PaduanBenedick’s most recent Quotables

Your Jesus is my mother is someone else’s turtle.

We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.

The tears I shed yesterday have become rain.

Courage is a special kind of knowledge: the knowledge of how to fear what ought to be feared and how not to fear what ought not to be feared.

I contest that only a malicious god would make belief in the absurd the only means to escape eternal torment after making me with a brain incapable of doing so.

Respecting bad ideas is far too close to affirming them for my tastes.

Catharsis isn’t a wound being excavated from childhood.

My heart, thus knowing, thus seeing, was released from the fermentation of sensuality, released from the fermentation of becoming, released from the fermentation of ignorance. With release, there was the knowledge, 'Released.' I discerned that 'Birth is ended, the holy life fulfilled, the task done. There is nothing further for this world.

All human unhappiness comes from not facing reality squarely, exactly as it is.

The basis of world peace is the teaching which runs through almost all the great religions of the world. "Love they neighbor as thyself." Christ, some of the other great Jewish teachers, Buddha, all preached it. The followers forgot it. What is the trouble between capital and labor, what is the trouble in many of our communities, but rather a universal forgetting that this teaching is one of our first obligations.

In each man’s mouth at birth is born an axe, wherewith the fool who speaks will cut himself.

You will not be punished for your anger; you will be punished by your anger.

There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way and not starting.

Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.

It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell.

But if you do not find an intelligent companion, a wise and well-behaved person going the same way as yourself, then go on your way alone, like a king abandoning a conquered kingdom, or like a great elephant in the deep forest.

Believe nothing just because a so-called wise person said it. Believe nothing just because a belief is generally held. Believe nothing just because it is said in ancient books. Believe nothing just because it is said to be of divine origin. Believe nothing just because someone else believes it. Believe only what you yourself test and judge to be true.

Unable are the loved to die,
For love is immortality,
Nay, it is deity.

Every man knows he will die; and nobody believes it. On that paradox stand not only a host of religions but the entity of sane being.

A lot of people say, 'I would rather have a heart attack at the height of sexual passion'. I think I would prefer to be killed by a bookcase.