only a good action, that of dying.
Carl William Brown
Evil people always support each other; that is their chief strength.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
When the student is ready the teacher appears. When the student is truly ready, the teacher disappears.
Lao Tzu
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
Immanuel Kant
Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.
Alfred North Whitehead
All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.
Voltaire
The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.
Geroge Orwell
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
William James
There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.
Hannah Arendt
Thinking in itsself is very dangerous, as Hannah Arendt said, avove all if you are under the supreme cruel power of human stupidity, as Mr. Putrid shows us.
Carl William Brown
Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.
Bertolt Brecht
Life is nothing but a reckless, unaware, risky, and incautious bet that in the end everyone is doomed to lose. So you’d better get used!
Carl William Brown
Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has.
Rene Descartes
It is a little embarrassing that, after forty-five years of research and study, the best advice I can give to people is to be a little kinder to each other.
Aldous Huxley
The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. And the body is born young and grows old. That is life’s tragedy.
Oscar Wilde
The human species is mainly made up of people who do nothing but fill the sewers and pollute the environment in which they live, an endless mass of donkeys who unfortunately believe themselves to be horses and since they even believe to have a religious spirituality, they are also quite convinced to gain eternal life.
Carl William Brown
Geniuses are like thunderstorms: they go against the wind, terrify people, clear the air.
Soren Kierkegaard
Humor is definitely a form of religion, of course it’s not as generous and solid as other traditional forms of worship. To his faithful theorists, pratictioners or even to his martyrs he cannot certainly offer virgin maidens in his paradise, as Islam does; in any case one must be satisfied, at the limit it can offer a dramatis personae disguised as a joker, or if you prefer, a kind of fool!
Carl William Brown
Don’t educate your children to be rich. Educate them to be happy, so they know the value of things, not the price.
Victor Hugo
Two percent of the people think; three percent of the people think they think; and ninety-five percent of the people would rather die than think.
George Bernard Shaw
The voice of the majority is no proof of justice.
Friedrich Schiller
Sadness is caused by intelligence, the more you understand certain things, the more you wish you didn’t understand them.
Charles Bukowski
If you allow men to use you for your own purposes, they will use you for theirs.
Aesop
Society often forgives the offender, never forgives the dreamer.
Oscar Wilde
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiation – creation – there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
One can hardly read our history without conceiving a horror for mankind.
Voltaire
True freedom is the right to say something that others don’t want to hear.
George Orwell
For all evils, there are two remedies – time and silence.
Alexandre Dumas
Giordano Bruno and the roots of our culture in the light of the darkness of holy imbecility. In fact, the roots of our culture are Catholic Christians, since if you tried to have other roots, they would burn you alive.
Carl William Brown
He who dares not offend cannot be honest.
Thomas Paine
Humans arose, rather, as a fortuitous and contingent outcome of thousands of linked events, any one of which could have occurred differently and sent history on an alternative pathway that would not have led to consciousness.
Stephen Jay Gould
The first thing that reading teaches is how to be alone.
Jonathan Franzen
The trouble with the world is not that people know too little; it’s that they know so many things that just aren’t so.
Mark Twain
A noble heart will refuse happiness built on misfortune of others.
Saadi
The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Respond intelligently even to unintelligent treatment.
Lao Tzu
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Edmund Burke
The intelligence consists not only in the knowledge but also in the skill to apply the knowledge into practice.
Aristotle
The mark of a civilized man is his willingness to re-examine his most cherished beliefs.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
When all think alike, then no one is thinking.
Walter Lippmann
Television is the mirror where the defeat of our entire cultural system is reflected.
Federico Fellini
Day by day, what you think and what you do is who you become.
Heraclitus
Make your own rules or be a slave to another man’s.
William Blake
Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be lived.
Søren Kierkegaard
No man on earth is truly free, All are slaves of money or necessity. Public opinion or fear of prosecution forces each one, against his conscience, to conform.
Euripides
Without goals, the very concept of intelligence is meaningless.
Steven Pinker
What worries you, masters you.
John Locke
Art is to console those who are broken by life.
Vincent Van Gogh
The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.
René Descartes
Humanity is as if immersed in sleep, it is interested only in what is useless and lives in the world of error. Hakim Sanai
You are wealthy when you can freely decide what to do with your time.
Vala Afshar
A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.
Montaigne
There is one art of which people should be masters – the art of reflection.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.
Diogenes
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