Here are several pages worth of quotes that have inspired/entertained me over the years.
If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions?
Scott Adams
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
Franz Kafka
There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.
Kurt Vonnegut, "Cold Turkey", In These Times, May 10, 2004
A little nonsense now and then, is cherished by the wisest men.
Roald Dahl, (Willy Wonka) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
...there are two kinds of idleness that form a great contrast. There is the man who is idle from laziness, and from lack of character, from the baseness of his nature. You may if you like take me for such a one...
Then there is the other idle man, who is idle in spite of himself, who is inwardly consumed by a great longing for action, who does nothing because he seems to be imprisoned in some cage, because he does not possess what he nees to make him productive, because the fatality of circumstances brings him to that point, such a man does not always know what he could do, but he feels by instinct: yet I am good from something, my life has an aim after all, I know that I might be quite a different man! How can I then be useful, of what service can I be! There is something inside me, what can it be!
This is quite a different idle man; you may if you like take me for such a one.
Vincent Van Gogh
Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I've always thought that a big laugh is a really loud noise from the soul saying, "Ain't that the truth."
Quincy Jones
Love: the condition in which the welfare and happiness of another becomes essential to your own.
Robert A Heinlein
There are kisses and kisses. Some are given in sport and some in passion. There are formal kisses of greeting and departure, and there are perfunctory pecks of accustomized affection. Once in a great while lips meet and two spirits merge for a time and the universe is right and complete and the planets wheel in their proper places. Once in a while the lonely, broken spirit of man is healed and make whole. For a while his quest is over and his questions are answered.
Robert A. Heilein, “For Us, the Living”
When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other."
Chinese Proverb
You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.
Mahatma Gandhi
Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you now have was once among the things only hoped for.
Epicurus
To be alone is to be different, to be different is to be alone.
Suzanne Gordon
In the wise words of Stephen King: "Don't create what you think the people will like, create what you know you will like" But then again he also said : "I have the heart of a small boy, ...it's in a jar on my desk"
Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
Albert Einstein
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
Albert Einstein
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
Galileo Galilei
The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad.
Salvador Dali
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.
Plato
If you are going through hell, keep going.
Sir Winston Churchill
All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher.
Ambrose Bierce
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.
Mark Twain
Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
Mark Twain
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
Mark Twain
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
Phillip K. Dick
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
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be.
Anton Chekhov
Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.
Oscar Wilde
There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
Graham Greene, "The Power and the Glory"
Someday I'll walk away and be free and leave the sterile ones their secure sterility. I'll leave without a forwarding address and walk across some barren wilderness to drop the world there. Then wander free of care like an unemployed Atlas.
James Kavanaugh
I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing a habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.
Umberto Eco, "Foucault's Pundulum"
If we know where we are, then we can't know where we are going; and, if we know where we are going, then we can't know where we are.
Werner Heisenberg
The problem with calling a computer a machine is this: We don't yet have a word between mechanical and human.
Gregory J. E. Rawlins, “Slaves of the Machine”
The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.
Umberto Eco
It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.
Douglas Adams
Assert your right to make a few mistakes. If people can't accept your imperfections, that's their fault.
Dr. David M. Burns
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection . . . that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fixing one's love upon other human individuals.
George Orwell writing about Ghandi
In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
Albert Camus
Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.
Anais Nin
Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.
Benjamin Franklin
Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action has arrived, stop thinking and go in.
Napoleon Bonaparte
Do not remove a fly from your friend's forehead with a hatchet.
Peter McWilliams
If our early lessons of acceptance were as successful as our early lessons of anger, how much happier we would all be.
Chinese Proverb
Most people would sooner die than think. In fact, they do.
Bertrand Russel
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
Mahatma Gandhi
I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
Umberto Eco
When you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.
Friedrich Nietzsche
My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you'll be happy; if not, you'll become a philosopher.
Socrates
Just as there is a moment when the artist must stop, when the sculpture must be left as it is, the painting untouched - just as a determination not to know serves the maker more than all the resources of clairvoyance - so there must be a minimum of ignorance in order to perfect a life in happiness. Those who lack such a thing must set about acquiring it: unintelligence must be earned.
Albert Camus, A Happy Death
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.
Helen Keller
When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.
Helen Keller
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle
An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.
Mahatma Gandhi
Everything has been figured out, except how to live.
Jean-Paul Sartre
I have an existential map; it has 'you are here' written all over it.
Steven Wright
I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.
Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1943
There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.
Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977
I just bought a Mac to help me design the next Cray.
Seymoure Cray, when he was informed that Apple Inc. had recently bought a Cray supercomputer to help them design the next Mac.