Mr. Burns, The Simpsons
- Mother Nature needs a favor?
Oh, so Mother Nature needs a favor? Well, maybe she should have thought of that when she was besetting us with droughts and floods and poison monkeys. Nature started the fight for survival, and now she wants to quit because she's losing? Well, I say "hard cheese!"
George Orwell
- Two Plus Two (excerpt from 1984)
Perhaps the needle was at eighty-ninety. Winston could only intermittently remember why the pain was happening. Behind his screwed-up eyelids a forest of fingers seemed to be moving in a sort of dance, weaving in and out, disappearing behind one another and reappearing again. He was trying to count them, he could not remember why. He knew only that it was impossible to count them, and that this was somehow due to the mysterious identity between five and four.
Ayn Rand
- Ellsworth Toohey, The Fountainhead
Compassion is a wonderful thing. It's what one feels when one looks at a squashed caterpillar. An elevating experience. One can let oneself go and spread-you know, like taking a girdle off. You don't have to hold your stomach, your heart or your spirit up-when you feel compassion. All you have to do is look down.
Ayn Rand
- The House on the Cliff, The Fountainhead
The house on the sketches had been designed not by Roark, but by the cliff on which it stood. It was as if the cliff had grown and completed itself and proclaimed the purpose for which it had been waiting. The house was broken into many levels, following the ledges of the rock, rising as it rose, in gradual masses, in planes flowing together up into one consummate harmony.
Ayn Rand
- Howard Roark, The Fountainhead
I have, let's say, sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I've chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I'm only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards-and I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one.
Jack Donaghy
- St. Patrick
There were never any snakes in Ireland, and St. Patrick didn't drive anything out of anywhere. First of all, he was born in fourth century Ireland. He might as well have been born in a grave. His only worldly possession was no snakes. But he turned that into sainthood, a holiday, this magnificent cathedral. He was just some guy, starving in the wilderness... Exactly like me. But he found a way to change his luck.
Viktor Frankl
- Man's Search for Meaning
The prisoner who had lost faith in the future-his future-was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay.
Viktor Frankl
- Don't aim at success
Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the byproduct of one's surrender to a person other than oneself.
Nassim Taleb
- What works cannot be irrational
By definition, what works cannot be irrational; about every single person I know who has chronically failed in business shares that mental block, the failure to realize that if something stupid works (and makes money), it cannot be stupid.
Robert Heinlein
- Excerpt from "Stranger in a Strange Land"
Harshaw was working hard. Most of him was watching pretty girls do pretty things with sun and water; one small, shuttered, soundproofed compartment was composing. He claimed that his method of writing was to hook his gonads in parallel with his thalamus and disconnect his cerebrum; his habits lent credibility to the theory.
Charles Dickens
- Excerpt from "Great Expectations"
The doorway soon absorbed her boxes, and she gave me her hand and a smile, and said good-night, and was absorbed likewise. And still I stood looking at the house, thinking how happy I should be if I lived there with her, and knowing that I never was happy with her, but always miserable.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Excerpt from "Notes from Underground"
What does reason know? Reason knows only what it has managed to learn (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is no consolation, but why not say it anyway?), while human nature acts as an entire whole, with everything that is in it, consciously and unconsciously, and though it lies, still it lives.
Jordan Peterson
Risk your security. Face the unknown. Quit lying to yourself, and do what your heart truly tells you to do. You will be better for it, and so will the world.
Jordan Peterson
Everybody acts out a myth, but very few people know what their myth is. And you should know what your myth is because it might be a tragedy, and maybe you don't want it to be.
Jordan Peterson
Strengthen the individual. Start with yourself. Take care with yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Choose your destination and articulate your Being. As the great nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, "He whose life has a why can bear almost any how."
