This page presents a growing list of some of my favorite quotes, across time and space (ordered alphabetically by author in three sections: General, Lyrics, and Poetry).

Disclaimer: While I may appreciate these quotes, I don’t necessarily agree with or endorse any particular views espoused by any individual who is quoted on this page.

General

“Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”
– Berthold Auerbach

“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt.”
– Bertrand Russell

“Having a bunch of cats around is good. If you're feeling bad, just look at the cats, you'll feel better, because they know that everything is, just as it is.”
– Charles Bukowski (from the book 'On Cats')

“One should try to write as if posthumously. Because then you’re free of all the inhibition that can cluster around even the most independent-minded writer. You don’t really care about public opinion now, you don’t mind about sales, you don’t care what the critics say. You don’t even care what your friends, your peers, your beloved think. You’re free. Death is a very liberating thought.”
– Christopher Hitchens

“Life is a series of iterations as you screw up in one way or another and you try to make the best of what you have.”
– David Brooks (from episode 334 of the Making Sense podcast, around minute 1:19:38)

“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, 'Look at that, you son of a bitch.'"
– Edgar D. Mitchell (Apollo 14 Astronaut)

"The biggest joy was on the way home. In my cockpit window, every two minutes: The Earth, the Moon, the Sun, and the whole 360-degree panorama of the heavens. And that was a powerful, overwhelming experience. And suddenly I realized that the molecules of my body, and the molecules of the spacecraft, the molecules in the body of my partners, were prototyped, manufactured in some ancient generation of stars. And that was an overwhelming sense of oneness, of connectedness; it wasn't 'Them and Us', it was 'That's me!', that's all of it, it's... it's one thing. And it was accompanied by an ecstasy, a sense of 'Oh my God, wow, yes', an insight, an epiphany."
– Edgar D. Mitchell (Apollo 14 Astronaut)

“Just because you’ve dealt with a stressor, doesn’t mean you’ve dealt with the stress. And you don’t have to wait until all your stressors are dealt with before you deal with your stress.”
– Emily Nagoski PhD and Amelia Nagoski DMA (from the book ‘Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle’)

"Who knows what form the forward momentum of life will take … The most that any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something—an object or ourselves—and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force."
– Ernest Becker (from the book 'The Denial of Death')

“Those who cling to perceptions and views wander the world offending people.” / “Those who cling to their opinions go around annoying one another.”
– Gautama Buddha (from “To Magandiya” in the ‘Sutta Nipata’)

"All politicians should be required to drink Ayahuasca 10 times before taking office."
– Graham Hancock

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms...”
– Henry David Thoreau (from the book 'Walden')

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
– James Clear

"My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."
– J. B. S. Haldane

“Redemption rises with the sun each day.”
– Kevin Doherty

“I would rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not.”
– Kurt Cobain

“I get up at 7:30 and work four hours a day. Nine to twelve in the morning, five to six in the evening. Businessmen would achieve better results if they studied human metabolism. No one works well eight hours a day. No one ought to work more than four hours.”
– Kurt Vonnegut

“The most important thing in your life is what happens at home."
– Labi Siffre

"Don't Try to Make Ice Cubes Out of a Flowing River."
– Laura Huxley

"Then I began to talk to him, saying, 'Light and free,' Some of these thing I told him at night in these last few weeks before he would go to sleep, and now I said it more convincingly, more intensely - 'go, go, let go, darling; forward and up. You are going forward and up; you are going towards the light. Willing and consciously you are going, willingly and consciously, and you are doing this beautifully; you are doing this so beautifully - you are going towards the light; you are going towards a greater love; you are going forward and up. It is so easy; it is so beautiful. You are doing it so beautifully, so easily. Light and free. Forward and up. You are going towards Maria's love with my love. You are going towards a greater love than you have ever known. You are going towards the best, the greatest love, and it is easy, it is so easy, and you are doing it so beautifully … Easy, easy, and you are doing this willingly and consciously and beautifully - going forward and up, light {and} free, forward and up towards the light, into the light, into complete love.'"
– Laura Huxley

“If you don’t know what to do — start. The momentum will carry you along and you’ll learn as you go.”
– Lloyd Kahn

“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.”
– Marcus Aurelius (from 'Meditations')

"Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years."
– Muhammad Ali

"You can have it all, just not all at the same time. Sometimes you have to put other things aside in order to really focus on the thing that's right in front of you."
– Nate Snell (from this podcast episode)

"Always do what you are afraid to do."
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Be here now."
– Ram Dass

"I am loving awareness."
– Ram Dass

"We're all just walking each other home."
– Ram Dass

“Whether we like it or not, compromise is the art of politics. Nobody ever gets everything they want.”
– Raymond W. Smock (from episode 481 of The Phil Ferguson Show, at minute 29:18)

“I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.”
– Richard Feynman

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
– Rumi

“On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer.”
– Satoru Iwata

“I know that I know nothing.” / “All I know is that I know nothing.”
– Socrates

“All the troubles in this world—political, economic, and so forth—are created from the situations in which the awareness of one’s ordinariness is absent.”
– Sodo Yokoyama

"In the midst of a particularly eventful week, I was driving north to meet some friends when I suddenly became aware that I was driving through myself. For years there had been no self at all, yet here on this road everything was myself, and I was driving through me to arrive where I already was. In essence, I was going nowhere because I was everywhere already. The infinite emptiness I knew myself to be was now apparent as the infinite substance of everything I saw."
– Suzanne Segal (from the book 'Collision With the Infinite: A Life Beyond the Personal Self')

"One of the common barriers to happiness is the false expectation that one thing—a book or a teacher, a princess or a knight, an accomplishment, a prize, or a revelation—will bring us eternal bliss. While all these things can contribute to our well-being, at best they form a small part of the mosaic of a happy life. The fairytale notion of happiness—the belief that something would carry us to the happily ever after—inevitably leads to disappointment. A happy—or happier—life is rarely shaped by some extraordinary life-changing event; rather, it is shaped incrementally, experience by experience, moment by moment.

To realize, to make real, life’s potential for the ultimate currency, we must first accept that ‘this is it’—that all there is to life is the day-to-day, the ordinary, the details of the mosaic. We are living a happy life when we derive pleasure and meaning while spending time with our loved ones, or leaning something new, or engaging in a project at work. The more our days are filled with these experiences, the happier we become. This is all there is to it."
– Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar (from the book 'Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment')

“A genius is the one most like [themself].”
– Thelonious Monk

“Less Annoying CRM has a kinda unique culture, and sometimes employees have said to me, ‘More companies should be like this. Why aren’t more companies like this?’ And the thing that makes me uncomfortable is a lot of times, it turns to like, that I’m some kind of amazing boss or something. And then I’m like, ‘If you were the boss, would you do anything differently?’ And they’re like, ‘No.’ Everyone you know would be generous to employees and would let people go home at 5pm and stuff like that. That’s not what’s unique. The unique thing is that people like that never bother to start a company.”
– Tyler King (from Startup to Last episode 119 at minute 42:20)

“The purpose of investing is not to simply optimize returns and make yourself rich. The purpose is not to die poor.”
– William J. Bernstein

"A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad."
– Attribution unclear

"Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good."
– Attribution unclear

Lyrics

“And in the end
The love you take
Is equal to the love you make."
– The Beatles, "The End"

"If you don't know where you're goin', any road will take you there."
– George Harrison, "Any Road" (referencing Lewis Carroll)

"If songs were lines in a conversation, the situation would be fine."
– Nick Drake, "Hazey Jane II"

"I woke up this morning
With a piece of past caught in my throat
And then I choked!"
– Rites Of Spring, "For Want Of"

“Everything that's made is made to decay.”
– Sparklehorse, "Someday I Will Treat You Good" (referencing Daniel Johnston)

"When you said you loved me, did you mean it then?
Did you change your mind one day, or was it all pretend?"
– Tony Molina, "Walk Away"

Poetry

"Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth."
– Kahlil Gibran (from the book 'The Prophet')

"Remember this when you are full of woe
There is a time when every sigh must end;
So often do we think of Time as foe
We do forget that Time can be a friend —"
– Molly Drake, written in Nick Drake's autograph book, 3 January 1956

"I will show you fear in a handful of dust."
– T. S. Eliot (from the poem 'The Waste Land')

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
– Walt Whitman (from the poetry book 'Leaves of Grass')

"What is that you express in your eyes?
It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life."
– Walt Whitman (from the poem 'Song of Myself')

"I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content."
– Walt Whitman (from the poem 'Song of Myself')

"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"
– Walt Whitman (from the poem 'Song of Myself')

"When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
– 'The Peace of Wild Things' by Wendell Berry