[From Jed's notes.]
If you wish to drown, do not torture yourself with shallow water.
Bulgarian Proverb
All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.
Friedrich Nietzsche
“What is in Room 101?”
The expression on O’Brien’s face did not change. He answered drily: “You know what is in Room 101, Winston. Everyone knows what is in Room 101.”
George Orwell, 1984
War is cruel. There is no use trying to reform it.
But the crueler it is, the sooner it’s over.
General W.T. Sherman
It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.
Eugene Ionesco
People mistakenly assume that their thinking is done by their head; it is actually done by the heart which first dictates the conclusion, then commands the head to provide the reasoning that will defend it.
Anthony de Mello
I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.
A.M. Lindbergh
If somebody thinks they’re a hedgehog, presumably you just give them a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.
Douglas Adams
I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.
Eugene Ionesco
To enter one’s own self, it is necessary to go armed to the teeth.
Paul Valery
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure is disagreeable and therefore not popular.
C.G. Jung
The enlightened man is capable of perceiving both unity and multiplicity without the least contradiction between them.
Huang Po
There is no god higher than truth.
Mahatma Gandhi
Winston Smith: “How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”
O’Brien: “Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”
George Orwell, 1984
You are rewarding a teacher poorly if you remain always a pupil.
Friedrich Nietzsche
This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
George Bernard Shaw
To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
George Orwell
The Sages, men of vision, have never asked anyone to believe anything. Belief is nothing but concept. The Sages have always merely pointed at the Truth, which the disciple must then realize himself.
Ramesh S. Balsekar
Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.
Katherine Mansfield
Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
Aldous Huxley
What we need is not the will to believe but the will to find out.
Bertrand Russell
A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.
Friedrich Nietzsche
There is Buddha for those who don’t know what he is.
There is no Buddha for those who know what he is.
Buddhist Proverb
Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
C.G. Jung
If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one.
Russian Proverb
Nothing is hidden.
Tenkei
How can you determine whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state.
Plato, Theaetetus
The perfect man has no self;
the spiritual man has no achievement;
the sage has no name.
Chuang Tzu
Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.
Leo Tolstoy
All books are either dreams or swords,
You can cut, or you can drug, with words.
Amy Lowell
I do not know how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?
H.D. Thoreau
A donkey with a load of holy books is still a donkey.
Sufi proverb
I count religion but a childish toy,
And hold there is no sin but ignorance.
Christopher Marlowe
I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.
Frederick Douglass, escaped slave
I thought for a minute there I saw her whipped. Maybe I did. But I see now that it don’t make any difference…. To beat her you don’t have to whip her two out of three or three out of five, but every time you meet. As soon as you let down your guard, as soon as you lose once, she’s won for good. And eventually we all got to lose. Nobody can help that.
Ken Kesey, OFOTCN
What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is its exact opposite.
Bertrand Russell
Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.
Friedrich Nietzsche
O’Brien: “Even now, I am well aware, you are clinging to your disease under the impression that it is a virtue.”
George Orwell, 1984
Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know.
Michel de Montaigne
The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life.
The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.
H.L. Mencken
Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once a week.
George Bernard Shaw
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
Soren Kierkegaard
I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Isaac Newton
It is always the false that makes you suffer, the false desires and fears, the false values and ideas, the false relationships between people. Abandon the false and you are free of pain; truth makes happy, truth liberates.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
Aldous Huxley
Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.
Aldous Huxley
There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.
William Shakespeare
To find yourself, think for yourself.
Socrates
If you’re going to tell people the truth, be funny or they’ll kill you.
Billy Wilder
