Michael Z > Michael's Quotes

“Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to
wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.”
― Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird

“To understand life is to understand ourselves, and that is both the beginning and the end of education.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Education and the Significance of Life: Jiddu Krishnamurti on Freedom, Self-Understanding, and Mature Love

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
― J. Krishnamurti

“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
― Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time

“Humans don't mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”
― Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.”
― Eric Hoffer

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
― Marcus Aurelius , Meditations

“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“We’ve bought into the idea that education is about training and “success”, defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.”
― Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.”
― Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water

“You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime’s worth of lessons.”
― Wallace Stegner

“We write to make sense of it all.”
― Wallace Stegner

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Always do what you are afraid to do.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It is not the length of life, but the depth.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.”
― John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

“Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags.”
― Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

“Consistency is the playground of dull minds.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski

“In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”
― Eric Hoffer

“Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.”
― Eric Hoffer

“We see people and things not as they are, but as we are.”
― Anthony de Mello, Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality

“Life is a banquet. And the tragedy is that most people are starving to death.”
― Anthony de Mello, Awareness

“If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.”
― Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire