180 quotes on philosophy and the big questions — from the classics to the everyday.
“One day our descendants will think it incredible that we paid so much attention to things like the amount of melanin in our skin or the shape of our eyes or our gender instead of the unique identities of each of us as complex human beings.”
Franklin A. Thomas · widely attributed to Franklin A. Thomas, former president of the Ford Foundation
“We know what we are, but know not what we may be.”
William Shakespeare · Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 5
“There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”
Audre Lorde · "Learning from the 60s," speech at Harvard, February 1982
“The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.”
W.E.B. Du Bois · "John Brown," 1909
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
James Baldwin · "As Much Truth As One Can Bear," The New York Times Book Review, 1962
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
Frederick Douglass · "If There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress," speech, 1857
“Quality is not an act, it is a habit.”
Aristotle · Nicomachean Ethics
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
Aristotle · Nicomachean Ethics (paraphrased by Will Durant)
“Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small.”
Lao Tzu · Tao Te Ching
“You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
Marcus Aurelius · Meditations
“Maybe that's enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting place of the mind; no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, at least for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.”
Anthony Bourdain · The Nasty Bits, 2006
“I don't have to agree with you to like you or respect you.”
Anthony Bourdain
“Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only at Hard Rock Cafes and McDonalds? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria's mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head?”
Anthony Bourdain · Kitchen Confidential, 2000
“Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me.”
Anthony Bourdain
“Without experimentation, a willingness to ask questions and try new things, we shall surely become static, repetitive, and moribund.”
Anthony Bourdain
“Silence is a sentence that says everything.”
Original
“In the middle of noise, the stillness inside you is the only thing that actually belongs to you.”
Original
