Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27th, 1770 – November 14th, 1831) was a German philosopher and an important voice of German idealism and 19th-century philosophy. He wrote about the philosophical side of many contemporary topics, including metaphysics, art, history, politics, and religion.

He is famous for The Phenomenology of Spirit, The Science of Logic, and University of Berlin lectures on subjects from his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences.

Below we list some words of wisdom from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

“To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.”

“To be aware of limitations is already to be beyond them.”

“We learn from history that we do not learn from history”

“Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two.”

“Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.”

“What history teaches us is that neither nations nor governments ever learn anything from it.”

“The valor that struggles is better than the weakness that endures.”

“If you want to love you must serve, if you want freedom you must die.”

“I have the courage to be mistaken.”

“Evil resides in the very gaze which perceives Evil all around itself.”

“The more certain our knowledge the less we know.”

“Every idea, extended into infinity, becomes its own opposite.”

“Only one man ever understood me, and he didn’t understand me”

“An individual piece only has meaning when it is seen as part of the whole.”

“A man who has work that suits him and a wife, whom he loves, has squared his accounts with life.”

“The learner always begins by finding fault, but the scholar sees the positive merit in everything.”

“Life has value only when it has something valuable as its object.”

“Public opinion contains all kinds of falsity and truth, but it takes a great man to find the truth in it. The great man of the age is the one who can put into words the will of his age, tell his age what its will is, and accomplish it. What he does is the heart and the essence of his age, he actualizes his age. The man who lacks sense enough to despise public opinion expressed in gossip will never do anything great.”

“Before the end of Time will be the end of History. Before the end of History will be the end of Art.”

“Philosophy is by its nature something esoteric, neither made for the mob nor capable of being prepared for the mob.”

“Impatience asks for the impossible, wants to reach the goal without the means of getting there. The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary.”

“Education to independence demands that young people should be accustomed early to consult their own sense of propriety and their own reason. To regard study as mere receptivity and memory work is to have a most incomplete view of what instruction means.”

“America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s History shall reveal itself.”

“The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”

“Poverty in itself does not make men into a rabble; a rabble is created only when there is joined to poverty a disposition of mind, an inner indignation against the rich, against society, against the government.”

“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”

“To make abstractions hold in reality is to destroy reality.”

“Mark this well, you proud men of action! you are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.”

“History is not the soil of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it.”

“Whatever is reasonable is true, and whatever is true is reasonable”

“God is the absolute truth…”

“Everything that from eternity has happened in heaven and earth, the life of God and all the deeds of time simply are the struggles for Spirit to know Itself, to find Itself, be for Itself, and finally unite itself to Itself; it is alienated and divided, but only so as to be able thus to find itself and return to Itself…As existing in an individual form, this liberation is called ‘I’; as developed to its totality, it is free Spirit; as feeling, it is Love; and as enjoyment, it is Blessedness.”

“The ignorant man is not free, because what confronts him is an alien world, something outside him and in the offing, on which he depends, without his having made this foreign world for himself and therefore without being at home in it by himself as in something his own. The impulse of curiosity, the pressure for knowledge, from the lowest level up to the highest rung of philosophical insight arises only from the struggle to cancel this situation of unfreedom and to make the world one’s own in one’s ideas and thought.”

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François Rabelais (1483 – 1553) was a French writer, Christian humanist, physician, Greek scholar, and satirist. He is known as the first great French prose author.

Below we list some words of wisdom from François Rabelais.

“When my soul leaves this human dwelling, I will not consider myself to have completely died, but to pass from one state to another, given that, in you and by you, I remain in my visible image in this world.”

“If you wish to avoid seeing a fool, you must first break your mirror.”

“Ignorance is the mother of all evils.”

“It is my feeling that Time ripens all things; with Time all things are revealed; Time is the father of truth.”

“Science without conscience is the soul’s perdition.”

“Wisdom entereth not into a malicious mind.”

“Tell the truth and shame the devil.”

“So much is a man worth as he esteems himself.”

“I place no hope in my strength, nor in my works: but all my confidence is in God my protector, who never abandons those who have put all their hope and thought in him.”

“I urge you to spend your youth profitably in study and virtue…. In brief, let me see in you an abyss of knowledge.”

“I never sleep comfortably except when I am at sermon or when I pray to God.”

“In their rules there was only one clause: Do what you will.”

“I’ve often heard it said, as the common proverb goes, that a fool can teach a wise man well.”

“How do you know antiquity was foolish? How do you know the present is wise? Who made it foolish? Who made it wise?”

“In this mortal life, nothing is blessed throughout.”

“If you wish to be good “Pantagruelists” (which is to say, live in peace, joy, health, and always dining well), never put too much faith in people who look out through a hole.”

“I won’t undertake war until I have tried all the arts and means of peace.”

“Nature abhors a vacuum.”

“Always open all gates and roads to your enemies, and rather make for them a bridge of silver, to get rid of them.”

“The dress does not make the monk.”

“He who has not an adventure has not horse or mule, so says Solomon.–Who is too adventurous, said Echephron,–loses horse and mule.”

“Men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is called honour. Those same men, when by base subjection and constraint they are brought under and kept down, turn aside from that noble disposition, by which they formerly were inclined to virtue, to shake off and break that bond of servitude, wherein they are so tyrannously enslaved; for it is agreeable with the nature of man to long after things forbidden, and to desire what is denied us.”

“It is quite a common and vulgar thing among humans to understand, foresee, know and predict the troubles of others. But oh what a rare thing it is to predict, know, foresee and understand one’s own troubles.”

“One should never pursue the hazards of fortune to their very ends and it behooves all adventurers to treat their good luck with reverence, neither bothering nor upsetting it.”

“He that has patience may compass anything.”

“According to the sage Solomon, wisdom does not enter into a soul that seeks after evil, and knowledge without conscienceis the ruin of the soul, it behooves you to serve, love and fear God and to put all your thoughts and hope in him, and by faith founded in charity, be joined to him, such that you never be separated from him by sin.”

“There is nothing holy nor sacred to those who have abandoned God and reason in order to follow their perverse desires.”

“All things have their ends and cycles. And when they have reached their highest point, they are in their lowest ruin, for they cannot last for long in such a state. Such is the end for those who cannot moderate their fortune and prosperity with reason and temperance.”

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Blaise Pascal (June 19th,1623 – August 19th,1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, writer, philosopher, child prodigy, and inventor of the mechanical calculator. His earliest mathematical work was on projective geometry at the age of 16. He also heavily influenced the development of modern economics and social science.

Below we list words of wisdom by Blaise Pascal.

“Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.”

“Don’t try to add more years to your life. Better add more life to your years.”

“All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.”

“Once your soul has been enlarged by a truth, it can never return to its original size.”

“Muhammad established a religion by putting his enemies to death; Jesus Christ by commanding his followers to lay down their lives.”

“One-half of the ills of life come because men are unwilling to sit down quietly for thirty minutes to think through all the possible consequences of their acts.”

“People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.”

“In difficult times carry something beautiful in your heart.”

“The more I see of Mankind, the more I prefer my dog.”

“Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.”

“It’s not those who write the laws that have the greatest impact on society. It’s those who write the songs.”

“Man’s greatness lies in his power of thought.”

“Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries. Yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.”

“The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.”

“Man is clearly made to think. It is his whole dignity and his whole merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought. And the order of thought is to begin with ourselves, and with our Author and our end.”

“Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.”

“Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. Love still stands when all else has fallen.”

“Happiness is neither within us, nor without us. It is in the union of ourselves with God.”

“There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.”

“Most of man’s trouble comes from his inability to be still.”

“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”

“We must learn our limits. We are all something, but none of us are everything.”

“Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much.”

“Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.”

“When intuition and logic agree, you are always right.”

“The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.”

“I bring you the gift of these four words: I believe in you.”

“Human beings do not know their place and purpose. They have fallen from their true place, and lost their true purpose. They search everywhere for their place and purpose, with great anxiety. But they cannot find them because they are surrounded by darkness.”

“Mankind suffers from two excesses: to exclude reason, and to live by nothing but reason.”

“Men are so completely fools by necessity that he is but a fool in a higher strain of folly who does not confess his foolishness.”

“Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light is throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.”

“Jesus Christ came to tell men that they have no enemies but themselves.”

“Lord, help me to do great things as though they were little, since I do them with your power; And little things as though they were great, since I do them in your name!”

“There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus.”

“If I believe in God and life after death and you do not, and if there is no God, we both lose when we die. However, if there is a God, you still lose and I gain everything.”

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Miguel de Cervantes (September 29, 1547 – April 22, 1616) was a Spanish writer. He is widely considered the greatest writer in the Spanish language and one of the greatest novelists ever. He is best known for his novel Don Quixote.

Below we list some words of wisdom from Miguel de Cervantes.

“In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd.”

“In every case, the remedy is to take action. Get clear about exactly what it is that you need to learn and exactly what you need to do to learn it. Being clear kills fear. Make it thy business to know thyself, which is the most difficult lesson in the world.”

“Our greatest foes, and whom we must chiefly combat, are within.”

“The man who is prepared has his battle half fought.”

“One of the effects of fear is to disturb the senses and cause things to appear other than what they are.”

“God exalts the man who humbles himself.”

“Fortune may have yet a better success in reserve for you and they who lose today may win tomorrow.”

“The wicked are always ungrateful.”

“Wit and humor belong to genius alone.”

“A knowledge of thyself will preserve thee from vanity.”

“Forewarned, forearmed; to be prepared is half the victory.”

“Men of great talents, whether poets or historians, seldom escape the attacks of those who, without ever favoring the world with any production of their own, take delight in criticizing the works of others.”

“Take away the cause, and the effect ceases.”

“The man who fights for his ideals is alive.”

“There is a time for some things, and a time for all things; a time for great things, and a time for small things.”

“Let us make hay while the sun shines.”

“Cunning cheats itself wholly, and other people partially.”

“Diligence is the mother of good fortune, and idleness, its opposite, never brought a man to the goal of any of his best wishes.”

“To think that the affairs of this life always remain in the same state is a vain presumption; indeed they all seem to be perpetually changing and moving in a circular course. Spring is followed by summer, summer by autumn, and autumn by winter, which is again followed by spring, and so time continues its everlasting round. But the life of man is ever racing to its end, swifter than time itself, without hope of renewal, unless in the next that is limitless and infinite.”

“There are two kinds of beauty, one being of the soul and the other of the body, That of the soul is revealed through intelligence, modesty, right conduct, Generosity and good breeding, all of which qualities may exist in an ugly man; And when one’s gaze is fixed upon beauty of this sort and not upon that of the body, Love is usually born suddenly and violently.”

“Too much sanity may be madness!”

“Experience is the universal mother of sciences.”

“True valor lies in the middle between cowardice and rashness.”

“Many count their chickens before they are hatched; and where they expect bacon, meet with broken bones.”

“What is bought is cheaper than a gift.”

“The cleverest character in comedy is the clown, for he who would make people take him for a fool, must not be one.”

“Let us forget and forgive injuries.”

“Man appoints, and God disappoints.”

“Nothing costs less nor is cheaper than compliments of civility.”

“Among the attributes of God, although they are equal, mercy shines with even more brilliance than justice.”

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Roland Gérard Barthes (November 12th, 1915 – March 26th, 1980) was a French philosopher, essayist, literary theorist, and critic. His work explored many fields, including, literary theory, anthropology, structuralism, and post-structuralism.

He is perhaps best known for his essay collection Mythologies in 1957, which covered popular culture.

Below we list some words of wisdom from Roland Barthes.

“The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”

“Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.”

“I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.”

“Every exploration is an appropriation.”

“To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.”

“Literature is the question minus the answer.”

“We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.”

“The author enters into his own death, writing begins.”

“The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”

“How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?”

“Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.”

“But I never looked like that!’ – How do you know? What is the ‘you’ you might or might not look like? Where do you find it – by which morphological or expressive calibration? Where is your authentic body? You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens (I am interested in seeing my eyes only when they look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images.”

“Every photograph is a certificate of presence.”

“Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.”

“Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.”

“I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.”

“Painting can feign reality without having seen it.”

“A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.”

“The photographer, like an acrobat, must defy the laws of probability or even of possibility; at the limit, he must defy those of the interesting: the photograph becomes surprising when we do not know why it has been taken.”

“To hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its excess) is inconceivable: not because the human subject is too weak, but because passion is in essence made to be seen: the hiding must be seen: I want you to know that I am hiding something from you, that is the active paradox I must resolve: at one and the same time it must be known and not known: I want you to know that I don’t want to show my feelings: that is the message I address to the other.”

“Isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent? —This isn’t the same languor: there are two words: Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himéros, the more burning desire for the present being.”

“What love lays bare in me is energy.”

“The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.”

“Am I in love? –yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn’t wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.”

“As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common.”

“To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.”

“We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.”

“The photographic image… is a message without a code.”

“Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.”

“Don’t say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.”

“All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.”

“I am simultaneously and contradictorily both happy and unhappy: ‘to succeed’ or ‘to fail’ have for me only ephemeral, contingent meanings (this does not stop my desires and sorrows from being violent ones); what impels me, secretly and obstinately, is not tactical: I accept and I affirm, irrespective of the true and the false, of success and failure; I am withdrawn from all finality, I live according to chance.”

“I want to be both pathetic and admirable, I want to be at the same time a child and an adult. Thereby I gamble, I take a risk: for it is always possible that the other will simply ask no question whatever about these unaccustomed glasses; that the other will see, in the fact, no sign.”

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Malcolm Forbes (August 19, 1919 – February 24, 1990) was an American businessman and publisher of Forbes magazine, which was founded by his father B. C. Forbes. He promoted capitalism and free market economics and was known for an extravagant lifestyle, including spending $2.5 million on his 70th birthday party.

Below we list some words of wisdom from Malcolm Forbes.

“Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are.”

“If you’ve had a good time playing the game, you’re a winner even if you lose.”

“It’s always worthwhile to make others aware of their worth.”

“It’s so much easier to suggest solutions when you don’t know too much about the problem.”

“Failure is success if we learn from it.”

“Victory is sweetest when you’ve known defeat.”

“Since you have to do the things you have to do, be wise enough to do some of the things you want to do.”

“The smart ones ask when they don’t know. And, sometimes, when they do.”

“The difference between towering and cowering is totally a matter of inner posture.”

“Keeping score of old scores and scars, getting even and one-upping, always makes you less than you are.”

“Being right half the time beats being half-right all the time.”

“When things are bad, we take comfort in the thought that they could always get worse. And when they are, we find hope in the thought that things are so bad they have to get better.”

“Those who talk loudly are rarely listened to.”

“The more sympathy you give, the less you need.”

“To seduce most anyone, ask for and listen to his opinion.”

“Scientists ofttimes have the greatest faith in a higher power. The more they dig into, establish facts and figures, the more they marvel about the mystery of it all.”

“Listening to advice often accomplishes far more than heeding it.”

“Meaningful truths are never newly discovered; they’re just uncovered anew.”

“Some people as a result of adversity are sadder, wiser, kinder, more human. Most of us are better, though, when things go better. Knowing when to keep your mouth shut is invariably more important than opening it at the right time. Always listen to a man when he describes the faults of others. Often times, most times, he’s describing his own, revealing himself.”

“How in heck are they handling their surplus population in Hell these days? Maybe by the time you and I are in the queue there won’t be room for us.”

“He who hesitates is sometimes wise.”

“The richest person in the world – in fact. All the riches in the world – couldn’t provide you with anything like the endless, incredible loot available at your local library. You can measure the awareness, the breadth and the wisdom of a civilization, a nation, a people by the priority given to preserving these repositories of all that we are, all that we were, or will be.”

“Daydreams are doable. The turn-on is not in scale, spectacle, or cost. It’s in the doing. Anything you haven’t done is an adventure. Wanting to is the principal requirement. If you can do and want to, don’t not. In short, while alive, live.”

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Willard Van Orman Quine (June 25th, 1908 – December 25th, 2000), an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, was known as “one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century”.

Below we list some words of wisdom from Willard Van Orman Quine.

“Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.”

“Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.”

“I have been accused of denying consciousness but I am not conscious of having done so.”

“Life is what the least of us make the most of us feel the least of us make the most of.”

“Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it.”

“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.”

“Irrefragability, thy name is mathematics.”

“We must not leap to the fatalistic conclusion that we are stuck with the conceptual scheme that we grew up in. We can change it, bit by bit, plank by plank, though meanwhile there is nothing to carry us along but the evolving conceptual scheme itself. The philosopher’s task was well compared by Neurath to that of a mariner who must rebuild his ship on the open sea.”

“To define an expression is, paradoxically speaking, to explain how to get along without it. To define is to eliminate.”

“To be is to be the value of a variable.”

“Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.”

“One man’s observation is another man’s closed book or flight of fancy.”

“Language is a social art.”

“Unscientific man is beset by a deplorable desire to have been right. The scientist is distinguished by a desire to be right.”

“Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praise-worthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.”

“My position is a naturalistic one; I see philosophy not as an a priori propaedeutic or groundwork for science, but as continuous with science. I see philosophy and science as in the same boat–a boat which, to revert to Neurath’s figure as I so often do, we can rebuild only at sea while staying afloat in it. There is no external vantage point, no first philosophy.”

“The word ‘definition’ has come to have a dangerously reassuring sound, owing no doubt to its frequent occurrence in logical and mathematical writings.”

“Wyman’s overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes.”

“Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word.”

“Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it.”

“Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato’s beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occam’s razor.”

“Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and control the triggerings of our sensory receptors in the light of previous triggering of our sensory receptors.”

“We do not learn first what to talk about and then what to say about it.”

“One man’s antinomy is another man’s falsidical paradox, give or take a couple of thousand years.”

“It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.”

“A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put into three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: ‘What is there?’ It can be answered, moreover, in a word–‘Everything’–and everyone will accept this answer as true.”

“For me the problem of induction is a problem about the world: a problem of how we, as we are now (by our present scientific lights), in a world we never made, should stand better than random, or coin-tossing chances changes of coming out right when we predict by inductions. . . .”

“No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.”

“Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word.”

“Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike.”

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Michel de Montaigne (February 28, 1533 – September 13 1592), was a French statesman, writer, and philosopher, known for making the essay a popular literary genre. He was one of the most notable philosophers of the French Renaissance and is most known for his cynical statement, “What do I know?”

Below we list some words of wisdom from Michel de Montaigne.

“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”

“He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak.”

“The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness.”

“Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.”

“The lack of wealth is easily repaired but the poverty of the soul is irreplaceable.”

“I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.”

“We can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but we cannot be wise with other men’s wisdom.”

“We must learn to endure what we cannot avoid. Our life is composed, like the harmony of the world, of contrary things, also of different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud. If a musician liked only one kind, what would he have to say?”

“Life itself is neither a good nor an evil: life is where good or evil find a place, depending on how you make it for them.”

“We commend a horse for his strength, and sureness of foot, and not for his rich caparisons; a greyhound for his share of heels, not for his fine collar; a hawk for her wing, not for her jesses and bells. Why, in like manner, do we not value a man for what is properly his own? He has a great train, a beautiful palace, so much credit, so many thousand pounds a year, and all these are about him, but not in him.”

“If others examined themselves attentively, as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself.”

“A man must keep a little back shop where he can be himself without reserve. In solitude alone can he know true freedom.”

“Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself.”

“Happiness involves working toward meaningful goals.”

“Take care that old age does not wrinkle your spirit even more than your face.”

“Ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head.”

“Though we may be learned by another’s knowledge, we can never be wise but by our own experience.”

“Learning is a good medicine: but no medicine is powerful enough to preserve itself from taint and corruption independently of defects in the jar that it is kept in. One man sees clearly but does not see straight: consequently he sees what is good but fails to follow it; he sees knowledge and does not use it.”

“To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. All other things, ruling, hoarding, building, are only little appendages and props, at most.”

“There is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and others.”

“Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately.”

“Every one rushes elsewhere and into the future, because no one wants to face one’s own inner self.”

“Let us permit nature to have her way. She understands her business better than we do.”

“Dreams are faithful interpreters of our inclinations; but there is art required to sort and understand them.”

“Things are not bad in themselves, but our cowardice makes them so.”

“Any person of honor chooses rather to lose his honor than to lose his conscience.”

“Meditation is a rich and powerful method of study for anyone who knows how to examine his mind.”

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Copyright © 2024 Scott Petullo, Stephen Petullo

Sir Bernard Arthur Owen Williams (September 21st, 1929 – June 10th, 2003) was an English moral philosopher. His authored the books Problems of the Self, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Shame and Necessity, and Truth and Truthfulness.

He was a Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.

Below we list some words of wisdom from Bernard Williams.

“If we try and fail, we have temporary disappointments. But if we do not try at all, we have permanent regrets.”

“Man never made any material as resilient as the human spirit.”

“There was never a night or a problem that could defeat sunrise or hope.”

“It is almost impossible to watch a sunset and not dream.”

“We grow a little every time we do not take advantage of somebody’s weakness.”

“Life is supposed to be a series of peaks and valleys. The secret is to keep the valleys from becoming Grand Canyons.”

“Unsolicited advice is the junk mail of life.”

“We must escape our illusions of correctness to understand the actions and beliefs of others.”

“I like the word “indolence.” It makes my laziness seem classy.”

“There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face.”

“We may pass violets looking for roses. We may pass contentment looking for victory.”

“The day the Lord created hope was probably the same day he created Spring.”

“Few things move as quietly as the future.”

“Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.”

“Sooner or later we all quote our mothers.”

“This is the end of the day, but soon there will be a new day.”

“A half-truth is usually less than half of that.”

“Tranquility is like quicksilver. The harder you grab for it, the less likely you will grasp it.”

“A friend is a lot of things, but a critic isn’t.”

“The average man will bristle if you say his father was dishonest, but he will brag a little if he discovers that his great-grandfather was a Pirate.”

“If a June night could talk, it would probably boast it invented romance.”

“Few things are as democratic as a snowstorm.”

“No symphony orchestra ever played music like a two-year-old girl laughing with a puppy.”

“People who say, ‘Let the chips fall where they may,’ usually figure they will not be hit by a chip.”

“September tries its best to have us forget summer.”

“You are mature when you know what is foolhardy and what is courage.”

“Books had instant replay long before televised sports.”

“An extravagance is something that your spirit thinks is a necessity.”

“Women have a favorite room, men a favorite chair.”

“Laziness has many disguises. Soon “winter doldrums” will become “spring fever.”

“Americans are optimists. They hope they’ll be wealthy someday – and they’re positive they can get one more brushful of paint out of an empty can.”

“Ideas are like wandering sons. They show up when you least expect them.”

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Copyright © 2024 Stephen Petullo, Scott Petullo

Denis Diderot (October 5, 1713 – July 31, 1784) was a French philosopher and writer. He was a major figure in the Age of Enlightenment and best known as co-founder and contributor to the Encyclopédie, an encyclopedia of the arts and sciences.

Below we list some words of wisdom from Denis Diderot.

“We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.”

“All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone’s feelings.”

“Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things.”

“A thing is not proved just because no one has ever questioned it. What has never been gone into impartially has never been properly gone into. Hence skepticism is the first step toward truth. It must be applied generally, because it is the touchstone.”

“There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge… observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.”

“Distance is a great promoter of admiration.”

“You risk just as much in being credulous as in being suspicious.”

“When we know to read our own hearts, we acquire wisdom of the hearts of others.”

“Instinct guides the animal better than the man. In the animal it is pure, in man it is led astray by his reason and intelligence.”

“There are things I can’t force. I must adjust. There are times when the greatest change needed is a change of my viewpoint.”

“Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common.”

“Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth.”

“It is said that desire is a product of the will, but the converse is in fact true: will is a product of desire.”

“To say that man is a compound of strength and weakness, light and darkness, smallness and greatness, is not to indict him, it is to define him.”

“The philosopher forms his principles on an infinity of particular observations. He does not confuse truth with plausibility, he takes for truth what is true, for false what is false, for doubtful what is doubtful, and probable what is probable. The philosophical spirit is thus a spirit of observation and accuracy.”

“In order to shake a hypothesis, it is sometimes not necessary to do anything more than push it as far as it will go.”

“Oh! how near are genius and madness! Men imprison them and chain them, or raise statues to them.”

“As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes.”

“People praise virtue, but they hate it, they run away from it. It freezes you to death, and in this world you’ve got to keep your feet warm.”

“There comes a moment during which almost every girl or boy falls into melancholy; they are tormented by a vague inquietude which rests on everything and finds nothing to calm it. They seek solitude; they weep; the silence to be found in cloister attracts them: the image of peace that seems to reign in religious houses seduces them. They mistake the first manifestations of a developing sexual nature for the voice of God calling them to Himself; and it is precisely when nature is inciting them that they embrace a fashion of life contrary to nature’s wish.”

“Does not vanity itself cease to be blamable, is it not even ennobled, when it is directed to laudable objects, when it confines itself to prompting us to great and generous actions?”

“Although a man may wear fine clothing, if he lives peacefully; and is good, self-possessed, has faith and is pure; and if he does not hurt any living being, he is a holy man.”

“All abstract sciences are nothing but the study of relations between signs.”

Our FREE Spiritual Detox Script can help you get rid of toxic energy and help you make the most of your life. http://spiritualgrowthnow.com/script/

Learn more about spiritual myths, meditation and how to use it to your advantage, and much more with our Direct Your Destiny e-Package: http://spiritualgrowthnow.com/directyourdestiny/

Copyright © 2024 Scott Petullo, Stephen Petullo