100 marvellous great quotes | The World of English

100 marvellous great quotes and aphorisms by great and famous authors and writers edited for the World of English blog by Carl William Brown, a sincere literary avenger. (Find out more about him on Amazon).

Audi doctrinam, si vis vitare ruinam: cum sine doctrina nil proficiat medicina.
Proverbium mediaevale

Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem he must solve.
Erich Fromm

When muslims become Osho’s followers I will trust them a little bit more.
Carl William Brown

Sobriety distinguishes, discriminates, and says no. Intoxication expands, unites, and says yes.
William James

We’ll meet again in the gardens of memory, in the palace of dreams.
Lewis Caroll

The ethics of knowledge and social justice do not exist; instead, there is the use of force, abuse of power, and institutionalized fraud to safeguard privilege, injustice, and the spread of stupidity.
Carl William Brown

The man who cannot create wants to destroy.
Erich Fromm

Stupid people ask about God, the intelligent person asks about death. The people who go on asking about God never find God, and the person who asks about death is bound to find God
Osho

We survive by what we receive, but we live by what we give.
Carl Gustav Jung

Syncretinism is santanic!
Carl William Brown

What the herd hates most is a person who thinks differently.
Arthur Shopenhauer

Coniunctio or Coincidentia Oppositorum: if everything makes sense, then nothing makes sense; that’s why we live in a painful and absurd world.
Carl William Brown

I turn cruel when I am empty, If I cannot be loved, I must be feared.
Niccolò Machiavelli

Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.
Adam Smith

Literature is a defence against the insults of life.
Cesare Pavese

The result of every life is completely erroneous, so why the bothering of calculation, or of having faith.
Carl William Brown

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.
Margaret Mead

To be happy you must eliminate two things: The fear of a bad future and The memory of a bad past.
Seneca

From the beginning till the end the entire life is a whole process of learning, of how useless it all has been.
Carl William Brown

What are you afraid of losing, when nothing in the world actually belongs to you?
Marcus Aurelius

The human soul is “symphonic”; music is part of the profound nature.
Hildegard of Bingen

Never play fair in a game where others cheat.
Niccolò Machiavelli

Too many pacifists around, we need a good war here too, like in the good old days, the only hygiene for a world too full of idiots.
Carl William Brown

Dare to declare who you are. It is not far from the shores of silence to the boundaries of speech. The path is not long, but the way is deep. You must not only walk there, you must be prepared to leap.
Hildegard von Bingen

Humor is the weapon of the wise for it disarms the arrogant.
Aristophanes

Silence was fundamental for Osho, also because most of the time, speaking is useless, given the ordinary human capacity for understanding.
Carl William Brown

The soul is the greening life force of the flesh, for the body grows and prospers through her, just as the earth becomes fruitful when it is moistened. The soul humidifies the body so it does not dry out, just like the rain which soaks into the earth.
Hildegard von Bingen

Highly intelligent people cannot be evil, because evil requires stupidity and a limited mind.
J.P. Sartre

I wouldn’t like to die alone; it would be better to be in good company, but whose one? Unfortunately, choices have always been my weakness.
Carl William Brown

Se viviamo, è per camminare sulla testa dei Re.
William Shakespeare

We cannot live in a world interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a hope. Part of the terror is to take back our listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light.
Hildegard von Bingen

Never let the future disturb you. you will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason that arm you today, against the present.
Marcus Aurelius

In pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added. In pursuit of the Tao, every day something is dropped.
Tao Te Ching

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.
Seneca

Religion is like a blind man looking in a black room for a black cat that isn’t there, and finding it.
Oscar Wilde

Peace is defined not merely by the absence of war, but as a proactive state characterized by the presence of justice, equity, understanding, and human rights.
Martin Luther King Via Baruch Spinoza

Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.
Baruch Spinoza

In a few years, no doubt, marriage licences will be sold like dog licences, good for 12 months.”
Aldous Huxley

Stupid matter uses even its most brilliant scientific minds to spread its own harmful imbecility.
Carl William Brown

Of all follies there is none greater than wanting to make the world a better place.
Moliere

A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something that he can understand.
Bertrand Russell

Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation.
Terence McKenna

To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous.
Confucius

Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Jorge Luis Borges

In my mother’s brain, the disease had devastated the garden of memory, but perhaps not yet the palace of dreams. Then, however, death came, and everything collapsed.
Carl William Brown

Many are destined to reason wrongly; others, not to reason at all; and others, to persecute those who do reason.
Voltaire

There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it.
Aldous Huxley

Because there is no man who can be true and just judge of himself, so much will self-love deceive him.
Dante

You cannot have a rational discussion with a man who prefers shooting you to being convinced by you.
Karl Popper

Reason is the root through which the resonant word blossoms.
Hildegard of Bingen

Your emotions are servants, not masters. Keep them in line.
Marcus Aurelius

Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs.
Arthur Schopenhauer

We are all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.
Rudyard Kipling

Galileo said that mathematics is the language in which the book of nature is written, ignoring the fact that nature has no need of books, nor of mathematics, nor of Galileo.
Carl William Brown

Celui qui serait sage n’aurait pas de fou; celui qui a un fou n’est pas sage; s’il n’est pas sage, il est fou; et peut-être, fût-il roi, le fou de son fou.
Denis Diderot

What sickens me about left-wing people, especially the intellectuals, is their utter ignorance of the way things actually happen.
George Orwell

L’histoire ne vous fournit que des exemples de paix violées, de guerres injustes et cruelles, des champs dévastés de villes réduites en cendres.
Diderot Encyclopédie, article (Paix)

Solitude is the school of genius.
Edward Gibbon

If you are not a master of yourself, then trying to be a master of others is just a substitute to befool yourself, to deceive yourself, and that is what the stupidity consists of.
Osho

There is no pain that the passage of time does not diminish or students. (Nullus pain est quem non longinquitas temporis minuat ac molliat).
Marcus Tullius Cicero

The most stupid thinks that he is very intelligent. Hence you go on giving compliments to each other. All those compliments are lies – and everybody is ready to believe.
Osho

Desiring life, in any case, and to the full extent of this desire, is nothing other than desiring unhappiness; desiring to live is as much as desiring to be unhappy.
Giacomo Leopardi

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.
Voltaire

Inside every cynic is a disappointed idealist.
George Carlin

People are so fucking stupid. No one reads anymore, no one goes out and watches and explores the society and culture they grew up in. People have five-second attention spans and the depth of a glass of water.
David Bowie

A certain darkness is needed to see the stars.
Osho

Lack of judgment is precisely what is called stupidity, and there is absolutely no remedy for this defect. A dull and limited brain, lacking nothing except a suitable measure of intellect and precision in its concepts, can certainly be trained through study, even to the point of achieving erudition. However, since judgment is usually also lacking in such cases, one not infrequently encounters highly erudite men who, in the use of their knowledge, often reveal this incurable defect.
Immanuel Kant

Beginning with the suppression of reason and truth, we must end with the most brutal and violent destruction of all that is human. This is the inevitable consequence of any system that seeks to control thought, to suppress dissent, to impose a single, unchallengeable doctrine.
Karl Popper

Many who are self-taught far excel the doctors, masters, and bachelors of the most renowned universities.
Ludwig von Mises

When a clown seats himself on the throne he does not become a king, the kingdom becomes a circus!
Turkish proverb

If we want to discover what is true, we must be completely free from all religions, all conditioning, all dogmas, all beliefs, and any authority that pushes us to conform; essentially, to be completely alone, and that is very difficult.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Man is so stupid, unbelievably stupid. He goes on throwing the responsibility on somebody else. Unless you stop this you will never become religious.
Osho

Love is the only sensible and satisfying answer to the problem of human existence.
Erich Fromm

I am not anti-life as other religions are. I am absolutely for life, and life in its essence means love.
Osho

All religions. All this singing. One song. Peace be with you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Achieve some perfection yourself, so that you may not fall into sorrow by seeing the perfection in others.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

A little while alone in your room will prove more valuable than anything else that could ever be given you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The successful revolutionary is a statesman; the unsuccessful one is a criminal.
Erich Fromm

Humanity will never be religious unless all organized religions disappear and religion becomes an individual commitment towards existence.
Osho

As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Every miserable fool, who has nothing in the world to be proud of, clings to the last resource to be proud of, namely, the nation to which he belongs: in this way he comforts himself and is now full of gratitude and ready to defend tooth and nail all the defects and all the foolishness characteristic of that nation.
Arthur Schopenhauer

To be crazy, some intelligence is needed.
Osho

Essere intelligenti è una maledizione diceva Schopenhauer. Infatti: capisci il gioco, osservi le menzogne, riconosci gli schemi. Ma devi comunque fingerti stupido per sopravvivere.
Arthur Schopenhauer

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas – uncertainty, progress, change – into crimes.
Salman Rushdie

All religions. All this singing. One song. Peace be with you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The first necessity is to realize the evils of the world.
Bertrand Russell

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.
Carl Gustav Jung

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

The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Toleration is the best religion.
Victor Hugo

The Vatican has always been corrupted, first of all by stupidity.
Carl William Brown

It is undesirable to believe a proposition to be true when there is no basis for supposing it to be actually true.
Bertrand Russell

My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.
George Bernard Shaw

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas – uncertainty, progress, change – into crimes.
Salman Rushdie

When it comes to money, everyone is of the same religion.
Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire

With stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain.
Friedrich von Schiller

God is a person; godliness is a quality. You cannot become God, but you can be godly.
Osho

Man is the only animal for whom his own stupid existence is a problem which he has to try in vain to solve.
Carl William Brown via Eric Fromm

It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
George Bernard Shaw

If a person has known only sex as life, he is stupid, he is an idiot.
Osho

Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds.
Albert Einstein

An anonymous man from the 16th century always used to say: “There are many important things in life, the first is eating, I don’t know the others.”
Carl William Brown

If somebody moves from poverty into spirituality, he has great intelligence. And if someone remains in richness and still does not move towards spirituality, he is just stupid and nothing else.
Osho

The secret of happiness lies in facing the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.
Bertrand Russell

It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver.
Mahatma Gandhi

Leave all the afternoon for exercise and recreation, which are as necessary as reading. I will rather say more necessary because health is worth more than learning.
Thomas Jefferson

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