Your favourite philosophical or spiritual quotes

[Bill the Piper]

It is requisite to choose the most excellent life; for custom will make it pleasant. - Pythagorean saying
  
It is better to suffer, than to do wrong. - Pythagorean saying

The best and greatest winning is a true friend; and the greatest loss is the loss of time. - Pythagorean saying
 
The virtuous man is driven by responsibility, the non-virtuous man is driven by profit.  - Confucius
 
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useless. - Seneca
 
Without contraries there is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate are necessary to human existence. - William Blake
 
There are no sons of God, but there are mature and thus rational and perfect sons of the Cosmos. There is no Christ, but there is a brilliant man and a greater teacher of mankind.  - Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
 
Nothing exists, save atoms and their combinations. There is no atom, which wouldn't periodically take part in life.  - Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
 
This is the goal of all living, that the Cosmos may be known, and admired, and that it may be crowned with further beauties. Nowhere and at no time, so far as we can tell, at least within our own galaxy, has the adventure reached further than in ourselves. And in us, what has been achieved is but a minute beginning. But it is a real beginning. - Olaf Stapledon
 
In you, humanity is precarious; and so, in dread and in shame, you kill the animal in you. And its slaughter poisons you  - Olaf Stapledon
 
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. - Carl Sagan
 
Progress should not bow to fear, but should proceed with eyes wide open. - Max More

[pbrower2a]

Character is destiny -- Heraclitus.

Facts are stubborn things -- John Adams.

Before you tear down a fence, know why it is there -- G. K. Chesterton.

We have nothing to fear but Fear itself -- Franklin Roosevelt.

The unexamined life is a waste -- Socrates.

[Hintergrund]

History creates generations. Generations create history.

[Eric the Green]

I was quoting Emerson somewhere. Here's three of the best I found.

"Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

[Warren Dew]

"There is no sadder sight in the world, than to see a beautiful theory killed by brutal fact." - T. Huxley

[David Horn]

(07-13-2019, 08:47 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: "There is no sadder sight in the world, than to see a beautiful theory killed by brutal fact." - T. Huxley

How sad he would be today, seeing how easily fact is degraded and subsumed by opinion and passion -- nearly the opposite of what Huxley observed in his time.

[Eric the Green]

“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings, Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. As age comes on, one source of enjoyment after another is closed, but nature's sources never fail.” "God never made an ugly landscape. All that the sun shines on is beautiful, so long as it is wild." “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.
Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike . . . Keep close to Nature's heart... and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.” -- John Muir