11
Cicero
2
Epicurus
2
Hegel
1
Hesiod
1
Homer
4
Juvenal
4
Plato
1
Ayn Rand
1
Seneca
10
Seneca
10
Adam Smith
5
Socrates
2
Tacitus
3
Lao Tzu
1
Sun Tzu
4
Virgil
3
Voltaire
Stephen Hawking
There should be no boundaries to human endeavor. We are all different. However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there's life, there is hope.
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Arthur Schopenhauer
A last trick is to become personal, insulting and rude as soon as you perceive that your opponent has the upper hand. In becoming personal you leave the subject altogether, and turn your attack on the person by remarks of an offensive and spiteful character. This is a very popular trick, because everyone is able to carry it into effect.
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Seneca
Those who forget the past, ignore the present, and fear for the future have a life that is very brief and filled with anxiety: when they come to face death, the wretches understand too late that for such a long time they have busied themselves in doing nothing.
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Fulton J. Sheen
Criticism of others is thus an oblique form of self-commendation. We think we make the picture hang straight on our wall by telling our neighbors that all his pictures are crooked.
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Real obscurantism is not to hinder the spread of what is true, clear, and useful, but to bring into vogue what is false.
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Montesquieu
If we only wanted to be happy, it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, which is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are.
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Thomas Jefferson
And to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers.
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John Adams
Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
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Socrates
Mankind is made of two kinds of people: wise people who know they're fools, and fools who think they are wise.
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Fyodor Dostoyevsky
how easily the heart accustoms itself to comforts, and how difficult it is to tear one’s self away from luxuries which have become habitual and, little by little, indispensable.
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John Locke
In transgressing the law of nature, the offender declares himself to live by another rule than that of reason and common equity
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Sophocles
Do not believe that you alone can be right.
The man who thinks that,
The man who maintains that only he has the power
To reason correctly, the gift to speak, the soul
A man like that, when you know him, turns out empty.
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Arthur Schopenhauer
The ordinary man places his life’s happiness in things external to him, in property, rank, wife and children, friends, society, and the like, so that when he loses them or finds them disappointing, the foundation of his happiness is destroyed.
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François de La Rochefoucauld
No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong.
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Soren Kierkegaard
There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.
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Arthur Conan Doyle
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius.
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Plato
One which is the next best, and has the advantage of compelling the citizens to look to their characters:—Let there be a general rule that every one shall enter into voluntary contracts at his own risk, and there will be less of this scandalous money-making, and the evils of which we were speaking will be greatly lessened in the State. Yes, they will be greatly lessened. At present the governors, induced by the motives which I have named, treat their subjects badly; while they and their adherents, especially the young men of the governing class, are habituated to lead a life of luxury and idleness both of body and mind; they do nothing, and are incapable of resisting either pleasure or pain. Very true. They themselves care only for making money, and are as indifferent as the pauper to the cultivation of virtue. Yes,
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Arthur Schopenhauer
A poet or philosopher should have no fault to find with his age if it only permits him to do his work undisturbed in his own corner; nor with his fate if the corner granted him allows of his following his vocation without having to think about other people. For the brain to be a mere laborer in the service of the belly, is indeed the common lot of almost all those who do not live on the work of their hands; and they are far from being discontented with their lot. But it strikes despair into a man of great mind, whose brain-power goes beyond the measure necessary for the service of the will; and he prefers, if need be, to live in the narrowest circumstances, so long as they afford him the free use of his time for the development and application of his faculties; in other words, if they give him the leisure which is invaluable to him. It is otherwise with ordinary people; for them leisure has no value in itself, nor is it, indeed, without its dangers, as these people seem to know. The technical work of our time, which is done to an unprecedented perfection, has, by increasing and multiplying objects of luxury, given the favorites of fortune a choice between more leisure and culture upon the one side, and additional luxury and good living, but with increased activity, upon the other; and true to their character they choose the latter, and prefer champagne to freedom. And they are consistent in their choice; for, to them, every exertion of the mind which does not serve the aims of the will is folly. Intellectual effort for its own sake, they call eccentricity.
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Edmund Burke
I wished to warn the people against the greatest of all evils,—a blind and furious spirit of innovation, under the name of reform.
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Seneca
There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them... Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced.
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John Maynard Keynes
There is a danger of expecting the results of the future to be predicted from the past.
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Arthur Schopenhauer
Money is human happiness in the abstract; and so the man who is no longer capable of enjoying such happiness in the concrete, sets his whole heart on money.
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Cicero
The aim of a ship's captain is a successful voyage; a doctor's, health; a general's, victory. So the aim of our ideal statesman is the citizens' happy life--that is, a life secure in wealth, rich in resources, abundant in renown, and honorable in its moral character. That is the task which I wish him to accomplish--the greatest and best that any man can have.
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John Maynard Keynes
The commonest virtues of the individual are often lacking in the spokesmen of nations; a statesman representing not himself but his country may prove, without incurring excessive blame—as history often records—vindictive, perfidious, and egotistic.
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Lao Tzu
A leader is best
When people barely know he exists
Of a good leader, who talks little,
When his work is done, his aim fulfilled,
They will say, “We did this ourselves.
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Man is not born to solve the problem of the universe, but to find out what he has to do; and to restrain himself within the limits of his comprehension.
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Immanuel Kant
Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them.
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Seneca
you shall be told what pleased me to-day in the writings of
Hecato; it is these words: "What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself." That was
indeed a great benefit; such a person can never be alone. You may be sure that such a man is a friend to all mankind.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
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Ludwig Von Mises
Nobody ever recommended a dictatorship aiming at ends other than those he himself approved. He who advocates dictatorship always advocates the unrestricted rule of his own will
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