deep thoughts

“To be is to do.” --Aristotle

“To do is to be.” --Jean-Paul Sartre

“To be or not to be?” --Shakespeare

“Do be do be do, be do be do be…” --Frank Sinatra

1) “The unexamined life is not worth living.”—Socrates via Plato

2) The only thing I know for sure is that I know nothing with absolute certainty.—Socrates via Plato

3) “He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.”—Chinese Proverb

4)“Reduce everything to its simplest but no further.”—Einstein

5) “Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.”—Plato

6) “If you are certain, then you are a prisoner of the known. When you embrace uncertainty, and include intention and detachment, then the most improbable happens. That’s what we call a miracle.”—Deepak Chopra

7) “The trick is to be so aware of what is going on in our society and in our lives that we can, at least some of the time, select viable options that will help improve the quality of life. It is worth our while—worth our lives in fact—to study cultures of the past and present, and to make conscious cultural choices” (Lamm 3).

8) “Memory believes before knowing remembers.”--Faulkner

9) “Art is a higher type of knowledge than experience.”—Aristotle

10) “The object of art is to give life a shape.”—Jean Anouilh

11) “Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.”—Henry Miller

12) “Art is science in the flesh.”—Jean Cocteau

13) “All art is social because it is the result of a relationship between an artist and his time.”—John Adams

14) “Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.”—Oscar Wilde

15) “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”—Oscar Wilde

16) “The great artist sees his objects (and this is true whether they are sad, absurd, repulsive or even evil) in a light of justice and mercy. The direction of attention is, contrary to nature, outward, away from self which reduces all to a false unity, towards the great surprising variety of the world, and the ability so to direct attention is love.”—Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

17) “Raphael paints wisdom; Handel sings it; Pheidias carves it; Shakespeare writes it.”—Emerson

18) “The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.”—P.B. Medawar

19) “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”—Aristotle

20) “The trouble with normal is it always gets worse.”—Bruce Cockburn

21) “Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.”—Voltaire

22) "A witty saying proves nothing." --Voltaire

23) "It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it."--Voltaire

24) " It is not enough to conquer; one must learn to seduce."--Voltaire

25) "As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities." --Voltaire

26) "Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well."--Voltaire

27) " Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do." --Voltaire

28) " He who has not the spirit of this age, has all the misery of it."--Voltaire

29) "God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." --Voltaire

30) "There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song--but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny."
- Pablo Neruda