Here are all the random quotes I’ve collected while using Tumblr…

What can be thought of must certainly be a fiction.
- Nietzsche

The very meaninglessness of life forces us to create our own meaning.
- Stanley Kubrick

Decide what to be and go be it.
- Avett Brothers

As a medical doctor, it is my duty to evaluate the situation with as much data as I can gather and as much expertise as I have and as much experience as I have to determine whether or not the wish of the patient is medically justified.
— Jack Kevorkian (R.I.P.) on suicide

Why is it the philosopher who is expected to be easier and not some scientist who is even more inaccessible?
— Jacques Derrida

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.
- Oscar Wilde

Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.
- Dr. Seuss

Yeah, well, y’know that’s just, like, your opinion, man.
- The Dude

We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.
— Orson Welles

Patriotism in its simplest, clearest, and most indubitable signification is nothing else but a means of obtaining for the rulers their ambitions and covetous desires, and for the ruled the abdication of human dignity, reason, and

conscience, and a slavish enthralment to those in power. And as such it is recommended wherever it is preached. Patriotism is slavery.
— Leo Tolstoy

Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.
— Noam Chomsky

Religion. It’s given people hope in a world torn apart by religion.
— Jon Stewart

The important thing is not to stop questioning; curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when contemplating the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one

tries merely to comprehend a little of the mystery every day. The important thing is not to stop questioning; never lose a holy curiosity.
— Albert Einstein

Socrates stirred up the youth of Athens simply by being himself.
— Walter Kaufman

Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully as when they do it for religious convictions
— Blaise Pascal

One can choose what to do, but not what to want.
— Arthur Schopenhauer

I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.
- Salvador Dali

Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the

fallibility of all the human beings involved
— Carl Sagan

You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
— Albert Camus

The meaning of life is that it ends.
— Franz Kafka

The most common form of despair is not being who you are.
— Søren Kierkegaard

Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man.
- Nietzsche

Freedom, not imaginary but actual, is attained not by barricades and murders, nor by any new kind of institution coercively introduced, but only by the cessation of obedience to any human authority whatever.
— Leo Tolstoy

Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.
— Richard Dawkins

There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people for a purpose which is unattainable.
— Howard Zinn

When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Whether it’s good or bad, smashing something is also very pleasant on occasion.
— Underground Man

If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.
— Joseph Campbell

In despair there are the most intense enjoyments, especially when one is very acutely conscious of the hopelessness of one’s position.
— Underground Man

Alcohol may be man’s worst enemy, but the bible says to love your enemy
— Frank Sinatra

Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.
- Dr. Seuss

He who despairs over an event is a coward but he who holds hopes for the human condition is a fool.
- Camus

It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere. … Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the

charge is unjust. A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment

and hope of reward after death.
— Albert Einstein

[Religion] is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. It is still

more humiliating to discover how a large number of people living today, who cannot but see that this religion is not tenable, nevertheless try to defend it piece by piece in a series of pitiful rearguard actions.
— Sigmund Freud

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
- William Shakespeare

One of the signs of a damaged ego is absolute certainty.
— milton glaser

My body will not be a tomb for other creatures.
— Leonardo da Vinci

The world is so exquisite, with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there’s little good evidence. Far better, it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look Death in

the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.
— Carl Sagan

I do not trust people who don’t love themselves and yet tell me, ‘I love you.’ There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.
— Maya Angelou

Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control. Thus, a corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist; that is, it has tight control at

the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level — there’s a little bargaining, a little give and take, but the line of authority is perfectly straightforward. Just as I’m opposed to political fascism, I’m opposed to

economic fascism. I think that until major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it’s pointless to talk about democracy.
— Noam Chomsky

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.
- Charles Darwin

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
- Nietzsche

Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.
— Jack Kerouac

One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.
— Nietzsche

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.
— Frank Lloyd Wright

Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.
- Oscar Wilde

Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.
— Albert Einstein

I think that we’re all mentally ill. Those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better - and maybe not all that much better after all.
— Stephen King

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
— Voltaire

The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

The reason why people use a crucifix against vampires is vampires are allergic to bullshit!
— Richard Pryor

Philosophy is that living activity of critical reflection where we are invited to analyze the world in which we find ourselves, and to question what passes for common sense or opinion in the particular society in which we live. This

activity is not some optional addendum to a culture, but should form part of that culture’s life. It should be integral to how a culture converses with itself, understands itself, talks to other cultures and seeks to understand them.

Philosophy can provide a method for debunking the many myths and ideologies that haunt the present, as well as proposing alternative frameworks for thinking about the concepts we live by.
— Simon Critchley

Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.
— Benjamin Franklin

I have just returned from a party of which I was the life and soul; wit poured from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me - but I went away…and wanted to shoot myself.
— Søren Kierkegaard

Anarchism urges man to think, to investigate, to analyze every proposition
— Emma Goldman

A democracy is not safe if people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by any controlling private power.
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck.
- Paul Virilio

Somewhere something incredible is waiting to be known.
- Carl Sagan

Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.
— Albert Einstein

Life would be a mistake without music.
- Nietzsche

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
— Oscar Wilde

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.
- Bob Dylan

Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.
— Voltaire

There is not enough love and kindness in the world to permit us to give any of it away to imaginary beings.
- Nietzsche

There is no Yoda - there’s no one who points you in the right direction. You’ve got to figure that out by yourself
- Heath Ledger

Life is too important to be taken seriously.
- Oscar Wilde

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
— George Bernard Shaw

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?
— Mohandas Gandhi

That’s the best revenge of all: happiness. Nothing drives people crazier than seeing someone have a good fucking life.
- Chuck Palahniuk

The book to read is not the one that thinks for you but the one which makes you think.
- Harper Lee

The whole reason you watch a TV show is because it ends. If I want a long, boring story with no point to it, I have my life.
— Seinfeld

I was never aware of any other option but to question everything.
- Noam Chomsky

One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood.
- Nietzsche

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.
— Mark Twain

In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
- Camus

Have no fear of perfection. You’ll never reach it.
- Salvador Dali

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.
— Ernest Hemingway

Time you enjoyed wasting was not wasted.
- John Lennon

Don’t wait for the last judgment - it takes place every day.
— Albert Camus

We are all in the gutter. But some of us are looking at stars.
- Oscar Wilde

All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.
- Henry Ellis

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.
— Arthur Schopenhauer

If our being is finite, then an authentic human life can only be found by confronting finitude and trying to make a meaning out of the fact of our death.
— Simon Critchley

Relativism is a red herring used by the God-and-apple-piety crowd; it does service for thinking when the discussion gets too complicated.
— Jack Caputo

All thinking men are atheists.
— Ernest Hemingway

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
- Nietzsche

Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
— Albert Einstein

Enterprises, discoveries, and institutions are legitimate only insofar as they contribute to the emancipation of mankind.
— Jean-Francois Lyotard

Hell is other people.
- Sartre

Every morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most.
— Buddha

Without death, everything would sink into absurdity and nothingness.
- Maurice Blanchot

The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.
- Tolstoy

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
- George Bernard Shaw

It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
— Carl Sagan

I am who I am today because of the choices I made yesterday.
- Eleanor Roosevelt

It is not length of life, but depth of life.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
- Bertrand Russell

We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.
- Chuck Palahniuk

If the gods listened to the prayers of men, all men would quickly have perished: for they are always praying for evil against one another.
— Epicurus

And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.
— Nietzsche

To live is to suffer; to survive is to find meaning in the suffering.
— Victor Frankl

He has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it.
— Cornel West on Obama

Life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved.
— Søren Kierkegaard

I knew that I had come face to face with someone whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.
— Oscar Wilde

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
- Nietzsche

Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.
- Stephen King

Life has no meaning a priori. Life itself is nothing until it is lived, it is we who give it meaning, and value is nothing more than the meaning that we give it.
— Sartre

If we worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true really is true, then there would be little hope for advance.
- Orville Wright

Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.
— Sartre

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
- Mark Twain

Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.
— Oscar Wilde

Existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position. Its intention is not in the least that of plunging men into despair. And if by despair one means as the Christians do – any attitude of unbelief, the despair of the existentialists is something different. Existentialism is not atheist in the sense that it would exhaust itself in demonstrations of the non-existence of God. It declares, rather, that even if God existed that would make no difference from its point of view. Not that we believe God does exist, but we think that the real problem is not that of His existence; what man needs is to find himself again and to understand that nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of God. In this sense existentialism is optimistic. It is a doctrine of action, and it is only by self-deception, by confining their own despair with ours that Christians can describe us as without hope.
— Sartre

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 since it is life.
— William Faulkner

Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.
— Henry Miller

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.
— Carl Sagan

I consider it an act of cultural resistance to pay homage publicly to a difficult form of thought, discourse, or writing, one which does not submit easily to normalization by the media, by academics, or by publishers, one which rebels against the restoration currently underway, against the philosophical or theoretical neo-conformism in general (let us not even mention literature) that flattens and levels everything around us.
— Andrea Hurst

A genuine materialism means there isn’t anything immaterial. Matter is irreducible…but you can’t reduce everything to matter.
— Jack Caputo

My big worry is not to be ignored, but to be accepted.
— Zizek

Capitalism generates religious fundamentalism.
— Zizek

One of the most important things we need to do as humans is to stop externalizing evil, and look inside ourselves.
— Wes Craven

Passion has to do with… rejecting the customary ways people have of blunting the reality of suffering through comforting thoughts such as, “Everything will work out in the long run.” Passion is refusing to take refuge in the make believe.
— Paul Hessert

[They] love human dignity so much that they are ready to legalize torture — the ultimate degradation of human dignity — to defend it.
— Slavoj Zizek

Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
— Samuel Beckett

Execute every act of thy life as though it were thy last.
— Marcus Aurelius

Unconscious civilizations become totalitarian wastelands.
— Chris Hedges

We usually claim that time is the ultimate prison (“no one can jump outside of his/her time”), and that the whole of philosophy and religion circulates around one aim: to break out of this prison-house of time into eternity. What, however, if, eternity is the ultimate prison, a suffocating closure, and it is only the fall into time that introduces Opening into human experience?
- Slavoj Zizek

Debt has replaced God as the guarantee for human cooperation, and our modern globalised world is driven by the religion of money.
- Philip Goodchild

Pain is not simply something that imposes itself upon our life but is, more fundamentally, part of life. In other words, the various possible external threats to our participation in meaning are undermined by the very real internal threat of the dread that there might be no meaning. If this is the case then we cannot avoid this suffering but must face it.
- Peter Rollins

As a skeptic, I believe you’ve got to question everything, including skepticism.
- Kari Byron

Theoretical considerations are…vital, for those who would shun academic insights are generally not those who are free from theory but rather the ones who are most in danger of being enslaved by it.
— Peter Rollins

Don’t undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.
- Edwin Land

It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.
- Oscar Wilde