I am certainly convinced that it is one of the greatest impulses of mankind to arrive at something higher than a natural state.

James Baldwin

We must take care not to admit as true anything which is only probable. For when one falsity has been let in, infinite others follow.

Baruch Spinoza

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

Henry David Thoreau

Evil destroys even itself.

Aristotle

The pursuit of philosophy is founded on the belief that knowledge is good, even if what is known is painful.

Bertrand Russell

The beauty of things must be that they end.

Jack Kerouac

I’m a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Never stand begging for that which you have the power to earn.

Miguel de Cervantes

When it was too late for rescue, it was still early enough for revenge.

Kazuo Ishiguro

I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.

Charles Baudelaire

There’s always, there’ll always be, more story. That’s what story is.

Ali Smith

History’s chief use is only to discover of the constant and universal principles of human nature.

David Hume

Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable longing to see the truth.

Cicero

The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.

Carl Sagan

Respond to every call that excites your spirit.

Jalāl Rumi

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar… Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.

Aldous Huxley

The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime.

Max Stirner

You can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.

Andrè Gide

A mind that is stretched by new experiences can never go back to its old dimensions.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Come let us be friends for once. Let us make life easy on us. Let us be loved ones and lovers. The earth shall be left to no one.

Yunus Emre

Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.

Charles Bukowski

The infidels of one age have been the aureoled saints of the next. The destroyers of the old are the creators of the new.

Robert G. Ingersoll

There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.

Friedrich Nietzsche

There is a strange consuming happiness in acting with the full knowledge that whatever one is doing may very well be one’s last act on earth.

Carlos Castaneda

Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.

Albert Camus