The following quotes contain thoughts that I connect with in one way or another. (I also maintain pages for quotes from Victor Hugo and Yevgeny Zamyatin.)
Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.
— Ayn Rand
Make and cultivate music.
— Socrates (Phaedo 60)
Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
— Henri Bergson
The world's greatest thinkers have often been amateurs; for high thinking is the outcome of fine and independent living, and for that a professional chair offers no special opportunities.
— Havelock Ellis
My own personal goal has pretty much always just been to live a nice life. That has many facets to it — Linux obviously being one. Technical interest mixed in with a ton of joy in interacting with people even if only electronically. I certainly see that as a continual part of my life, but I'm not making any five-year plans. Look at what happened to countries that tried that — I think they are equally destructive in personal life.
— Linus Torvalds
There is something which, for want of a better name, we shall call the tragic sense of life, and it carries along with it an entire conception of the Universe and of life iteself, an entire philosophy more or less formulated, more or less conscious. And this sense may animate, and does animate, not only individual men, but entire peoples. And this sense does not so much flow from ideas as determine them, even though later these ideas react upon it and corroborate it.
— Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, p. 21
Even the absolute universality of the law of causality does not necessarily limit [man's] freedom, because the law of causality not only enables him to explain the past and predict the future, but also encourages him to use his intelligence to create new causes and attain new results.
— Hu Shih
No social evil is greater than the destruction of the individual's individuality.
— Hu Shih
Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe...till we come to the hard bottom of rocks in place, which we can call reality.
— Henry David Thoreau
There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not just theoretically, but practically.
— Henry David Thoreau
Before you become a professor, you have to write a book which is boring enough so that even you cannot bear to read it over. Once you have done this, you are free to write as you please, but can't.
— Mark Helprin, A Vermont Tale
Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.
— Thomas Jefferson
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
— Mark Twain
The highest joy of man is creativity. No power, or wealth, or drugs can match that. There are three great sources of happiness in life: friends, love, and work. Take care of those three, and you can forget the rest. There is no cure for poverty of the spirit.
— Boris Strugatsky
Any corporation, because of the intensity of the reality distortion field of the collective organism that is a large corporate entity, has a totalitarian quality.
— John Perry Barlow
Individualism is the cruel enemy of socialism.
— Ho Chi Minh
In the sage are united the philosopher, the poet, and the musician. His talents are diminished when they are separated.
— Diderot
One crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name.
— Fortune Cookie
To recognize that you know when you do know and recognize that you do not know when you do not know: that is knowledge.
— Confucius
The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
If you can conceive of morality without god, why can you not conceive of society without government?
— Peter Saint-André
If you can conceive of religion without faith, why can you not conceive of government without coercion?
— Peter Saint-André
It is by viewing together a number of facts that we come to believe in objectivism. Philosophy consists of pointing things out rather than arguments.
— Kurt Gödel
It is not necessary that man should be religious, but it is necessary that he should be philosophical. When he is philosophical, he has the very best of the blessings of religion.
— Fung Yu-lan
Those who know both western and Chinese music prefer the former, but those who know both western and Chinese philosophy prefer the latter.
— Fung Yu-lan
All men by nature desire to know.
— Aristotle
Accept the bounty of thy birth;
Taste the lordship of the earth.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The most selfish of all things is the independent mind that recognizes no authority higher than its own and no value higher than its judgment of truth.
— Ayn Rand
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds.
— Bob Marley
The only safe rule is found in the self-adjusting meter of demand and supply. Do not legislate. Meddle, and you snap the sinews with your sumptuary laws. Give no bounties, make equal laws, secure life and property, and you do not need to give alms. Open the doors of opportunity to talent and virtue and they do themselves justice; property will not be in bad hands. In a free and just commonwealth, property rushes from the idle and imbecile to the industrious, brave and persevering.
— Emerson
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
— Ben Franklin
Nothing sounds more beautiful than a guitar, save perhaps two guitars.
— Chopin
I believe the moment is at when, by a paranoiac and active advance of the mind (simultaneously with automatism and other passive states), it will be possible to systematize confusion and thereby discredit completely the realm of reality.
— Salvador Dali
I don't agree with that last one, but what a cool quote! :-)