Conflict… is a theme that has occupied the thinking of man more than any other, save only God and love.
—Anatol Rapoport (American Mathematical Psychologist)
Don’t tell a woman she’s pretty; tell her there’s no other woman like her, and all roads will open to you.
—Jules Renard (French Author, Diarist)
A population weakened and exhausted by battling against so many obstacles—whose needs are never satisfied and desires never fulfilled—is vulnerable to manipulation and regimentation. The struggle for survival is, above all, an exercise that is hugely time-consuming, absorbing and debilitating. If you create these “anti-conditions,” your rule is guaranteed for a hundred years.
—Ryszard Kapuscinski (Polish Journalist)
The fact that there is a general belief in a future life is no evidence of its truth.
—Clarence Darrow (American Lawyer)
People are never free of trying to be content.
—Murray Bookchin (American Political Thinker)
Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.
—Thomas Merton (American Trappist Monk)
We pass our life in deliberation, and we die upon it.
—Pasquier Quesnel (French Theologian)
You should talk to people who disagree with you and you should talk to people who are not in the same emotional situation you are.
—Daniel Kahneman (American-Israeli Psychologist, Economist)
The noble title of ‘dissident’ must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.
—Christopher Hitchens (Anglo-American Social Critic)
Vicissitude of fortune which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, but buries empires and cities in a common grave.
—Edward Gibbon (English Historian)
True courage is more a matter of intellect than of feeling.
—Steve Pavlina (American Motivational Speaker)
The anguish of the neurotic individual is the same as that of the saint. The neurotic, the saint are engaged in the same battle. Their blood flows from similar wounds. But the first one gasps and the other one gives.
—Georges Bataille (French Essayist, Intellectual)
He who loses money, loses much; He who loses a friend, loses much more; He who loses faith, loses all.
—Eleanor Roosevelt (American Humanitarian)
The universe appears to me like an immense, inexorable torture-garden. Passions, greed, hatred, and lies; law, social institutions, justice, love, glory, heroism, and religion: these are its monstrous flowers and its hideous instruments of eternal human suffering.
—Octave Mirbeau (French Author)
The ultimate Path is without difficulty. Just avoid picking and choosing.
—Jianzhi Sengcan (Chinese-Buddhist Monk)