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Amy's Quote Montage

Philosophy, Writing, and Other Pursuits

"You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life." Albert Camus

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth." -Umberto Eco

"I understand it as a willingness to think not about something other than what ordinary human beings think about, but rather to learn to think undistractedly about things that ordinary human beings cannot help thinking about, or anyway cannot help having occur to them, sometimes in a fantasy, sometimes as a flash across a landscape; such things, for example, as whether others really know the nature of one's own experiences, or whether good and bad are relative, or whether we might not now be dreaming that we are awake, or whether modern tyrannies and weapons and spaces and speeds and art are continuous with the past of the human race or discontinuous, and hence whether the learning of the human race is not irrelevant to the problems it has brought before itself. Such thoughts are instances of that characteristic human willingness to allow questions for itself which it cannot answer with satisfaction. Cynics about philosophy, and perhaps about humanity, will find that questions without answers are empty; dogmatists will claim to have arrived at answers; philosophers after my heart will rather wish to convey the thought that while there may be no satisfying answers to such questions in certain forms, there are, so to speak, directions to answers, ways to think, that are worth the time of your life to discover." -- Stanley Cavell, "The Thought of Movies"

"God has no religion." - Ghandi

"I liked things better when I didn't understand them"- Calvin and Hobbes

"No man can be brave who thinks pain the greatest evil; nor temperate, who considers pleasure the highest good"

"Destiny is something we've invented because we can't stand the fact that everything that happens is accidental." -Sleepless in Seattle

"No one would chose a friendless existence on condition of having all the other things in the world." - Aristotle

"People ought to enjoy everyday of thier lives, no matter how long. But they should also remember this: You will be dead a long time. Everything that happens then is useless."- Ecclesiastes 11:8

"For certain is death for the born And certain is birth for the dead; Therefore over the inevitable Thou shouldst not grieve." -The Bhagavad Gita

"You get fired, and this is what you hear. You catch your girlfriend in bed with the guy next door, and this is her defense. You get shot in the face, and the nurse whispers it to you: 'Everything happens for a reason.'... Everything might happen for a reason, but it doesn't have to be a good reason. It might be that the universe is chaotic or vengeful. It might be that it's Tuesday. It might just be your turn." - Stephan Talty, Time Out New York

"You are free and that is why you are lost."- Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis

"No one feels another's grief, no one can understand another's joy. People imagine that they can reach one another. In reality, they only pass each other by." - Franz Schubert

"PHILOSOPHY: Basically, this involves sitting in a room and deciding there is no such thing as reality and then going to lunch. You should major in philosophy if you plan to take a lot of drugs." Dave Barry, Dave Barrys Guide to College

"Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." -J.F.K.