Chapter 3 - You are reading Chapter 3 right now!
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Chapter 3

Friedrich Nietzsche

That which does not kill us makes us stronger. [1]

William Wordsworth

How does the Meadow flower its bloom unfold? Because the lovely little flower is free down to its root, and in that freedom bold. [2]

Samuel Beckett

You're on earth. There's no cure for that. [3]

Jean-Paul Sartre

Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth. [4]

Umberto Eco

The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it. [5]

John Ruskin

When a man is wrapped up in himself, he makes a pretty small package. [6]

Gabriel García Márquez

No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing. [7]

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Man only likes to count his troubles, but he does not count his joys. [8]

Bill Maher

The problem is that the people with the most ridiculous ideas are always the people who are most certain of them. [9]

Marcel Proust

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book. [10]

Christopher Hitchens

High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments. [11]

John Dewey

The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs. [12]

Flannery O'Connor

At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily. [13]

Geoffrey Chaucer

First he wrought, and afterward he taught. [14]

J.M. Barrie

His lordship may compel us to be equal upstairs, but there will never be equality in the servants hall. [15]

Alfred Tennyson

The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions. [16]

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living. [17]

Adolf Hitler

It is not truth that matters, but victory. [18]

Leo Tolstoy

The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity. [19]

Oscar Wilde

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance. [20]

Henry James

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting. [21]

Adam Smith

Resentment seems to have been given us by nature for a defense, and for a defense only! It is the safeguard of justice and the security of innocence. [22]

Joe Rogan

The misconception is that standup comics are always on. I don't know any really funny comics that are annoying and constantly trying to be funny all the time. [23]

Thomas Sowell

Talkers are usually more articulate than doers, since talk is their specialty. [24]

Charles Darwin

An American monkey, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men. [25]

Richard Dawkins

Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things. [26]

Henry David Thoreau

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity. [27]

Emil Cioran

What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his? [28]

Ernest Hemingway

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know? [29]

Winston Churchill

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give. [30]

Albert Einstein

I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious. [31]

E.O. Wilson

By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified. [32]

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own. [33]

John Locke

We are like chameleons, we take our hue and the color of our moral character, from those who are around us. [34]

Eudora Welty

For the night was not impartial. No, the night loved some more than others, served some more than others. [35]

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over. [36]

Richard Feynman

If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize. [37]

James Joyce

Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America. [38]

Albert Camus

Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken. [39]

William Shakespeare

Men at some time are the masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings. [40]

Victor Hugo

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor. [41]

George W. Bush

One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures. [42]

Gore Vidal

There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. [43]

John Steinbeck

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it. [44]

Virginia Woolf

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title. [45]

James Madison

Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. [46]

Thomas Paine

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right. [47]

Henri Poincare

The mathematical facts worthy of being studied are those which, by their analogy with other facts, are capable of leading us to the knowledge of a physical law. [48]

Jane Austen

Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure. [49]

William F. Buckley Jr.

I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would affront your intelligence. [50]

Stephen Hawking

We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet, [51]

Walt Whitman

I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best. [52]

Arthur Conan Doyle

What feeds me destroys me. [53]

John Milton

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties. [54]

Immanuel Kant

Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another. [55]

Jonathan Swift

The proper words in the proper places are the true definition of style. [56]

Aristotle

All men by nature desire knowledge. [57]

Mark Twain

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. [58]

Franz Kafka

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy. [59]

Carl Sagan

Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another. [60]

Voltaire

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything. [61]

Denis Diderot

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild. [62]

Noam Chomsky

It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies. [63]

Benjamin Franklin

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of. [64]

Arthur Schopenhauer

We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people. [65]

Frederick the Great

If my soldiers were to begin to think, not one would remain in the ranks. [66]

Gustave Flaubert

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe. [67]

Bertrand Russell

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education. [68]

Edgar Allan Poe

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry. [69]

David Hume

Custom is the great guide to human life. [70]

John Berger

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying. [71]

James Anthony Froude

The practical effect of a belief is the real test of its soundness. [72]

André Malraux

The attempt to force human beings to despise themselves is what I call hell. [73]

André Gide

It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves - in finding themselves. [74]

Douglas Adams

Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? [75]

George Eliot

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections. [76]

Toni Morrison

There is really nothing more to say-except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how. [77]

George Orwell

Big Brother is watching you. [78]

William Faulkner

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain. [79]

Elizabeth I of England

A strength to harm is perilous in the hand of an ambitious head. [80]

Jack Kerouac

All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together. [81]

Baruch Spinoza

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion. [82]

John Stuart Mill

A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life. [83]

Ludwig Wittgenstein

A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring. [84]

Isaac Newton

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers. [85]

Charles Dickens

The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again. [86]

José Saramago

I am traveling less in order to be able to write more. I select my travel destinations according to their degree of usefulness to my work. [87]

William James

It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome. [88]

Dante Alighieri

The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality. [89]

George Bernard Shaw

The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity. [90]

In Order of Appearance

Each chapter features the same authors in the same order! Different quotes.


  1. Friedrich Nietzsche - 12 ↩︎

  2. William Wordsworth - 63 ↩︎

  3. Samuel Beckett - 28 ↩︎

  4. Jean-Paul Sartre - 202 ↩︎

  5. Umberto Eco - 390 ↩︎

  6. John Ruskin - 212 ↩︎

  7. Gabriel García Márquez - 24 ↩︎

  8. Fyodor Dostoyevsky - 13 ↩︎

  9. Bill Maher - 11 ↩︎

  10. Marcel Proust - 54 ↩︎

  11. Christopher Hitchens - 1 ↩︎

  12. John Dewey - 47 ↩︎

  13. Flannery O'Connor - 154 ↩︎

  14. Geoffrey Chaucer - 162 ↩︎

  15. J.M. Barrie - 186 ↩︎

  16. Alfred Tennyson - 73 ↩︎

  17. Jean-Jacques Rousseau - 205 ↩︎

  18. Adolf Hitler - 65 ↩︎

  19. Leo Tolstoy - 25 ↩︎

  20. Oscar Wilde - 56 ↩︎

  21. Henry James - 181 ↩︎

  22. Adam Smith - 19 ↩︎

  23. Joe Rogan - 46 ↩︎

  24. Thomas Sowell - 383 ↩︎

  25. Charles Darwin - 114 ↩︎

  26. Richard Dawkins - 2 ↩︎

  27. Henry David Thoreau - 180 ↩︎

  28. Emil Cioran - 146 ↩︎

  29. Ernest Hemingway - 22 ↩︎

  30. Winston Churchill - 400 ↩︎

  31. Albert Einstein - 69 ↩︎

  32. E.O. Wilson - 142 ↩︎

  33. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - 15 ↩︎

  34. John Locke - 49 ↩︎

  35. Eudora Welty - 150 ↩︎

  36. F. Scott Fitzgerald - 152 ↩︎

  37. Richard Feynman - 58 ↩︎

  38. James Joyce - 14 ↩︎

  39. Albert Camus - 9 ↩︎

  40. William Shakespeare - 8 ↩︎

  41. Victor Hugo - 60 ↩︎

  42. George W. Bush - 167 ↩︎

  43. Gore Vidal - 170 ↩︎

  44. John Steinbeck - 215 ↩︎

  45. Virginia Woolf - 393 ↩︎

  46. James Madison - 193 ↩︎

  47. Thomas Paine - 382 ↩︎

  48. Henri Poincare - 179 ↩︎

  49. Jane Austen - 44 ↩︎

  50. William F. Buckley Jr. - 397 ↩︎

  51. Stephen Hawking - 59 ↩︎

  52. Walt Whitman - 394 ↩︎

  53. Arthur Conan Doyle - 88 ↩︎

  54. John Milton - 50 ↩︎

  55. Immanuel Kant - 42 ↩︎

  56. Jonathan Swift - 52 ↩︎

  57. Aristotle - 31 ↩︎

  58. Mark Twain - 26 ↩︎

  59. Franz Kafka - 23 ↩︎

  60. Carl Sagan - 20 ↩︎

  61. Voltaire - 61 ↩︎

  62. Denis Diderot - 36 ↩︎

  63. Noam Chomsky - 4 ↩︎

  64. Benjamin Franklin - 99 ↩︎

  65. Arthur Schopenhauer - 91 ↩︎

  66. Frederick the Great - 158 ↩︎

  67. Gustave Flaubert - 175 ↩︎

  68. Bertrand Russell - 10 ↩︎

  69. Edgar Allan Poe - 21 ↩︎

  70. David Hume - 35 ↩︎

  71. John Berger - 206 ↩︎

  72. James Anthony Froude - 190 ↩︎

  73. André Malraux - 76 ↩︎

  74. André Gide - 75 ↩︎

  75. Douglas Adams - 37 ↩︎

  76. George Eliot - 164 ↩︎

  77. Toni Morrison - 387 ↩︎

  78. George Orwell - 40 ↩︎

  79. William Faulkner - 62 ↩︎

  80. Elizabeth I of England - 145 ↩︎

  81. Jack Kerouac - 187 ↩︎

  82. Baruch Spinoza - 98 ↩︎

  83. John Stuart Mill - 51 ↩︎

  84. Ludwig Wittgenstein - 53 ↩︎

  85. Isaac Newton - 43 ↩︎

  86. Charles Dickens - 6 ↩︎

  87. José Saramago - 219 ↩︎

  88. William James - 398 ↩︎

  89. Dante Alighieri - 127 ↩︎

  90. George Bernard Shaw - 163 ↩︎