List of Cool Quotations from this Semester

Every semester of school I keep an Excel file where I write down all the cool quotations and words I discover while reading textbooks or listening to professors. Here are a few of them. Since I don't know what kind of quotations everyone is into I will put them into a few different categories so you can read what you want. Oh, and one more thing, a good deal of these quotations come from Nietzsche and Shakespeare (Two of the most quotable people that ever lived and I took a class that focused exclusively on each of them. Unfortunately I took both classes before I had a blog so many of their gems were wasted...I'm fixing that now).

Philosophical:

Wittgenstein, Ludwig: Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

Nietzsche: It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

Charles Peirce: To have a gifted scientist's mind work on your day to day problems is like running a train, burning diamonds instead of coal. (not a verbatim quote)

Moral and Religious:

Shakespeare: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

Shakespeare: Temptation is the fire that brings up the scum of the heart.

Shakespeare: Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.

Shakespeare: The love of heaven makes one heavenly.

King, Arthur Henry: Sincerity is being oneself without thinking of oneself.

Nietzsche: Fear is the mother of morality (don't have to agree with him, just an interesting idea).


Love (Warning! not always positive):

Gordon, George: Absence--the common cure of love.

Rouchefoucauld, François de la: Absence weakens mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind blows out candles and kindles fires.

Nietzsche: Love is blind, friendship closes its eyes.

Shakespeare: The course of true love never did run smooth.

Nietzsche: Love is not consolation. It is light.

Nietzsche: (feminists do not read this one..I'm not) If a woman possesses manly virtues one should run away from her; and if she does not possess them she runs away from herself. (He never married, never even had a girlfriend, but he did have a girl he liked who dissed him so bad he became a philosopher)

Nietzsche: It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

And one more from our little German friend...

Nietzsche: There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.

Cynical:

(had to make this category to get out some more Nietzsche (the dude just sat down in pain and wrote all day))

Nietzsche: He that humbleth himself wishes to be exalted.

Nietzsche: Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.

Nietzsche: Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.

Nietzsche: Perhaps I know why it is man alone who laughs: He alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

Shakespeare: I dote on his very absence.

Shakespeare: Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind.

General Wisdom

Anonymous: Regrets are far more painful than goodbyes.

Anonymous: A righteous man's reason is revelation.

Shakespeare: How poor are they that have no patience. What wound did ever heal but by degrees.