Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

Some people feel like they don’t deserve love. They walk away quietly into empty spaces, trying to close the gaps of the past.

What does Plato say is the highest end that man can attain here below? To sit down and contemplate the good.

Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it (your final) target, the more you are going to miss it. For true success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself. Listen to what your conscience commands you to do and carry it out to the best of your knowledge.

A force de nous faire croire qu’on combat des terroristes, on déshumanise nos adversaires et on rend les violences plus faciles au détriment d’une future négociation. C’est tout ce que je voudrais éviter.

Trying to make us believe that we’re fighting terrorists, they are dehumanizing our opponents and making violence easier at the expense of future negotiations. That’s all I’d want to avoid.

Vous vous posez trop de questions. En acceptant d’être officier vous acceptez les ordres même s’ils sont contre votre morale. Regardez-moi. Je suis Général, j’ai deux étoiles sur les épaules, j’ai 30 ans de carrière, j’ai droit de vie et de mort. Je suis à la merci du 1er politicien qui me dit de sauter, je saute. Comme vous le ferez demain. C’est ça, être un soldat. Êtes-vous sûr de vouloir être un soldat? Philippe, c’est la seule question que vous devez vous poser.

You ask too many questions. By agreeing to be an officer you are agreeing to follow orders, even if they are against your morals. Look at me. I am General, I have two stars on his shoulders, I have 30 years of career, I have the right of life and death. I am at the mercy of the first politician who tells me to jump, and I jump. As you will do, tomorrow. This is what being a soldier means. Are you sure you want to be a soldier? Philippe, that is the only question you need to ask yourself.

Vous avez injecté vos poisons, l’argent, la drogue, l’alcool. Cet argent qui dirige chacun de vos pas, qui différencie les bons des méchants, qui vous enferme dans vos villes dortoirs à ne vivre que pour en gagner plus.

You inject your poisons: money, drugs, alcohol. Money that leads your every step, that differentiates the good from the bad, that locks you into your dormitory-villas, to live only to earn more.

Never mistake motion for action.

Six Rules:
1. If you like something because you think other people are gonna like it, it’s a sure bet no one will.
2. Most doors in the world are closed, so if you find one you want to get into, you damn well better have an interesting knock. And if knock like you drum, you’ll be fine.
3. Everything you think is important, isn’t. And everything you think is unimportant, is.
4. Don’t shit where you eat.
5. Lean into it: the outcome doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’re there for it. Whatever “it” is, good or bad.
6. Never sleep with someone who has more problems than you do.

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

Just look at us. Everything is backwards. Everything is upside-down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the major media destroy information, and religion destroys spirituality.

Whatever is on my mind, I say it as I feel it. I’m truthful to myself. I’m young and I’m old, I’ve been bought and I’ve been sold, so many times… I am hard-faced, I am gone. I am just like you.

That bag, it doesn’t have any feelings you can hurt. It’s empty. I don’t have any feelings you can hurt either. Ok?

And never have I felt so deeply at one and, at the same time, so detached from myself, and so present in the world.

The fucked up thing is that… we all.. we all have problems, we all have things we’re dealing with. Some days we’re better than others, some days we’re not so great. Some days we have limited space, for others.

Listen to me, just listen. We’re all the same. We all feel pain, we all have chaos in our lives. Life is very, very confusing, I know. I don’t have the answers, but I know, if you ride it out, it will all be ok.

The eyes are useless when the mind is blind.

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.

No matter how far down the wrong road you’ve gone, TURN BACK.

If you correct your mind, the rest of your life will fall into place.

The only real failure in life is the failure to try.

Everything will be alright in the end. If it’s not alright, it’s not yet the end.

Always remember, child, that to think bad thoughts is really the easiest thing in the world. If you leave your mind to itself it will spiral you down into ever-increasing unhappiness. To think good thoughts, however, requires effort. This is one of the things that discipline—training—is about. So train your mind to dwell on sweet perfumes, the touch of this silk, tender raindrops against the shoji, the curve of this flower arrangement, the tranquility of dawn. Then, at length, you won’t have to make such a great effort.

Conduct is creed in action.

To be ignorant of Scripture is to be ignorant of Christ.

To believe that man’s aggressiveness or territoriality is in the nature of the beast is to mistake some men for all men, contemporary society for all possible societies, and, by a remarkable transformation, to justify what is as what needs must be; social repression becomes a response to, rather than a cause of, human violence. Pessimism about man serves to maintain the status quo. It is a luxury for the affluent, a sop to the guilt of the politically inactive, a comfort to those who continue to enjoy the amenities of privilege.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.

The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy. Its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.

President Obama is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.

Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God?

Back in the thirties we were told we must collectivize the nation because the people were so poor. Now we are told we must collectivize the nation because the people are so rich.

Great character is defined by our struggle with the worst parts of our nature rather than by not having these parts.

President Obama is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.

The person who is waiting for something to turn up might start with their shirt sleeves.

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

To read something is not necessarily to understand it. Partly, of course, because when you’re young, you always understand less than you think you do. But mainly because, to understand someone, it’s not enough to sit there tapping your foot while he talks. You’ve got to listen, rather than merely waiting for a pause so that you can insert the response you’d already formulated before he even opened his mouth. And when you’re a young man who thinks he’s got the religious question all figured out, you’re in little mood to listen — especially if you’ve fallen in love with one side of the question, the side that’s new and sexy because it’s not what you grew up believing.

This is my song, O God of all the nations,
a song of peace for lands afar from mind.

This is my home, the country where my heart is;
here are my hopes, my dreams, my hold shrine;

But other hearts in other lands are beating with hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

When politics loses its vision, religion loses its faith, and culture loses its soul; life becomes confused, cheap, and endangered. Nothing less than a restoration of the shattered covenant will save us. That will require a fundamental transformation of our ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. At the core of prophetic religion is transformation—a change of heart, a revolution of the spirit, a conversion of the soul that isues forth in new personal and social behavior… We are suffering today not just from greed, injustice, and violence, but from a lack of imagination. For lack of a vision, we are perishing. We need new visions and dreams; our future depends upon fresh imagination.

Yes, we are the cowed, — we the trustless. It is a mischievous notion that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin, it is flint. They adapt themselves to it as they may; but in proportion as a man has any thing in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes his signet and form.

While I have met humble agnostics, who believe human reason insufficient to come to certainty on the question of the existence of divine things, I have never met a humble atheist… Now, honestly, you cannot walk around thinking yourself intellectually superior to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and the founders of your republic or kingdom or nation without it being reflected in your demeanor and character.

Haters give themselves away by obsessing over the supposed hatefulness of the people they hate. This act of projection provides a ready-made excuse to indulge in the darkest malevolence. A dim brain often accompanies a black soul. Hatred and ignorance are familiar bedfellows.

A goal without a plan is just a wish.

Every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to it being done at all.

If you are not willing to look stupid, nothing great is ever going to happen to you.

To say that only the natural sciences reach truth is to make a philosophical claim about truth, which goes beyond the sciences themselves.

The lamps are different, but the Light is the same: it comes from Beyond.

The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.