30 Quotes For 30

I’m turning 30. In some sense, that’s a time for reflection, but one thing I’ve learned is that it’s often better to reflect with others than alone. Plato wrote dialogues after all.

On that theme, here are 30 quotes for 30. Many of these are entirely correct. Others are merely provocative. I’ve grouped them into four themes: self-transformation, philosophy, society, and religion. They do not appear in any particular order.

Self-Transformation

Seek victory today over the self of yesterday. Tomorrow, conquer your shortcomings and then [build] your strong points. Practice all I have written here, mindful of not veering from the path.

Musashi, The Book of Five Rings

Where there is a will to fail, obstacles can be found.

John McCarthy

The further away from social norms I traveled, the easier it was to connect with my kind, just as water flows to the lowest point.

Judith Grisel, Never Enough

If you don't get what you want, it's a sign either that you did not seriously want it, or that you tried to bargain over the price.

Rudyard Kipling, An Unqualified Pilot

As they say, the moment we turn and look behind us, death stands right there.

Seneca, On Anger

It is the height of shamelessness to think about how weak our bodies are when enduring pain, but to forget how weak they are when experiencing pleasure.

Musonius Rufus, Fragments

Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else.

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

See first that you yourself deserve to be a giver, and an instrument of giving. For in truth it is life that gives unto life—while you, who deem yourself a giver, are but a witness.

Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself and in no instance bypass the discriminations of reason? You have been given the principles that you ought to endorse, and you have endorsed them. What kind of teacher, then, are you still waiting for in order to refer your self-improvement to him? You are no longer a boy, but a full-grown man. If you are careless and lazy now and keep putting things off and always deferring the day after which you will attend to yourself, you will not notice that you are making no progress, but you will live and die as someone quite ordinary. From now on, then, resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside. And whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable, or highly or lowly regarded, remember that the contest is now: you are at the Olympic Games, you cannot wait any longer, and that your progress is wrecked or preserved by a single day and a single event. That is how Socrates fulfilled himself by attending to nothing except reason in everything he encountered. And you, although you are not yet a Socrates, should live as someone who at least wants to be a Socrates.

Epictetus, Discourses

To say "I love you" one must know first how to say the "I".

Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

Philosophy

The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-​formula or that world-​formula be the true one. 

William James, What Pragmatism Means

I would rather die having spoken after my manner, than speak in your manner and live.

Socrates, Apology

You are looking into fog and for that reason persuade yourself that the goal is already close. But the fog disperses and the goal is not yet in sight. 

Ludwig Wittgensten, Notebooks

I only wish I could discover the truth as easily as I can uncover falsehood

Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods

The idolizers of "facts" never realize that their idols shine only in a borrowed light. They are indeed not supposed to realize that, for it would immediately make them perplexed and, accordingly, useless. But idolizers and idols are used only when the gods are absconding and so are announcing their nearness.

Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy

Philosophers should not only interpret our beliefs; when they are false, they should change them.
Derek Parfit, On What Matters

Society

Do you know how dumb the average person is? Well half of them are dumber than that.

Anonymous

The victims most interesting to us are always those who allow us to condemn our neighbors. And our neighbors do the same. They always think first about victims for whom they hold us responsible. 

Rene Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

Two minutes of this kind of exercise per day, with closed eyes, after reading the morning paper, are at present more necessary to us than physical jerks and breathing the Yogi way. It might even be a substitute for going to church. For as long as there are people on the road and victims in the thicket, divided by dream barriers, this will remain a phoney civilisation.

Arthur Koestler, On Disbelieving Atrocities

The word “crisis” comes from the Greek for choice or crossroads. Its core meanings are choice, challenge, opportunity, and risk. It is significant that we use the word to mean disaster, catastrophe, emergency, plight, and predicament.

Thomas Szasz, Words to the Wise

The social world is a realm of suspicion: the locus of ambition and competitive striving, the engine of using and instrumentalizing, the dissipation of energy into anxiety and petty spites. Only in withdrawing from it can the fundamentals of human and divine life become clear.

Zena Hitz, A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life

All our efforts are, in the end, poisoned by our inheritance, because that inheritance is what we are. We compete for the basic things and for recognition, and in every new circumstance this means that the old relations of domination will be reproduced, but in different forms. I think one should stop hoping for anything else.

Roger Scruton, Conversations with Roger Scruton

If you've met any professional historians, you'd stop claiming that history is written by "the winners"
Anonymous

As he is weeding and hoeing around his thriving potato plants, it dawns on him that he has, unwittingly, become the slave of the potato. Here he is, on his hands and knees, day after day, weeding, fertilizing, untangling, protecting, and in general reshaping the immediate environment to the utopian expectations of his potato plants.

James C Scott, Against The Grain

Religion

The universe is transformation, life is opinion.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 4.3

When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbors whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbors. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like ‘the body of Christ’ and the actual faces in the next pew.

Wormwood to his nephew, C.S Lewis, Screwtape Letters

To love God is precisely to cease one’s childish demand that he return our love; it is to know that divine love cannot be expended on such trivia as us.

Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Human beings render the old gods irrelevant by coming to be better than they are; they shame the old gods by being better to the gods than the gods have been to them.

Mark Johnston, Saving God

For centuries people have spoken of the Greek myths as something to be rediscovered, reawoken. The truth is it is the myths that are still out there waiting to wake us and be seen by us, like a tree waiting to greet our newly opened eyes.

Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Here we could speak of a mystical dimension of Stoicism. At each moment, at each instant, one must say yes to the universe, that is, to the will of universal Reason. One must want what universal Reason wants, that is, the present instant such as it is.

Pierre Hadot, Don’t Forget To Live