Lateralus and the Qabala

QUOTES

MAYNARD

"I think psychedelics play a major part in what we do, but having said that, I feel that if somebody's going to experiment with those things they really need to educate themselves about them. People just taking the chemicals and diving in without having any kind of preparation about what they're about to experience tend to have no frame of reference, so they're missing everything flying by and all these new perspectives. It's just a waste. They reach a little bit of spiritual enlightenment, but they end up going, 'Well, now I need that drug to get back there again.' The trick is to use the drugs once to get there, and maybe spend the next ten years trying to get back there without the drug."

- MJK

(Do you hate people?)
"Pretty much, I would have to say absolutely."
(Why?)
"Ignorance."

- MJK

"Welcome to our world!"
- MJK

"food, shelter, clothing, pussy"
- MJK on what inspires him

"When I get an idea, my balls itch."
- MJK

"Are ya happy? On three can I get a big, fat YES? 1..2..3 How 'bout in French, which is OUI (we) in case you wouldn't know that. 1..2..3.. And in Spanish, which is SI. 1..2..3..

- MJK before "46 & 2" at the Coachella Festival

- MJK live before Stinkfist (w/ Suspicious Minds lyrics)

"Good evening. It's good too see you all. Especially all of our Hollywood guests. This next song we don't normally do, but seeing as we've got so many very important guests from Hollywood; figured we'd do it for you. Incidentally, can we get you anything else? Cold beer? Hot Chocolate? A pillow in your fucking seat?

- MJK before "Ticks & Leeches"

"It's been a long time since we've been able to play with Rage Against The Machine. We've spent many, many months in Europe eating stale bread and horrible cheese. It's a pleasure to play with them again. Did they kick your ass? I don't know if you know this or not, but Zack is really sick and he still came out here and kicked your ass. What do you think of that? They have a new record coming out on November 1st, go and buy it."

- MJK after "Eulogy" at the Coachella Festival

"We have a guest. We have Buzz from the Melvin's joining us. This is a song by a band called Peach, which Justin used to be in. Back when he was eating bad food."

- MJK before "Spasm" at the Coachella Festival

- MJK during and after the song "4 degrees" at a concert

"I love fairy tales."
- MJK on Christianity

"We were backstage playing Monopoly and totally forgot there was a show."
- MJK on why they were so late for their set

- MJK announcing the last song at one of their concerts

"Hello, we're Tool. Just a reminder for those of you who are too fucked on acid to remember."
- MJK

- MJK on Ænima

- MJK on Message to Harry Manback

"I am not a scientologist nor should anyone else be."
- MJK

- MJK on Justin

- MJK on Bill Hicks

- MJK on being dark

- MJK on the success of Ænima

- MJK after Opiate

"I want you to take these feelings home with you, and remember them, and create something positive with them."

- MJK at the end of a show

"We must know where we came from to know where we are going."

- MJK

"I didn't spend six freakin' years in evil medical school just to be called 'Mister.'"

Um.... Uh.....

- MJK

DANNY

"We're a total drug band. We're as psychedelic as a band can get, but we're articulate about it, I suppose. That's the difference between us and some other groups."

- Danny Carey

"We're dealing with the chaos of life, and we're rubbing it down. The deeper you rub, the more patterns you can see until you realize that it's really an organized chaos. There isn't really ever any chance to understand it all, but we're here to keep rubbing."

- Danny Carey

"...no recording can capture what happens in a room with four people who have a similar cause and believe in it. Especially the way we play. Live is what our band is about..."

- Danny Carey

"...kids will mosh to anything these days, but there are those people in the crowd that the music reaches on a deeper psychological and subconscious level..."

- Danny Carey

"...the band is strong right now, all the cylinders are firing. There's more focus than there was ever before. The projects are only going to get bigger and better..."

- Danny Carey

- Danny Carey

"...they are known to make people feel good, so that's our feel good song for the record..."

- Danny on (-)ions

- Danny Carey

ADAM

"The best thing about [Tool] is that no matter how many albums we sell, or how many tours we headline, our focus remains on the music."

- Adam Jones

"Our music is designed to inspire - to create thought - and no matter where we are, and how many people may be in the audience, that's where our efforts go."

- Adam Jones

"...when we started the band we all had our own jobs. We did this as a side project, we never intended to get signed. It was all about the music, music that inspires and music that creates thought..."

- Adam Jones

"...we're all individuals and have our own opinions. We end up meeting in the middle and producing what you hear as Tool..."

- Adam Jones

JUSTIN

"...I can't wait to get on with touring because it's the communion of our music on a much more personal level in a greater way than recording..."

- Justin Chancellor

"...I've never come across or been part of a collection of souls so diverse in character and belief that possess the ability to mutually accommodate those differences and evolve them into positive creativity..."

- Justin Chancellor

"...if you listen carefully you can hear the rubble subsiding into a glorious new landscape. Only then are you afforded the clarity of mind essential to pry open your third eye..."

- Justin Chancellor

- Justin on Third Eye

RANDOM QUOTES

"Some people go to church, I go to Tool concerts."

-Andy Augspurger

"Since the one thing we can say about fundamental matter is, that it is vibrating. And since all vibrations are theoretically sound, then it is not unreasonable to suggest that the universe is music and should be perceived as such."
- Joachim Ernst-Berendt

"Music is the universal language of mankind"
-Longfellow

"It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music."
-Ursula K. Le Guin

"A stone is frozen music"
-Pythagoras

"Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

"It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf."
-Walter Lippman

"Music fathoms the sky."
-Charles Baudelaire

"Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn."
-Charlie Parker

"The musician should find in mathematics a study as useful to him as the learning of another language is to a poet."
-Igor Stravinsky

"Music is the harmonious voice of creation; an echo of the invisible world."
-Geoffrey Latham

"Sex is the mathematics urge sublimated."
-M. C. Reed

"Cause you know, if you play New Kids on the Block albums backwards, they sound better. "Oh come on, Bill, they're the New Kids, don't pick on them, they're so good and they're so clean cut and they're such a good image for the children." Fuck that. When did mediocrity and banality become a good image for your children? I want my children to listen to people who fucking rocked."
-Bill Hicks

"The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud."
-Coco Chanel

"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance."
-Derek Bok

"Ideals are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them with your hands. But like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them you will reach your destiny."
-Carl Schurz

"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools talk because they have to say something." 
- Plato

"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."
-H. L. Mencken

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices, but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."
-Albert Einstein

"What a crazy world we live in! Trying to treat addiction as a legal problem, and trying to treat criminal misbehaviors using guns as a medical problem! Beam me up, Scotty. Ain't no intelligent life down here." 
-Julie Cochrane

"There is one light of the sun, though it is interrupted by walls, mountains and infinite other things. There is one Intelligent Soul, though it seems to be divided. All things are implicated with one another. The Spirit that bonds us all as One is holy. Everything on Earth, under the heavens, is connected with every other thing. All the different things in the world are coordinated and combined to make up the same universe."
-Marcus Aurelius

"Excellence can be attained if you Care more than others think is wise, Risk more than others think is safe, Dream more than others think is practical, and Expect more than others think is possible." 
-Author Unknown

"Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young." 
-Henry Ford

"We are not human beings on a spiritual journey. We are spiritual beings on a human journey."
-Stephen R. Covey

"Include just enough to allow the viewers to identify the subject, but then leave intimate, abstract compositions in other areas for the viewers to enjoy individually."
-Anonymous

"Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity"
-Anonymous

"Man must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind him to the fact that each moment of his life is a miracle and a mystery."
-H. G. Wells

"With soap, baptism is a good thing." 
-Robert G. Ingersoll

"I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forego their use."
-Galileo

"Doctors pour drugs of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, into human beings of which they know nothing." 
-Voltaire

"The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible."
-Bertrand Russell

"The beat goes on regardless of a conditioned notion That Causes all our Suffering and useless commotion, As there is no Will beyond the Will of What-IS Reality But is the Will of Truth Evoluting/Involuting a Totality."
-Yogajyotii

"In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists."
-Eric Hoffer

"Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong."
-Thomas Jefferson

"A belief, however necessary it may be for the preservation of a species, has nothing to do with truth. The falseness of a judgment is not for us necessarily an objection to a judgment. The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life-preserving, species preserving, perhaps even species cultivating. To recognize untruth as a condition of life--that cetainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil."
-Friedrich Nietzsche

"There are two modes of acquiring knowledge, namely by reasoning and experience. Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the mind may rest on the intuition of truth, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience."
-Roger Bacon

"The Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one."
-David Hume

"It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong."
-Thomas Jefferson

"simple people talk of people, notable people talk of events, and extraordinary people talk of ideas"
-Eleanor Roosevelt

"I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art."
-Kahlil Gibran

"Certum est, quia impossibile est." (It is certain because it is impossible.)
-Tertullian

"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."
-John Milton

"The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order … the continuous thread of revelation."
-Eudora Welty

"The mysterious … is the source of all true art and science."
-Albert Einstein

"Hell is other people."
-Jean Paul Sartre

"Labour to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire,—conscience."
-George Washington 

"All that we see or seem, is but a dream within a dream."
-Edgar Allan Poe 

"Our sun is one of 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Our galaxy is one of billions of galaxies populating the universe. It would be the height of presumption to think that we are the only living things in that enormous immensity."
-Wernher von Braun

"Out of mind as soon as out of sight."
-Lord Brooke 

"Money … is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets."
-Somerset Maugham 

"Religion is more like response to a friend than it is like obedience to an expert."
-Austin Farrer 

"Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious."
-George Orwell 

"No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober."
-Samuel Smiles 

"Knowledge is not simply another commodity. On the contrary. Knowledge is never used up. It increases by diffusion and grows by dispersion."
-Daniel J. Boorstin 

"The imagination must not be given too much material. It must be denied food so that it can work for itself."
-Macedonlo de la Torre

"We are all designed for a specific purpose; we all have something for which each of us, and each of us alone, is responsible."
-Naomi Stephan 

"Lighthouses are more helpful than churches."
-Benjamin Franklin

"You study, you learn, but you guard the original naiveté. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love is within the lover."
-Henri Matisse 

"The leader must know, must know that he knows and must be able to make it abundantly clear to those about him that he knows."
-Clarence B. Randall

"Change your thoughts and you change your world."
-Norman Vincent Peale

"Every man hath a good and a bad angel attending on him in particular, all his life long."
-Robert Burton

"Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned."
-Anonymous

"The alleged power to charm down insanity, or ferocity in beasts, is a power behind the eye."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson 

"Who does not love wine, women, and song. Remains a fool his whole life long."
-Anonymous 

"He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper."
-Edmund Burke 

"We are in the black theater of nonexistence. In an eye blink the curtain is up, the stage ablaze, for the vast drama of ourselves."
-Herman Wouk 

"When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute—and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity."
-Albert Einstein 

"To be loose with grammar is to be loose with the worst woman in the world."
-Otis C. Edwards 

"Make-believe colors the past with innocent distortion, and it swirls ahead of us in a thousand ways—in science, in politics, in every bold intention."
-Shirley Temple Black

"The Theologian is an owl, sitting on an old dead branch in the tree of human knowledge, and hooting the same old hoots that have been hooted for hundreds and thousands of years, but he has never given a hoot for progress."
-Emmet F. Fields

"Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart…. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes."
-Carl Jung

"Half the world is composed of idiots, the other half of people clever enough to take indecent advantage of them."
-Walter Kerr

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be."
-Douglas Adams

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness."
-Allen Ginsberg 

"All television is children's television."
-Anonymous

"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night."
-Edgar Allan Poe

"A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become well known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized."
-Fred Allen

"We cannot change anything unless we accept it."
-Carl Jung

"Ignorance is the mother of devotion." 
-Dean Henry Cole

"Once stretched by a new idea, man's mind never returns to its original dimensions."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

"CAUTION: Proper use of the brain is not endorsed by federal governments nor huge corporations involved in serious financial profit from a brainwashed and enslaved population. Mild discomfort may occur as confusing independent thought challenges your current view of the world...Information is power. THINK FOR YOURSELF."
-Timothy Leary

"There are two theories to arguing with women. Neither one works."
-Anonymous

"Man is nothing else than that which he makes of himself"
-Sartre

"If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't"
-Lyall Watson

"I am free of all prejudices. I hate everyone equally."
-W. C. Fields

"If you think you can win, you can win. Faith is necessary to victory."
-William Hazlitt

"Conventional wisdom would have one believe that it is insane to resist this, the mightiest of empires... but what history really shows is that today's empire is tomorrow's ashes, that nothing lasts forever, and that to not resist is to acquiesce in your own oppression. The greatest form of sanity that anyone can exercise is to resist that force that is trying to repress, oppress and fight the human spirit."
-Mumia Abu-Jamal

"Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed."
-Mark Twain

"No one means all he says, yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous."
-Henry Adams

"Pure morality is only an instinctive adjustment which the soul makes."
-D.H. Lawrence

"It matters not whether you win or lose; what matters is whether I win or lose."
-Darrin Weinberg

"What if I say to you that the universe is a three-legged horse, eh? What then?"
-Russell Hoban

"God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich."
-W. H. Auden

"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
-Antoine de Saint Exupéry

"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it."
-Garrison Keillor

"We don't need more money, we don't need greater success or fame, we don't need the perfect body or even the perfect mate. Right now, at this very moment, we have a mind, which is all the basic equipment we need to achieve complete happiness."
-Anonymous

"I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you and I am I, and if by chance we find each other -- it is beautiful. If not it can't be helped."
-Fritz Perls

"We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another." 
-Jonathan Swift

"Consider the ignorance of the average fundamentalist. Then realize that by definition fully half of them must be even dumber than that."
-Anonymous

"If us who know so little can see a bit of good and right, we may be sure as there's a good and a right bigger than what we can know. I feel it in my own inside as it must be so."
-Anonymous

"Everyone has his own conscience, and there should be no rules about how a conscience should function."
-Ernest Hemingway

"Minds are like parachutes - they only function when open."
-Thomas Dewar

"An intimate relationship does not banish loneliness. Only when we are comfortable with who we are and can function independently in a healthy way, can we truly function within a relationship. Two halves do not make a whole when it comes to a healthy relationship: it takes two wholes."
-Patricia Fry

"The best advice on the art of being happy is about as easy to follow as advice to be well when one is sick." 
-Madame Swetchine

"An insincere and evil friend is more to be feared than a wild beast; a wild beast may wound your body, but an evil friend will wound your mind." 
-Buddha

"All blame is a waste of time. No matter how much fault you find with another, it will not change you. Blame keeps the focus off you when you're looking for reasons to explain your unhappiness or frustration. You may succeed in making another feel guilty, but you won't change whatever it is about you that is making you unhappy."
-Wayne Dyer

"The creator of the universe works in mysterious ways. But he uses a base ten counting system and likes round numbers."
-Scott Adams

"Flatter me, and I will not believe you. Criticize me, and I will not like you. Ignore me, and I will not forgive you. Encourage me, and I will not forget you."
-William Arthur

"It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don't say it." 
-Sam Levenson

"I speak without reservation from what I know and who I am. I do so with the understanding that all people should have the right to offer their voice to the chorus whether the result is harmony or dissonance, the world song is a colorless dirge without the differences that distinguish us, and it is that difference which should be celebrated not condemned."
-Ani Difranco

"Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow grow, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation." 
-George Washington

"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment."
-Buddha

"Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.'' 
-Lillian Smith

"Only the brave know how to forgive; it is the most refined and generous pitch of virtue human nature can arrive at."
-Laurence Stern

"The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper." 
-Eden Phillpotts

"All men who have achieved great things have been great dreamers."
-Orison Swett Marden

"You must first clearly see a thing in your mind before you can do it."
-Alex Morrison

"Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future."
-Paul Boese

"The work of the individual still remains the spark that moves mankind forward."
-Igor Sikorsky

"Intolerance has been the curse of every age and state."
-Samuel Davies

"Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace."
-Albert Schweitzer

"We are all caught up in an inescapable web of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever effects one directly effects all indirectly."
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

"How foolish it is to strive after worldly things. It is a great deal wiser to simply present yourself honestly and faithfully to the gods, in perfect simplicity."
-Marcus Aurelius

"Sex is the tabasco sauce which an adolescent national palate sprinkles on every course in the menu." 
-Mary Day Winn

"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth."
-Marcus Aurelius

"A fellow who is always declaring he's no fool usually has his suspicions." 
-Wilson Mizner 

"You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength."
-Marcus Aurelius

"Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness." 
-James Thurber

"Love must be learned, and learned again and again; there is no end to it. Hate needs no instruction, but wants only to be provoked." 
-Katherine Anne Porter

"As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand." 
-Josh Billings 

"It's better to be a lion for a day than a sheep all your life."
-Elizabeth Kenny

"Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go."
-T.S. Eliot

"The greater the philosopher, the harder it is for him to answer the questions of common people." 
-Henryk Sienkiewicz 

"What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes 

"To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead."
-Bertrand Russell 

"Whoever values peace of mind and the health of the soul will live the best of all possible lives."
-Marcus Aurelius

"It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot, irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it." 
-Jacob Chanowski

"Love is not blind - it sees more, not less. But because it sees more, it is willing to see less."
-Julins Gordon

"Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh." 
-George Bernard Shaw 

"Nobody really cares if you're miserable, so you might as well be happy."
-Cynthia Nelms

"If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane."
-Robert G. Ingersoll

"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength; loving someone deeply gives you courage."
-Lao-Tzu

"Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction." 
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"The supreme happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved -- loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves."
-Victor Hugo

"We live by encouragement and die without it - slowly, sadly and angrily." 
-Celeste Holmr

"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." 
-Confucius

"The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing."
-John Powell

"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams."
-Eleanor Roosevelt

"Live as if your were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever."
-Mahatma Gandhi

"So long as they don't get violent, I want to let everyone say what they wish, for I myself have always said exactly what pleased me."
-Albert Einstein

"I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it." 
-Henry Emerson Fosdick

"There is no disguise which can hide love for long where it exists, or simulate it where it does not."
-La Rochefoucauld

"There is no limit to what can be accomplished if it doesn't matter who gets the credit." 
-Emerson

"There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from."
-Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

"Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it you will land among the stars."
-Les Brown

"Love is the answer, but while you are waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions."
-Woody Allen

"There is only on thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience." 
-Archibald McLeish 

"A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world." 
-Sigmund Freud

"We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence."
-Philip Pullman

"It isn't what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about." 
-Dale Carnegie

"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
-W. Edwards Deming

"When you make the finding yourself - even if you're the last person on Earth to see the light - you'll never forget it."
-Carl Sagan

"If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow."
-Chinese Proverb

"The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you, and you don't know how or why." 
-Albert Einstein 

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious."
-Albert Einstein

"If a man will begin in certainties he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin in doubts he shall end in certainties."
-Francis Bacon

"Know the true value of time! Snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no procrastination. Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today."
-Philip Chesterfield

"The holiest of all holidays are those kept by ourselves in silence and apart; The secret anniversaries of the heart."
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Every great work, every big accomplishment, has been brought into manifestation through holding to the vision, and often just before the big achievement, comes apparent failure and discouragement."
-Florence Scovel Shinn

"Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it you can."
-Danny Kaye

"Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does." 
-William James

"And of course, with the birth of the artist came the inevitable afterbirth -- the critic."
-Narrator in 'History of the World: Part I'

"Success is getting what you want; happiness is wanting what you get."
-Anonymous

"Fidelity is a matter of perception; nobody is unfaithful to the sea or to mountains or to death: once recognized they fill the heart."
-Russell Hoban

"Crowds of men are like crowds of sheep. Not the best, but the first leader is usually followed."
-Max Brand

"Don't lower your expectations to meet your performance. Raise your level of performance to meet your expectations. Expect the best of yourself, and then do what is necessary to make it a reality." 
-Ralph Marston

"Joy in looking and comprehending is nature's most beautiful gift"
-Albert Einstein

"He who reins within himself and rules passions, desires, and fears is more than a king"
-John Milton

"History has shown us all too often the consequences of dreaming poorly or not at all."
-Jeff VanderMeer

"Only the man who finds everything wrong and expects it to get worse is thought to have a clear brain."
-John Kenneth Galbraith

"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate."
-Carl Jung

"Half the world is composed of idiots, the other half is people clever enough to take indecent advantage of them."
-Walter Kerr 

"As people used to be wrong about the motion of the sun, so they are still wrong about the motion of the future. The future stands still; it is we who move in infinite space."
-Rainer Maria Rilke 

"To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life"
-Robert Louis Stevenson

"A good listener tries to understand thoroughly what the other person is saying. In the end he may disagree sharply, but before he disagrees, he wants to know exactly what it is he is disagreeing with."
-Kenneth A. Wells 

"Love is an attempt to change a piece of a dream-world into reality"
-Henry David Thoreau

"Only when you can be extremely pliable and soft can you be extremely hard and strong."
-Zen proverb

"The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm"
-Aldous Huxley

"An object in possession seldom retains the same charm that it had in pursuit."
-Gaius Plinius

"Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures"
-Henry Ward Beecher

"To stumble twice against the same stone is a proverbial disgrace."
-Cicero

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."
-Henry David Thoreau

"Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve. He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind."
-Leonardo da Vinci

"No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not some day be antiquated.... To seize the flying thought before it escapes us is our only touch with reality."
-Ellen Glasgow

"I won't slave for beggar's pay
likewise gold and jewels
but I would slave to learn the way
to sink your ship of fools"
-Robert Hunter

"Only two things in life are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I am not so sure about the former."
-Albert Einstein

"Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know."
-Aldous Huxley

"Do you really serve the Devil if it's all God's plan? Good and Evil need each other; Honey I'm your man."
-Robyn Hitchcock in "Serpent at the Gates of Wisdom

"These lives we live falsify the reality we all pertain too."
-Lyle Warren

"The great masses of the people... will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one."
-Adolf Hitler

"Men are born with two eyes, but with one tongue, in order that they should see twice as much as they say."
-Charles Caleb Colton

"Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself."
-Richard Bach

"In dreams and in love there are no impossibilities"
-Janos Arany

"The folks who know the truth aren't talking. The ones who don't have a clue, you can't shut them up."
-Tom Waits

"The lips of wisdom are closed, except to the ears of Understanding." 
-The Kybalion.

"Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for the appointment by the corrupt few."
-George Bernard Shaw

"The best way to escape from a problem is to solve it."
-Alan Saporta

"The empires of the future are the empires of the mind."
-Sir Winston Churchill

"I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal."
-Jane Austen

"A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends."
-Baltasar Graciánn Baltasar

"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him."
-Voltaire

"In studying the way, realizing it is hard; once you have realized it, preserving it is hard. When you can preserve it, putting it into practice is hard."
-Zen Saying

"Good humor is one of the best articles of dress one can wear in society."
-William Makepeace Thackeray

"Society is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists--talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"If you have no confidence in yourself, you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence, you have won even before you have started"
-Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind."
-William Shakespeare

"Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished. If you're alive, it isn't."
-Richard Bach

"It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not."
-Andre Gide

"Oh yeah, we know each other real well -- although I don’t think we’ve ever flesh met."
-Howard Rheingold

"A graceful taunt is worth a thousand insults."
-Louis Nizer

"Freedom of speech and freedom of action are meaningless without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt."
-Bergen Baldwin Evans

"The skill of man is unequal to the formation of a new man from old materials, but the battered tenement may, with care, be long sustained by props."
-Becklard’s Physiology

"I attribute the little I know to my not having been ashamed to ask for information, and to my rule of conversing with all descriptions of men on those topics that form their own peculiar professions and pursuits."
-John Locke

"Nature has given men one tongue and two ears, that we may hear twice as much as we speak." 
-Epictetus

"Nobody can teach what is inside a person; it has to be discovered for oneself and a way must be found to express it."
-Eduardo Chillida

"Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life."
-Immanuel Kant

"I hold, as an article of faith, that the worth of an organization can be accurately measured as the reciprocal of how many "Hollywood beautiful people" it attracts. It has never failed me yet."
-Barry Williams (the Skeptic of Oz)

"To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything."
-Anatole France

"That which is everybody's business is nobody's business."
-Izaak Walton 

"Because television can make so much money doing its worst, it often cannot afford to do its best."
-Fred W. Friendly

"The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled."
-Plutarch

"Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Energy is eternal delight."
-William Blake

"The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live."
-Victor Hugo

"Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face."
-Victor Hugo

"Whenever we seek to avoid the responsibility for our own behavior, we do so by attempting to give that responsibility to some other individual or organization or entity. But this means we then give away our power to that entity."
-M Scott Peck

"I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about."
-Arthur C. Clarke

"If in our daily life we can smile, if we can be peaceful and happy, not only we, but everyone will profit from it. This is the most basic kind of peace work."
-Thich Nhat Hanh

"The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, "I was wrong".
-Sydney Harris

"I will act as if what I do makes a difference."
-William James

"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."
-Howard Hathaway Aiken

"Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business."
-Tom Robbins

"Change does not necessarily assure progress, but progress implacably requires change. Education is essential to change, for education creates both new wants and the ability to satisfy them."
-Henry Steele Commager 

"The secret of success is to know something nobody else knows."
-Aristotle Onassis

"Mankind owes to the child the best it has to give. Most convicted felons are just people who were not taken to museums or Broadway musicals as children."
-Libby Gelman-Waxner

"Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result."
-Winston Churchill

"Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest."
-Mark Twain 

"If we do not learn from history, we shall be compelled to relive it. True. But if we do not change the future, we shall be compelled to endure it. And that could be worse."
-Leonard I. Sweet

"Military justice is to justice what military music is to music."
-Groucho Marx

"The best way to know God is to love many things."
-Vincent Van Gogh

"Life is a great big canvas; throw all the paint you can at it."
-Danny Kaye

"Genius without education is like silver in the mine."
-Benjamin Franklin

"The grim fact is that we prepare for war like precocious giants, and for peace like retarded pygmies."

-Lester Bowles Pearson

"You must try diligently to know everything! It is, of course, absolutely impossible in our times, but, the more you know the harder it is to lie to you, the less you know the easier it is to lie to you!"
-Unknown

"The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude."
-Friedrich Nietzsche

"Having ideas is like having chessmen moving forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"True enjoyment comes from activity of the mind and exercise of the body; the two are ever united."
-Humboldt

"Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's."
-Billy Wilder

"Anyone who keeps learning stays young."
-Henry Ford

"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."
-Bertrand Russell

"Energy and persistence conquer all things."
-Benjamin Franklin

"Ask a question and you're a fool for three minutes; do not ask a question and you're a fool for the rest of your life."
-Chinese Proverb

"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you too, can become great."
-Mark Twain

"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man."
-Elbert Hubbard

"The greatest achievement of the human spirit is to live up to one's opportunities and make the most of one's resources."
-Marquis de Vauvenargues

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

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
-Voltaire.

"Books are a finer world within the world."
-Alexander Smith

"We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality."
-Albert Einstein

"Let's find out what everyone is doing, and then stop everyone from doing it."
-A.P. Herbert 

"The strongest are those who renounce their own times and become a living part of those yet to come. The strongest, and the rarest."
-Milovan Djilas 

"If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?"
-Thomas Huxley

"All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in fact, barely presentable."
-Fran Lebowitz

"I don't like authority, at least I don't like other people's authority."
-A.C. Benson

"You can fool too many of the people too much of the time."
-James Thurber

"Sit in reverie and watch the changing color of the waves that break upon the idle seashore of the mind."
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Where there is no difference, there is only indifference."
-Louis Nizer

"Behind every argument is someone's ignorance."
-Louis D. Brandeis

"A friend is one that knows you as you are, understands where you have been, accepts what you have become, and still, gently allows you to grow." 
–William Shakespeare

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

–William Shakespeare 

"Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything."
-Napoleon Hill

"Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things."
-Russell Baker

"The only good imitations are those that poke fun at bad originals."
-Francois de La Rouchefoucauld

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
-Albert Einstein

"Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control -- these three alone lead to power."
-Alfred Lord Tennyson