"It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around doing nothing, really doing nothing."
Gertrude Stein

"Man is condemned to be free. Condemned because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does."
Jean Paul Sartre

"Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people."
George Bernard Shaw

"In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."
Karl Marx

"One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters."
Aldous Huxley

"The essential function of the universe... is a machine for making gods"
Henri Bergson

"The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and if need be, die for it."
Alfred North Whitehead

"Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different."
William James

"So long as the system of competition in the production and exchange of the means of life goes on, the degradation of the arts will go on; and if that system is to last for ever, then art is doomed, and will surely die; that is to say, civilization will die."
William Morris

"Formlessness and chaos lead to new forms. And new order. Closer to, probably, what real order is."
Jerry Garcia

"When I tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do."
William Blake

"Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies, for example."
John Ruskin

"We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth."
Carl Jung

"Little by little it has become clear to me that every great philosophy has been the confession of its maker, as it were his involuntary and unconscious autobiography."
Friedrich Nietzsche

"Action is the last resource of those who do not know how to dream."
Oscar Wilde

"The mind has exactly the same power as the hands; not merely to grasp the world, but to change it."
Colin Wilson

"The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself."
William Blake

"To say one thing in terms of another is the philosophical attempt to set matter in terms of spirit, or spirit in terms of matter, to make the final unity."
Robert Frost

"'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' - that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
John Keats

"There are no whole truths; all truths are half- truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil."
Alfred North Whitehead

"Religion is doing; a man does not merely think his religion or feel it, he "lives" his religion as much as he is able, otherwise it is not religion but fantasy or philosophy."
George Gurdjieff

"To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Everyone knows that on any given day there are energies slumbering in him which the incitement's of that day do not call forth. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. The human individual usually lives far within his limits."
William James

"Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength."
Aldous Huxley

"The basis of optimism is sheer terror."
Oscar Wilde

"Achievement us for senators and scholars. At one time I had ambitions but I had them removed by a doctor in Buffalo."
Tom Waits

"Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe."
Alfred North Whitehead

"If the doors of perceptions were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."
William Blake

"The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely 'understandable' world"
William James

"Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into."
Wallace Stevens

"Beauty is a form of genius - is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon."
Oscar Wilde

"Prizes bring bad luck. Academic prizes, prizes for virtue, decorations, all those inventions of the devil encourage hypocrisy and freeze the spotaneous upsurge of the soul."
Charles Baudelaire

"Life has no meaning a priori... It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose."
Jean Paul Sartre

"Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom."
Henri Bergson

"Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light."
John Ruskin

"The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves."
Carl Jung

"The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."
Karl Marx

"No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it."
Alfred North Whitehead

"A remembrance cannot be the result of a state of the brain. The state of the brain continues the remembrance; it gives it a hold on the present by the materiality which it confers upon it, but pure memory is a spiritual manifestation. With Memory, we are, in very truth, in the domain of spirit."
Henri Bergson

"To the eyes of a god, mankind must appear as a species of bacteria which multiply and become progressively virulent whenever they find themselves in a congenial culture, and whose activity diminishes until they disappear completely as soon as proper measures are taken to sterilize them."
Aleister Crowley

"The crisis through which the world and the history of the gods develop is not outside the poets; it takes place in the poets themselves, it makes their poems... it is the crisis of the mythological consciousness which in entering into them makes the history of the gods."
Friedrich Schelling

"Improvement makes strait roads; but the crooked roads without Improvement are the roads of Genius."
William Blake

"Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings."
William James

"It is only a man's own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else's meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger."
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The majority of men are subjective toward themselves and objective towards all others, terribly objective sometimes-but the real task is in fact to be objective towards oneself and subjective towards all others."
Soren Kierkegaard

"There's nothing nobler than to put up with a few inconveniences like snakes and dust for the sake of absolute freedom."
Jack Kerouac

"Reality is just a crutch for people who can't deal with drugs."
Lily Tomlin

"It is the greatest mistake to think that man is always one and the same. A man is never the same for long. He is continually changing. He seldom remains the same even for half an hour."
George Gurdjieff

"What's wrong with dropping out? To me, this is the whole point: one's right to withdraw from a social environment that offers no spiritual sustenance, and to mind one's own business."
William Burroughs

"That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of our time."
John Stuart Mill

"The inquiry in England is not whether a man has talents and genius, but whether he is passive and polite and a virtuous ass and obedient to noblemen's opinions in art and science. If he is, he is a good man. If not, he must be starved."
William Blake

"To be a useful person has always appeared to me to be something quite horrible."
Charles Baudelaire

"With the arrogance of youth, I determined to do no less than to transform the world with Beauty. If I have succeeded in some small way, if only in one small corner of the world, amongst the men and women I love, then I shall count myself blessed, and blessed, and blessed, and the work goes on."
William Morris

"The only true voyage of discovery... would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another."
Marcel Proust

"To end the eternal conflict between our self and the world, to restore the peace that passeth understanding, to unite ourselves with nature so as to form one endless whole that is the goal of all strivings."
Friedrich Holderlin

"For a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature, and to go on creating oneself endlessly."
Henri Bergson

"Human-reality is free because it is not enough. It is free because it is perpetually wrenched away from itself and because it has been separated by a nothingness from what it is and from what it will be."
Jean Paul Sartre

"Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do."
Oscar Wilde

"Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth."
John Ruskin

"All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination."
Carl Jung

"There is a self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge."
Alfred North Whitehead

"A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention."
Aldous Huxley

"The Eye wherein I see God is the same eye wherein God sees me: my eye and God's eye are one eye, one vision, one knowing, one love."
Meister Eckhart

"The foundation of empire is art and science. Remove them or degrade them, and the empire is no more. Empire follows art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose."
William Blake

"The most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."
H.P. Lovecraft

"Caught up in this earth, man yet feels himself deeply and clearly a denizen of that spiritual realm in which we can neither refuse nor cease to believe. This affinity holds the secret of our everlasting aspiration toward an unknown goal."
Goethe

"The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly."
Wallace Stevens

"The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour."
William James

"Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you."
William Blake

"Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love."
Karl Marx

"A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education."
George Bernard Shaw

"Philosophy in the age of completed metaphysics is anthropology."
Martin Heidegger

"Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point."
Arthur Schopenhauer