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"Remember this; that very little is needed to make a happy life."

~Marcus Antonius

"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another."

~Sir James Matthew Barrie
(1860—1937)

"God made my body and if it is dirty, then the imperfection lies with the Manufacturer, not the product."

~Lenny Bruce

"Self-examination is usually a half-hearted, spontaneous thing we do when we're either scared or bored."

~Jonathan Carroll

"Be not afraid of growing slowly. Be afraid only of standing still."

~Chinese proverb

"To be nobody-but-myself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make me everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting."

~E.E. Cummings
poet (1984—1962)

"A life predicated on being obedient and taking orders is a very comfortable life indeed. Living in such a way reduces to a minimum one's own need to think."

~Adolf Eichmann

"It is the eye which makes the horizon."

~Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803—1882)

"If I were reincarnated, I'd want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything."

~William Faulkner

"When you are deluded and full of doubt, even a thousand books of scripture are not enough. When you have realized understanding, even one word is too much."

~Fen-Yang

"I don't like obscurity because I consider obscurity to be a form of despotism. One must expose oneself to pronouncing errors. One must expose oneself to possibly saying things which are probably going to be difficult to express, and which obviously are going to make one fumble for words."

~Michel Foucault

"Never underestimate man's ingenuity in masterminding his own destruction."

Harkur, "In Conquest Born"

~C.S. (Celia) Friedman
writer

"It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people."

"Good Omens"

~Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett

"It is beneath human dignity to loose one's self and become a mere cog in the machine."

~Mahatma Gandhi
(1869—1848)

"Take it from me: the slave of introspection
Is like a beast on arid waste
By some foul fiend led round and round,
While, all about, green meadowlands abound."

Mephistopheles, "Faust"

~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
poet, novelist, playwright, courtier, & natural philosopher (1749—1832)

"Desire creates its own object."

~Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

"Everyone should carefully observe which way his heart draws him. And then choose that way with all his strength."

~Hasidic saying

"If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us."

~Hermann Hesse

"Great trees are envied by the wind."

~Japanese proverb

"The world needs anger. The world often continues to allow evil because it isn't angry enough."

~Bede Jarrett

"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves."

~Carl Jung
psychologist (1875—1961)

"Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after."

~Anne Morrow Lindbergh

"The average person thinks he isn't."

~Father Larry Lorenzoni

"Cease trembling and shaking and gasping and cursing and find again your core which I am. Rest from twistedness, distortion, deformations. For an hour you will be me; that is, the other half of yourself. The half you lost. What you burnt, broke, and tore is still in my hands: I am the keeper of fragile things and I have kept of you what is indissoluble."

~Anaïs Nin

"All human evil comes from this: a man's being unable to sit still in a room."

~Pascal

" 'How does one become a butterfly?' she asked pensively.
'You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar.' "

"Hope for the Flowers"

~Trina Paulus

"I have no ambitions and no desires.
To be a poet is not my ambition,
It's my way of being alone."

Alberto Caeiro: "The Keeper of Sheep"

~Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa
Poet (1888—1935)

"You are who you perceive yourself to be."

"The Chapters"

~Alicia Romano

"Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you're climbing it."

~Andy Rooney

"It is strange to think that I, of all people, became a smith of the language, for my relations with human kind have always been marked by a fundamental lack of commonality, as though I came from a distant land and spoke an alien tongue. I have always looked at my countrymen and thought that they slept as they walked: a sleep without dreams."

Halden, "To Sleep Without Dreams" in "Sea Without a Shore"

~Sean Russell
writer

"Ante senectutem curavi ut bene virerem; in senectute curo ut bene moriar."
Before old age I gave care to living a good life; in old age I give care to dying well.

~Lucius Annaeus Seneca
(ca. 4 BCE—65 CE)

"Life isn't about finding yourself, it's about creating yourself."

"Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!"

~George Bernard Shaw

"The unexamined life is not worth living."

"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing."

~Socrates
(469—399 BCE)

"You're not going to be able to run many historical games with that restriction; history is full of horrible things happening to children, often by deliberate acts of adults. I suppose it really comes down to whether you want real evil in your games, or only cinematic evil. Cinematic evil is a lot easier for most people to handle."

on the Pyramid Discussion Boards

~Bill Stoddard

"Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm."

~Publius Syrus

"Reality is the crutch for people who can't cope with drugs."

~Lily Tomlin

"Eventually the revolutionaries become the established culture, and then what will they do?"

~Linus Torvalds
designer of Linux

"Dance like nobody's watching; love like you've never been hurt. Sing like nobody's listening; live like it's heaven on earth."

"Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live."

"Man is the only animal who blushes. Or needs to."

~Samuel Langhome Clemens aka Mark Twain
(1835—1910)

"I always knew that I would look back at the times I cried and laugh, but never did I guess that I would look back at the times that I laughed and cry."

"You can only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough."

~Unknown

"Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best."

~Henry Van Dyke

"I gotta help my body forgive my soul."

"Color Me Once"

~Violent Femmes

"One is always, and before all else, the enemy of someone, and this is what defines the self."

"From the Enemy's Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society"

~Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

~Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
novelist

"I can resist anything except temptation."

Lord Darlington, "Lady Windermere's Fan"

"I won't tell you that the world matters nothing, or the world's voice, or the voice of society. They matter a good deal. They matter far too much. But there are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely—or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands. You have that moment now. Choose!"

Lord Darlington, "Lady Windermere's Fan"

"Misfortunes one can endure—they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults—ah! there is the sting of life."

Lord Windermere, "Lady Windermere's Fan"

"I am afraid of being myself."

Lady Windermere, "Lady Windermere's Fan"

"Only the shallow shall know themselves."

"The world is divided into two classes, those who believe the incredible, and those who do the improbable."

"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell the truth."

"There is luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel no one else has a right to blame us."

~Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde
poet, novelist, & playwright (1854—1900)

"I had to be first in everything because in my perverse heart I felt myself the least of god's creatures."

regarding alcoholism

~Bill Wilson

"It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea."

~Robert Anton Wilson

"Even now, there is a close association in my gut between feeling and pain. Logically, I recognize that feeling is, often is, pleasure and delight. Nevertheless, at an instinctual level, at a level outside of logic, feeling is pain."

"Gut Symmetries" (1997)

~Jeanette Winterson

"If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live."

~Lin Yutang

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