No one ever said that you would live to see the repercussions of everything you do, or that you have guarantees, or that you are not obliged to wander in the dark, or that everything will be proved to you and neatly verified like something in science. Nothing is: at least nothing that is worthwhile. I didn’t bring you up only to move across sure ground. I didn’t teach you to think that everything must be within our control or understanding. Did I? For, if I did, I was wrong. If you won’t take a chance, then the powers you refuse because you cannot explain them, will, as they say, make a monkey out of you. Mark Helprin, Winter’s Tale
I believe the simplest explanation is, there is no God. No-one created the universe and no-one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization that there probably is no heaven and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe and for that, I am extremely grateful. Stephen Hawking
Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder
Been living on this earth for so long now and still don’t know what a happy life feels like. I’m ready for a change. Jonathan Anthony Burkett
We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it. Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House
A man who views the world the same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life. Muhammad Ali
Life is a gamble. You can get hurt, but people die in plane crashes, lose their arms and legs in car accidents; people die every day. Same with fighters: some die, some get hurt, some go on. You just don’t let yourself believe it will happen to you. Muhammad Ali
This is a test to see where we spend our life – heaven or hell. Muhammad Ali, interview Reg Gutteridge, film When Ali Came to Newcastle
The most important thing about life is what’s going to happen when you die. Are you going to go to Heaven or Hell? And there’s eternity: how long is eternity? ibid.
I’m happy to be getting out. I mean, it’s been hell. Muhammad Ali, cited What’s My Name, HBO 2019
People dying and being shot … I just feel so guilty laughing and joking like everything is so rosy when people are hungry and can’t find work, and out of work, and getting being put out of apartments … I’m just dedicated to it. Muhammad Ali, cited Ali & Cavett: The Tale of the Tapes, Sky 2020 *****
No-one really knows why they are alive until they know what they’d die for. Martin Luther King
The great problem facing modern man is that, that the means by which we live have outdistanced the spiritual ends for which we live. So we find ourselves caught in a messed-up world. The problem is with man himself and man’s soul. We haven’t learned how to be just and honest and kind and true and loving. And that is the basis of our problem. The real problem is that through our scientific genius we've made of the world a neighborhood, but through our moral and spiritual genius we’ve failed to make of it a brotherhood. Martin Luther King, Rediscovering Lost Values
An Individual has not started living fully until they can rise above the narrow confines of individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of humanity. Every person must decide at some point, whether they will walk in light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgment: Life’s most persistent and urgent question is: What are you doing for others? Martin Luther King
All human beings have a desire to belong and to feel significant and important. And the way to solve this problem is not to drown out the ego but to find your sense of importance in something outside of the self. And you are then able to live because you have given your life to something outside and something that is meaningful, objectified. You rise above this self-absorption to something outside. This is the way to go through life with a balance, with the proper perspective because you’ve given yourself to something greater than self. Sometimes it’s friends, sometimes it’s family, sometimes it’s a great cause, it’s a great loyalty, but give yourself to that something and life becomes meaningful. Martin Luther King
There are moments when a kind of clarity comes over you, and suddenly you can see through walls to another dimension that you’d forgotten or chosen to ignore in order to continue living with the various illusions that make life, particularly life with other people, possible. Nicole Krauss, Great House
Take the life-lie away from the average man and straight away you take away his happiness. Henrik Ibsen, The Wild Duck, 1884
It was the promise of men, that around each corner there was yet another man, more wonderful than the last, that sustained me. You see, I had men confused with life … You can’t get what I wanted from a man, not in this life. Nancy Friday, ‘My Mother, My Self’, 1977
The subjection of human beings by the organisation of productive labour has increased a hundredfold since Engels wrote that passage. The greater the exploitation, the more miserable the lot of so many workers, and the greater the case for socialism. The worst crime of capitalism is its enslavement and corruption of the human spirit. It binds that spirit to the yoke of productive labour, lobs it back and forth between boom and slump, insults and degrades it as if it were no more than part of the machinery. ‘We are,’ says the Guatemalan peasant in the film El Norte, ‘just arms and legs for them.’ Paul Foot, The Case for Socialism chapter 5
Machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don’t hate: only the unloved hate, the unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers, don’t fight for slavery, fight for liberty! You the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness! You the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure! Then, in the name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite! Let us fight for a new world, a decent world. Charles Chaplin
I have resigned. I will not be pushed. Filed. Stamped. Indexed. Briefed. Debriefed. Or numbered. My life is my own. My life is my own. I am not a number. I am a free man. The Prisoner, TV series 1967-68
The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Next to selfishness the principle cause which makes Life unsatisfactory is want of mental cultivation. John Stuart Mill
Live through deeds of love, and let others live with tolerance for their unique intentions. Rudolf Steiner, Philosophy of Freedom
Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it. Ellen Goodman
Social life is disappointing. The very franticness of attempts to re-establish community and festival, by partying, by groups, by club, by touristy Mardi Gras, is the best evidence of the loss of true community and festival and of the loneliness of self, stranded as it is as an unspeakable consciousness in a world from which it perceives itself as somehow estranged, stranded even within its own body, with which it sees no clear connection. Walker Percy: Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book
What interests me is the extent to which we are unreliable narrators of ourselves. Gwen Adshead, Broadmoor forensic psychotherapist
People can become disorganised at different times. Gwen Adshead
I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine. Bruce Lee
I am not eccentric. It’s just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of catfish. Edith Sitwell