146 Thought-Provoking Quotes

In a world that often rushes forward at a relentless pace, it's essential to carve out moments for reflection and inspiration. A single, thoughtfully crafted quote has the power to change perspectives, ignite creativity, or provide solace during difficult times. Our curated collection of the top 146 thought-provoking quotes offers a treasure trove of wisdom from a diverse array of thinkers, writers, and visionaries. Each quote has been carefully selected for its ability to stimulate your mind and touch your soul, inviting you to ponder deeper truths and explore new possibilities. So, take a moment to pause, read, and let these timeless words guide you on your journey towards greater understanding and introspection.

1. “But then something happened, Ray, something amazing. Something..."That white cop sitting next to me? He took a long look at my mother when she came in, just like, absorbed her, and then without even turning to me, he just put his hand on my back, up between my neck and shoulder..."And all he did was squeeze. Give me a little squeeze of sympathy, then rubbed that same spot with his palm for maybe two, three seconds, and that was it."But I swear to you, nobody, in my entire life up to that point had ever touched me with that kind of tenderness. I had never experienced a sympathetic hand like that, and Ray, it felt like lightning."I mean, the guy did it without thinking, I'm sure. And when dinnertime rolled around he had probably forgotten all about it. Forgot about me, too, for that matter... But I didn't forget."I didn't walk around thinking about it nonstop either, but something like seven years later when I was at community college? The recruiting officer for the PD came on campus for Career Day, and I didn't really like college all that much to begin with, so I took the test for the academy, scored high, quit school and never looked back."And usually when I tell people why I became a cop I say because it would keep Butchie and Antoine out of my life, and there's some truth in that."But I think the real reason was because that recruiting officer on campus that day reminded me, in some way, you know, conscious or not, of that housing cop who had sat on the bench with me when I was thirteen."In fact, I don't think it, I know it. As sure as I'm standing here, I know I became a cop because of him. For him. To be like him. God as my witness, Ray. The man put his hand on my back for three seconds and it rerouted my life for the next twenty-nine years."It's the enormity of small things... Adults, grown-ups, us, we have so much power... And sometimes when we find ourselves coming into contact with certain kinds of kids? Needy kids? We have to be ever so careful...” - Richard Price

2. “A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?” - Albert Einstein

3. “Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken...” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

4. “Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled ‘This could change your life’.” - Helen Exley

5. “What work do I have to do then?" said Will, but went on at once, "No, on second thought, don't tell me. I shall decide what I do. If you say my work is fighting, or healing, or exploring, or whatever you might say, I'll always be thinking about it. And if I do end up doing that, I'll be resentful because it'll feel as if I didn't have a choice, and if I don't do it, I'll feel guilty because I should. Whatever I do, I will choose it, no one else.” - Philip Pullman

6. “Have you ever been in a conflict with someone who thought he was wrong. If you are not wrong, then you will be willing to consider how you might be mistaken.” - Arbinger Institute

7. “...the long train ride was like traveling through limbo. You weren't anywhere when you were on a train, she decided. You weren't where you had been, and you weren't yet where you were going. You were nowhere. It might be beautiful outside the window-and it was, she had sense enough to realize that-but it wasn't anywhere to her, just a scene passing by that was framed by the train window. (p160)” - Katherine Paterson

8. “I have mo prejudice against the Southern people... They are just what we would ben in their situation. If slavery did not now exits amongst them, they wld not inrtoduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up... I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. (p52)” - Russell Freedman

9. “I like to imagine that the world is one big machine. You know, machines never have any extra parts. They have the exact number and type of parts they need. So I figure if the entire world is a big machine, I have to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too.” - Brian Selznick

10. “According to Aristophanes in Plato's The Banquet, in the ancient world of legend there were three types of people.In ancient times people weren't simply male or female, but one of three types : male/male, male/female or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangment and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everyone in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing half.” - Haruki Murakami

11. “He lingered at the door, and said, 'The Lion wants courage, the Tin Man a heart, and the Scarecrow brains. Dorothy wants to go home. What do you want?'...She couldn't say forgiveness, not to Liir. She started to say 'a soldier,' to make fun of his mooning affections over the guys in uniform. But realizing even as she said it that he would be hurt, she caught herself halfway, and in the end what came out of her mouth surprised them both.She said, 'A soul-'He blinked at her.” - Gregory Maguire

12. “...I just gave up trying to be a Christian... Let's face it, I ain't got the knack for holiness. Besides, I didn't have the slightest little desire to join the likes of Reverend Pelham at the dinner table for fourteen minutes, much less at the banquet table of Heaven eternally. Eternity is a mighty long time to be stuck with people who judge every word you say and think and condemn most of what you do. It struck me as pretty miserable company. And if Reverend Pelham was the kind of company God preferred to keep, well, I just hoped they'd be happy together.” - Katherine Paterson

13. “But I've strayed so far from normal now, I'll never find my way back. And the truth is, I no longer want to.” - Alyson Noel

14. “And what greater might do we possess as human beings than our capacity to question and to learn?” - Ann Druyan

15. “Call it professional interest. You see, Jessamine, love is a kind of poison; one of my favorite kinds, in fact. It infects the blood; it takes over the mind; it seizes dominion over the body. It amuses me to think of him pining for you. Aching for what he cannot have. The loneliness in his soul is festering like a wound. There is nothing I could do for him that is worse that what you have already done, my lovely. And I assure you, in his case there will be no cure.” - Maryrose Wood

16. “But was that not the task you set me? To defend the helpless against the strong?" "Indeed it was Master Weed. But who is to say who is helpless, and who is strong?" .........."If you seek the power to alter fate, you must also bear responsibility for the consequences. For you cannot change the fate of only one being; all fates are intertwined." "I performed the task," I protest. "I did what you bid me do." "You defended the weak from the strong." Larkspur speaks as if from far away. "But who will defend these poor weak infants against you!?” - Maryrose Wood

17. “You flesh bodies are so obsessed with goodness, yet no other form of life on earth is capable of such cruelty. You need only convince yourselves your transgressions serve some 'purpose.' Even if it is only greed, or lust, or the raw desire for power that drives you. You will spill the blood of your kinsmen, lay waste to the earth itself, wreak havoc, and cause unspeakable suffering---any and all sins are justified, as long as they are a means to your precous, righteous 'purpose'.” - Maryrose Wood

18. “When someone dies, it feels like the hole in your gum when a tooth falls out. You can chew, you can eat, you have plenty of other teeth, but your tongue keeps going back to that empty place, where all the nerves are still a little raw.” - Jodi Picoult

19. “Given the obstacles to merging these fragile and diverse forms of storytelling into a single tale, it is, paradoxically, by venturing in the opposite direction -- by listening for the silences between accounts; by discovering what each genre of recordkeeping cannot tell us -- that we can capture most fully the human struggle to understand our elusive past. What this past asks of us in return is a willingness to recount all our stories -- our darkest tales as well as our most inspiring ones -- and to ponder those stories that violence has silenced forever. For until we recognize our shared capacity for inhumanity, how can we ever hope to tell stories of our mutual humanity?” - Karl Jacoby

20. “If blue helmeted UN peacekeepers show up in your town or village and offer to protect you, run.” - Andrew Thomson

21. “The impoverished always try to keep moving, as if relocating might help. They ignore the reality that a new version of the same old problem will be waiting at the end of the trip- the relative you cringe to kiss.” - Markus Zusak

22. “Lead us not into temptation' often means, among other things, 'Deny me those gratifying invitations, those highly interesting contacts, that participation in the brilliant movements of our age, which I so often, at such risk, desire.'Reflections on the Psalms, ch 7” - C.S. Lewis

23. “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” - Carl Sagan

24. “On their sofas of spice and feathers, the concubines also slept fretfully. In those days the Earth was still flat, and people dreamed often of falling over edges.” - Tom Robbins

25. “The party in Alobar’s head, which agitation and anxiety were throwing, now was crashed by a notion: existence can be rearranged.” - Tom Robbins

26. “All dreams continue in the beyond.” - Tom Robbins

27. “Perhaps the most terrible (or wonderful) thing that can happen to an imaginative youth, aside from the curse (or blessing) of imagination itself, is to be exposed without preparation to the life outside his or her own sphere - the sudden revelation that there is a there out there.” - Tom Robbins

28. “News is something worth knowing that you didn't know already. (by an "earnest young woman" in his journalism class)” - David Brinkley

29. “Faustus, who embraced evil and shunned righteousness, became the foremost symbol of the misuse of free will, that sublime gift from God with its inherent opportunity to choose virtue and reject iniquity. “What shall a man gain if he has the whole world and lose his soul,” (Matt. 16: v. 26) - but for a notorious name, the ethereal shadow of a career, and a brief life of fleeting pleasure with no true peace? This was the blackest and most captivating tragedy of all, few could have remained indifferent to the growing intrigue of this individual who apparently shook hands with the devil and freely chose to descend to the molten, sulphuric chasm of Hell for all eternity for so little in exchange. It is a drama that continues to fascinate today as powerfully as when Faustus first disseminated his infamous card in the Heidelberg locale to the scandal of his generation. In fine, a life of good or evil, the hope of Heaven or the despair of Hell, Faustus stands as a reminder that the choice between these two absolutes also falls to us.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

30. “It was very bad if the council had resorted to recruiting men. By tradition men were our last line of defence, their physical strength bent towards the single and most important task of protecting our homes and children. This meant the council had decided that our only defence was to defeat the enemy, period. Anything else meant the end of Darre.” - N.K. Jemisin

31. “One thing you have to realize from now on is that it doesn't matter if this is a dream or not. Survival depends on what you do, not what you think.” - Rebecca McKinsey

32. “Your mind can be either your prison or your palace. What you make it is yours to decide” - Bernard Kelvin Clive

33. “Even the finest sword plunged into salt water will eventually rust.” - Sun Tzu

34. “At school, new ideas are thrust at you every day. Out in the world, you'll have to find your inner motivation to seek for new ideas on your own.” - Bill Watterson

35. “Yet does illustrating in a new way signify a new way of seeing?” - Orhan Pamuk

36. “A slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and-whip grading, a mule mentality which said, “If you don’t whip me, I won’t work.” He didn’t get whipped. He didn’t work.” - Robert M. Pirsig

37. “What was behind this smug presumption that what pleased you was bad or at least unimportant in comparison to other things? … Little children were trained not to do “just what they liked’ but … but what? … Of course! What others liked. And which others? Parents, teachers, supervisors, policemen, judges, officials, kings, dictators. All authorities.When you are trained to despise “just what you like” then, of course, you become a much more obedient servant of others — a good slave. When you learn not to do “just what you like” then the System loves you.” - Robert M. Pirsig

38. “They Were all clad in the same uniform of misery and filth. For all of time, for all of eternity” - James Riordan

39. “There's still a question I must put to you," said the cunger woman. "Can you give up Joshua to keep him?” - William Hooks

40. “I don't understand," Belle cried. "I gave you gold. You only gave me grief.” - William Hooks

41. “The old tales of China tell us that all things may grow and change. A stone may become a plant. A plant may become an animal. An animal may become a human. A human may become a god.Just so, a snake may become a woman. And we are told of one who did.” - Aaron Shepard

42. “The tape measures and weighing scales of the Victorian brain scientists have been supplanted by powerful neuroimaging technologies, but there is still a lesson to be learned from historical examples such as these. State-of-the-art brain scanners offer us unprecedented information about the structure and working of the brain. But don't forget that, once, wrapping a tape measure around the head was considered modern and sophisticated, and it's important not to fall into the same old traps. As we'll see in later chapters, although certain popular commentators make it seem effortlessly easy, the sheer complexity of the brain makes interpreting and understanding the meaning of any sex differences we find in the brain a very difficult task. But the first, and perhaps surprising, issue in sex differences research is that of knowing which differences are real and which, like the intially promising cephalic index, are flukes or spurious.” - Cordelia Fine

43. “Before you bombed my boy Osama I always thought an explosion was such a quick thing but now I know better. The flash is over very fast but the fire catches hold inside you and the noise never stops…I live in an inferno where you could shiver with cold Osama. This life is a deafening roar but listen. You could hear a pin drop.” - Chris Cleave

44. “It is the story that lies around the edges of the photographs, or at the end of newspaper account. It's about the lies we tell others to protect them, and about the lies we tell ourselves in order not to acknowledge what we can't bear: that we are alive, for instance, and eating lunch, while bombs are falling, and refugees are crammed into camps, and the news comes toward us every hour of the day. And what, in the end, do we do?” - Sarah Blake

45. “This is how everything should end: with the forgotten remembered, the wounded healed, and the sinners forgiven.” - Jenny Hollowell

46. “Over the course of your life you are actually hundreds of different people. You are a different person at the coffee shop than you are at the bar, and a different person for the dry cleaner than you are for your boyfriend, and a different person at work than you are on vacation. You are nobody in particular. But once somebody finds you and loves you, you have to keep being the person that they love. You want thier love. You need to keep getting it even if it means pretending...but no one loved her and so she could keep changing.” - Jenny Hollowell

47. “While we may judge things as good or bad, karma doesn't. It's a simple case of like gets like, the ultimate balancing act, nothing more, nothing less. And if you're deteremined to fix every situation you deem as bad, or difficult, or somehow unsavory, then you rob the person of their own chance to fix it, learn from it, or even grow from it. Some things, no matter how painful, happen for a reason. A reason you or I may not be able to grasp at first sight, not without knowing a person's entire life story—their cumulative past. And to just barge in and interfere, no matter how well-intentioned, would be akin to robbing them of their journey. Something that's better not done.” - Alyson Noel

48. “It gets you thinking about all the parts in a story we never see" --he cleared his throat-- "the parts around the edges. You bring someone like that boy so alive before us and there he is set loose in our world so that we can't stop thinking of him. But then the report is over, the boy disappears. He was just a boy in a story and we never know the ending, we never get to close the book. It makes you wonder what happens to the people in them after the story stops--all the stories you've reported for instance. Where are they all now?” - Sarah Blake

49. “As for fame, fame felt like nothing. Fame was not a sensation like love or hunger or loneliness, welling from within and invisible to the outside eye. It was rather entirely external, coming from the minds of others. It existed in the way people looked at him or behaved towards him. In that, being famous was no different from being gay, or Jewish, or from a visible minority: you are who you are, and then people project onto you some notion they have.” - Yann Martel

50. “You're stressing too much about what might be. Do something to take your mind off thinking about what might never happen.” - Simone Elkeles

51. “The temptation of the age is to look good without being good.” - Brennan Manning

52. “So I have just one wish for you – the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.” - Richard P. Feynman

53. “Words are like people, I think. Put too many of them too close together and they cause trouble.” - Carolee Dean

54. “Poor God, how often He is blamed for all the suffering in theworld. It’s like praising Satan for allowing all the good that happens.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

55. “If Christ is God, He cannot sin, and if suffering was a sin in and by itself, He could not have suffered and died for us. However, since He took the most horrific death to redeem us, He showed us in fact that suffering and pain have great power.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

56. “If a man cannot serve two masters, neither can Christianity, or several thousand of them as the case may be.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

57. “Socrates: Have you noticed on our journey how often the citizens of this new land remind each other it is a free country? Plato: I have, and think it odd they do this.Socrates: How so, Plato?Plato: It is like reminding a baker he is a baker, or a sculptor he is asculptor.Socrates: You mean to say if someone is convinced of their trade, they haveno need to be reminded.Plato: That is correct.Socrates: I agree. If these citizens were convinced of their freedom, they would not need reminders.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

58. “When a youth was giving himself airs in the Theatre and saying, 'I am wise, for I have conversed with many wise men,' Epictetus replied, 'I too have conversed with many rich men, yet I am not rich!’.” - Epictetus

59. “If these self-anointed leaders did not keep the people aroused with calls to preserve the Revolution, or to defend it from one imaginary foe after another, then the people might shake themselves awake from the trance they were in and begin to question the very men who had drenched their streets in blood and make France pariah among the civilized nations of the world.” - Robert Masello

60. “Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement.” - Aldous Huxley

61. “And listening to all the things they would do if they had these things, Wang Lung heard only of how much they would eat and sleep, and of what dainties they would eat that they had never tasted,and how they would gamble in this great tea shop and in that, and what pretty women they would buy for their lust, and above all, how none would ever work again, even as they rich man behind the wall never worked.” - Pearl S. Buck

62. “He was a dying man looking down on the surgeons trying to save him.” - John Green

63. “The importance of setting a date, as in choosing a colour, is a matter of selection. Orange may be seen equally well as 'the decline and fall of red' or 'the rise and triumph of yellow'.” - Donald Thomas

64. “Mostly though, they waited. For the mail. For the news. For the bells. For breakfast and lunch and dinner. For one day to be over and the next day to begin.” - Julie Otsuka

65. “And if anyone asks, you're Chinese. The boy had nodded. "Chinese," he whispered. "I'm Chinese." "And I," said the girl, "am the Queen of Spain." "In your dreams," said the boy. "In my dreams," said the girl, "I'm the King.” - Julie Otsuka

66. “Because the man who stood there before us was not our father. He was somebody else, a stranger who had been sent back in our father's place. That's not him, we said to our mother, That's not him, but our mother no longer seemed to hear us..."Did you..." she said. "Every day," he replied. Then he got down on his knees and he took us into his arms...” - Julie Otsuka

67. “But ask us to prove even to ourselves we are right in our belief, and we are in a quandary.” - J.W. Sire

68. “Reality is such an elusive concept.” - Laura Gilfillan

69. “Sometimes we choose the road we follow.And sometimes the road chooses us.” - Richie singh

70. “And thereLike I thought I knewAnd aint life a bitchWas his head on a silver platter” - Valerie

71. “How do you explain to your friend's mother why a night out with friends has left her daughter dying from an ecstasy overdose?” - A.C. Flanagan

72. “Shattered by the cumulative effect of so much horror and death, Joan was again afflicted by a crisis of faith. How could a good and benevolent God let such a thing happen? How could He so terribly afflict even children and babies, who were not guilty of any sin?” - Donna Woolfolk Cross

73. “The voice says, maybe you don't go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don't do. The things you don't finish.” - Chuck Palahniuk

74. “‎"Tell me, sir, what is a butterfly?""It's what you are meant to become. It flies with beautiful wings and joins the earth to heaven. It drinks only nectar from the flowers and carries the seeds of love from one flower to another. Without butterflies, the world would soon have few flowers.” - Trina Paulus

75. “Of course, I am interested, but I would not dare to talk about them. In talking about the impact of ideas in one field on ideas in another field, one is always apt to make a fool of oneself. In these days of specialization there are too few people who have such a deep understanding of two departments of our knowledge that they do not make fools of themselves in one or the other.” - Richard P. Feynman

76. “I think a power to do something is of value. Whether the result is a good thing or a bad thing depends on how it is used, but the power is a value.” - Richard P. Feynman

77. “If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?” - Jonathan Safran Foer

78. “If love is blind, then maybe a blind person that loves has a greater understanding of it.” - Criss Jami

79. “To know that we are only angels weighed down by filth, free of guilt? The bacteria in our bellies are responsible for the farts which shame us, tiny monsters shitting in their billions all over our pure skin create the acid reek of "our" sweat. And Slade: when the "inner voices" tell us we're unworthy or instruct us to "love" and "hate," despite our best instincts... are these incessant distracting thoughts our own? Or do we only hear the voice of the eternal germ screaming in our heads?” - Grant Morrison

80. “The human heart: its expansions and contractions its electrics and hydraulics the warm tides that move and fill it. For years Art had studied it from a safe distance from many perspectives...he listened in fascination and revulsion, in envy and pity. He dispensed canned wisdom, a little scripture. He sent them on their way with a prayer.” - Jennifer Haigh

81. “Sometimes I wonder if any of us are cut out for the lives we lead.” - Rebecca Wells

82. “God has made us so that we must be mutually dependent. We may ignore our own dependence, or refuse to acknowledge that others depend upon us in more respects than the payment of weekly wages; but the thing must be, nevertheless. Neither you nor any other master can help yourselves. The most proudly independent man depends on those around him for their insensible influence on his character - his life.” - Elizabeth Gaskell

83. “The generation that followed did not have the same concerns; none of its members attempted to follow the example of the past generation. There was no longer anyone with the noble determination to get to know the great men of the world, or if there were some individuals consumed with this curiosity, they were few in number. From then on, there remained only vulgar minds given over to hatred, envy and discord, who took an interest only in things which did not concern them, gossip, slander, calumny of one's neighbors, all those things which are the source of the worst of our troubles.” - Cheikh Anta Diop

84. “Coincidence is the word we use when we can't see the levers and pulleys.” - Emma Bull

85. “For the lips of an immoral woman drip honey, and her mouth is smoother than oil; but in the end she is as bitter as wormword, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death, her steps lay hold of hell” - Justin Cronin

86. “As long as there's life, there's hope.” - Tamora Pierce

87. “Don't use yesterday's state of mind, to make today's decision.” - C. Nzingha Smith

88. “There's only one thing a bully respected: bigger bully.” - Lisa Kleypas

89. “How can the removal of beauty from a world so lacking in beauty be anything but tragic?” - S. Morgenstern

90. “We live by our labors from one harvest to the next, there is no certain telling whether we shall be able to feed ourselves and our children, and if bad times are prolonged we know we must see the weak surrender their lives and this fact, too, is within our experience. In our lives there is no margin for misfortune.” - Kamala Markandaya

91. “Stars, too, were time travelers. How many of those ancient points of light were the last echoes of suns now dead? How many had been born but their light not yet come this far? If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize we were alone? I had always known the sky was full of mysteries—but not until now had I realized how full of them the earth was.” - Ransom Riggs

92. “We lost weight and grew thin. We stopped bleeding. We stopped dreaming. We stopped wanting.” - Julie Otsuka

93. “There are symbolic dreams-dreams that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities-realities that symbolize a dream” - Haruki Murakami

94. “It's just a feeling I have. What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real. My enemy is, among other things, the me inside me.” - Haruki Murakami

95. “If people can't stand being alone, they have no choice but to die” - Natsuo Kirino

96. “Simply by living in this particular time and space, you're doing something nearly 100% of all other humans ever never could. Don't waste it.” - Bill Loguidice

97. “We choose our next world through what we learn in this one. Learn nothing, and the next world is the same as this one, all the same limitations and lead weights to overcome.” - Richard Bach

98. “Even when we do not actively participate in our destiny, we are still on a chosen path. Life has a way of making decisions for us.” - Nina Guilbeau

99. “Either way, Grayson found it ironic how such dissimilar circumstances, colleges, and mental hospitals, had led to the same awful apartment.” - Dorothy McFalls

100. “Knowledge is what enables one to be wrong. (p. 11)” - Mike Higton

101. “I have lost patience with the idea of an insignificant human being standing up above the rest of us--whether he is called Reverend or Doctor or Judge--and shouting at us all about this thing or that. As soon as someone starts to pontificate in this way, I am apt to cut him off or leave the room, or, if this can't be done gracefully, I simply arrange that sweet vapid smile on my face that was so useful during the trial but that so infuriates Dr. Cole. After all, I have already taken the measure of my own insignificance, and I survived.” - Charlotte Rogan

102. “The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?” - Milan Kundera

103. “In the land of the blind, a one eyed man is king” - Michael Grant

104. “I wondered if all a person could hope for was illusion and luck, for I was forced to conclude that the world was fundamentally and appallingly dangerous. It is a lesson I will never forget.” - Charlotte Rogan

105. “When we are babies...we need an authoritative figure to guide and take care of us. We ask no questions about that authority and imagine that the small circumference of family life is the limit of the universe...As we mature, our horizon expands and we begin to question. This continues until we either throw over our creators--our parents--for good and take their place as the creative force in our lives or find replacements for them because the terror and responsibility are too great. People go one way or the other, and this accounts for all of the great personal and political divides throughout history.” - Charlotte Rogan

106. “...People would make the decisions they wished to make and some of them would hurt both themselves and those who loved them, and some would pass unnoticed, while others would bring joy.” - Rachel Joyce

107. “I have no fear, I have only love” - Stevie Nicks

108. “The way he was talking to me earlier… makes me think he’s starting to feel like God’s the cosmic sadist again and he’s the marionette.”“In other words, God’s just torturing him for the kick?”Thomas sighed and set his mostly untouched plate down. “Something like that.”“That’s not a healthy outlook.”“He doesn’t feel loved right now, so it’s the natural one.” - Jessiqua Wittman

109. “As long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seeds of murder and pain cannot reap the joy of love.” - Pythagoras

110. “The desperate resilience,the annoyed flamboyance;his personable passivity and his phobic aggressiveness; all trapped in the clever wrinkles of his fingers, the hard unsociable cast of his knuckles, the safe hopelessness of the pads.” - Brandon Shire

111. “Much time is spent on meaning while precious little time wasted has none!” - M.B.JONES

112. “Challenge a person's beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing, and power. And when those beliefs are based on nothing but faith, they are chronically fragile. No one gets upset about the belief that rocks fall down as opposed to up, because all sane people can see it with their own eyes. Not so for the belief that babies are born with original sin or that God exists in three persons or that Ali is the second-most divinely inspired man after Muhammad. When people organize their lives around these beliefs, and then learn of other people who seem to be doing just fine without them--or worse, who credibly rebut them--they are in danger of looking like fools. Since one cannot defend a belief based on faith by persuading skeptics it is true, the faithful are apt to react to unbelief with rage, and may try to eliminate that affront to everything that makes their lives meaningful.” - Steven Pinker

113. “Some men think because they're afraid to do.” - George R.R. Martin

114. “I missed the future.” - John Green

115. “Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.” - Maggie Nelson

116. “We are all only men, defined by our choices.” - I.E. Castellano

117. “With wisdom comes responsibility. Somewhere along the way, I misplaced both.” - I.E. Castellano

118. “Every villain is a hero in his own mind.” - Tom Hiddleston

119. “Religion would have us believe that immortality is reserved for the gods. We remain skeptical.” - Fiona Paul

120. “Civilized beings regard the act of intercourse as the highest expression of romantic love. One need only observe the behavior of animals, however, to realize that the act is often a form of violence.” - Fiona Paul

121. “It was like trying to think about what he’d be thinking if he never existed. He wouldn’t be thinking about what he was thinking. He just wouldn’t exist. It wouldn’t hurt.” - Nicole Grotepas

122. “Vicki M. Taylor's "Not Without Anna," is a gripping, hard-hitting, thought-provoking look at the escalating crisis of teen alcohol and drug abuse. Charlene Austin” - Vicki M. Taylor

123. “There are things in this world that no human being should be able to endure. We should die of heartbreak, but we do not. Instead, we are forced to survive, to bear witness.” - Noah Hawley

124. “The stories themselves aren't what moves him now...What moves him are the shadowy people behind the stories, the workers weary from their days, gathering at night in front of a comforting bit of fire...The world then was no less terrifying than it is now, with our nightmares of bombs and disease and technological warfare. Anything held the ability to set of fear...a nail dropped in a the hay, wolves circling at the edge of the woods...” - Lauren Groff

125. “His heart...responds to those once-upon-a-time people, anonymous in the shadows, the faith it took them to come together and rest and listen through the gruesomeness, their patience for the ever after, happy or not.” - Lauren Groff

126. “The humans were protecting their heritage, or so they thought. Strange that Mud Men seem more concerned about the past than the present.” - Eion Colfer

127. “It is the transience of life which proves its inestimable worth.” - D.B. Harrop

128. “Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us.” - Oscar Wilde

129. “It was the first time I had ever seen someone die, and it wasn't what I expected...I stood there waiting for something momentous to happen, for someone to say something profound, but there was nothing...I still had the childish notion that since my life was so important, all lives were so important. Since my death would be so cataclysmic, all deaths would be so cataclysmic.” - Michael J. Collins

130. “He’d only ever seen a gun once, a smaller one on the hip of that old deputy, a gun he’d always figured was more for show. He stuffed a fistful of deadly rounds in his pocket, thinking how each one could end an individual life, and understanding why such things were forbidden. Killing a man should be harder than waving a length of pipe in their direction. It should take long enough for one’s conscience to get in the way.” - Hugh Howey

131. “The real strength of therose bush is not in the flowers but in the roots and the branches.” - Dorcas Kareithi

132. “We don't always get the journey we want. But we always get the journey we need.” - Alyson Noel

133. “It isn’t what the book costs. It’s what it will cost you if you don’t read it.” - Jim Rohn

134. “With food still scarce,there was no longer a right to exist. You needed to earn your spot. ” - Eric Liu

135. “But only a leper shows its sins to the world.” - Alan Rawlings

136. “The real problem has to do with the inability by people to admit that a position they've held a long time might be wrong. That's all. Not that it is. Just that it might be. I don't know why it is, but we tend to fall in love with things we believe, Threaten them, and you threaten us.” - Jack McDevitt

137. “That's gotta be one of the principles behind reality. Accepting things that are hard to comprehend, and leaving them that way.” - Haruki Murakami

138. “An idea weighs nothing, except on the mind.” - A.T. Baron

139. “Futures can and do change, something as simple as you're supposed to turn right down a street one day... In your bones u know it, and yet for reasons no one understands, you decide to debunk fate and go left. Now instead of meeting your spouse of your dreams and having a house full of kids, you get flattened by an ice-cream truck and spend the next 5 years in physical therapy recovering from the injuries; or worse you die from it. And all cause you exercised free will and turned the opposite way on a whim.” - Sherrilyn Kenyon

140. “You yourself may not be luminous, but you are a conductor of light.” - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

141. “Hatred only tarnishes the soul that carries it.” - D.B. Harrop

142. “... one would like to be both [loved and feared], but as it is difficult to combine both love and fear, if one has to choose between them it is far safer to be feared than loved” - Niccolo Machiavelli

143. “The technological man is limited as his tools. The man without technologies is limitless.” - Bilal Hussain

144. “The Stars shine down and watch us live Our little lives And weep for us” - Monet Nodlehs

145. “I have never, I think, wanted to 'belong' to a group whose interests were not mine, nor have I resented exclusion. Why should thet accept me? All I have ever asked is that others should go their way and let me go mine.” - W. H. Auden

146. “साधेपणा किती उदात्त असू शकतो , हे आधुनिकतेच्या लाटेत नष्ट न होवो. ही खेडी अशी निष्पाप साधी उदार मनाची राहतील? राहतील. राहतील. हिंदू लोक काहीही फेकून देत नाहीत. सिंधुकाळापासून सगळी अडगळ आम्ही तळघरात गच्च जपून ठेवली आहे. सगळं तिथे अंधारात कुठेतरी ठेवलेलं असतं. ते न दिसू दे. न हरवू दे. स्मृतीतून सुद्धा जाऊ दे. काही बिघडत नाही. केव्हातरी सापडेलच.” - Bhalchandra Nemade