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#aphorisms

Read through the most famous quotes by topic #aphorisms




The true basis and propaedeutic for all knowledge of human nature is the persuasion that a man's actions are, essentially and as a whole, not directed by his reason and its designs; so that no one becomes this or that because he wants to, though he want to never so much, but that his conduct proceeds from his inborn and inalterable character, is narrowly and in particulars determined by motivation, and is thus necessarily the product of these two factors.


Arthur Schopenhauer


#existentialism #maxims #schopenhauer #design

The American writer and dilettante Logan Pearsall Smith once said: 'Some people think that life is the thing; but I prefer reading.' When I first came across this, I thought it witty; now I find it—as I do many aphorisms—a slick untruth. Life and reading are not separate activities. The distinction is false (as it is when Yeats imagines a choice between 'perfection of the life, or of the work'). When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape—into different countries, mores, speech patterns—but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life's subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.


Julian Barnes


#books #life #reading #truth #imagination

Embrace aging.


Mitch Albom


#aphorisms #age

Writing is beautiful, like putting on a gold suit and going to sleep in it.


Mark Leidner


#writing #beauty

Few things are more absurd than wise saws originally designed to inculcate or maintain the social needs of a society long past - when they are applied to today.


Idries Shah


#big-picture #lack-of-knowledge #lack-of-perspective #rigidity #design

I can prove at any time that my education tried to make another person out of me than the one I became. It is for the harm, therefore, that my educators could have done me in accordance with their intentions that I reproach them; I demand from their hands the person I now am, and since they cannot give him to me, I make of my reproach and laughter a drumbeat sounding in the world beyond.


Franz Kafka


#education

Wings are freedom only when they are wide open in flight. On one's back they are a heavy weight.


Marina Tsvetaeva


#russian-poetry #tsvetaeva #wisdom #freedom

If you have decided to sail to the sea with great courage and determination, even the storm on the horizon will step aside!


Mehmet Murat ildan


#courage

You can't have love and honor, and neither will bring you peace.


W.M. Driscoll


#love

Men and the world are mutually toxic to each other.


Philip K. Dick


#men






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