Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist.

Whenever two men meet there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other sees him, and each man as he really is.

The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it. To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and of literature; and it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poison. The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.

, in response to those pseudo-feminist "You've Come a Long Way, Baby" cigarette ad slogans for Virginia Slims

We haven't come a long way, we've come a short way. If we hadn't come a short way, no one would be calling us "baby."

Japanese Proverbs

To teach is to learn.

Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.

First the man takes a drink. Then the drink takes a drink. Then the drink takes the man.

Alfred Jarry

God is the tangential point between zero and infinity.

Julian Jaynes, from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all -- what is it? And where did it come from? And why?

Thomas Jefferson

Question with boldness even the existence of God; because, if there is one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded faith.

I cannot live without books.

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

The advertisement is the most truthful part of a newspaper.

Saint Jerome

When the stomach is full, it is easy to talk of fasting.

Love knows no rule.

Jewish Proverb

God could not be everywhere and therefore he made mothers.

Juan Ramon Jimenez

If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.

Pope John Paul I

If someone had told me I would be Pope one day, I would have studied harder.

Pope John Paul II, 1 January 1991

People must not attempt to impose their own 'truth' on others. The right to profess the truth must always be upheld, but not in a way that involves contempt for those who may think differently. Truth imposes itself solely by the force of its own truth.

Lyndon B. Johnson

If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: PRESIDENT CAN'T SWIM.

Samuel Johnson

Knowledge always desires increase; it is like fire, which must first be kindled by some external agent, but which will afterward propagate itself.

Poetry cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve the languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. But as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language.

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it.

It is a most mortifying reflection for a man to consider what he has done, compared to what he might have done.

I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.

Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.

Franklin P. Jones

Love doesn't make the world go 'round. Love is what makes the ride worthwhile.

James Jones

When PETA starts trying to toss red paint on motorcycle riders wearing leather jackets, things will get more interesting (and I hope someone's there with a camera).

John Paul Jones, on the Bonhomme Richard, September 23, 1779

I have not yet begun to fight.

Thomas Jones

Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.

Erica Jong

Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow talent to the dark place where it leads.

Barbara Jordon

Do not call for black power or green power. Call for brain power.

Chief Joseph, Nez Perce surrender speech, 1877

Hear me, my chiefs, I am tired: my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.

James Joyce

I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.

Julian the Apostate

The idea of an incarnation of God is absurd: why should the human race think itself so superior to bees, ants, and elephants as to be put in this unique relation to its maker? . . . Christians are like a council of frogs in a marsh or a synod of worms on a dung-hill croaking and squeaking "for our sakes was the world created."

Carl Jung

To confront a person with his own shadow is to show him his own light.

Science is the tool of the Western mind and with it more doors can be opened than with bare hands. It is part and parcel of our knowledge and obscures our insight only when it holds that the understanding given by it is the only kind there is.

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances. If there is any reaction, both are transformed.

Franz Kafka

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it? Good God, we would also then be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.

From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

Stephen A. Kallis, Jr.

It is important to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.

Mitch Kapor

In a nutshell, I started this little company called Lotus and made this software product that several million people wound up buying. The little company turned into this enormous thing with thousands of employees making hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And it felt awful to me. So I left. I just walked away one day.

Margo Kaufman

I once complained to my father that I didn't seem to be able to do things the same way other people did. Dad's advice? 'Margo, don't be a sheep. People hate sheep. They eat sheep.'

John Keats

There is a budding morrow in midnight.

Philosophy will clip an angel's wings.

Is there another life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be, we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.

The poetry of earth is never dead.

Yet men will murder upon holy days.

John Kelly, jkelly@violet.berkeley.edu

I think this country would be in much better shape if all liberal arts majors agreed to get a good grip on algebra and trigonometry, if not calculus, and all engineering/science majors agreed to get a good grip on literature, art, music, etc.

Jack Kemp

Conservatives define compassion not by the number of people who recieve some kind of government aid but rather by the number of people who no longer need it.

Thomas a Kempis

Love feels no burden, thinks nothing of trouble, attempts what is above its strength, pleads no excuse of impossibility; for it thinks all things lawful for itself, and all things possible.

Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.

H. Kendall

People who take issue with control of population do not understand that if it is not done in a graceful way, nature will do it in a brutal fashion.

Florynce R. Kennedy

If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.

John F. Kennedy

Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.

We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world - or to make it the last.

And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.

Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.

Ich bien ein Berliner [I am a jelly donut].

Robert F. Kennedy

Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.

Some men see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say "Why not?"

John Maynard Keynes

In the long run we are all dead.

Pir Vilayat Khan, Sufi Master

The reason why we are disenchanted with ourselves is because we entertain in the depths of our psyche a kind of vision-an anticipated vision of what we could be if we would be what we might be.

LI of Rubaiat of Omar Khayyam, rendered into English verse by Edward Fitzgerald

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Nikita Khruschev

Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build bridges even when there are no rivers.

Soren Kierkegaard

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.

There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

Now, I say to you today my friends, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: - 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'

I submit to you that if a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live.

If a man is called a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. he should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.

Stephen King

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

Charles Kingsley

(from The Argonauts) ...each of us has a Golden Fleece to seek, and a wild sea to sail over, ere we reach it, and dragons to fight, ere it be ours.

Maxine Hong Kingston

(from The Woman Warrior) Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound.

Rudyard Kipling

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

The female of the species is more deadly than the male.

If I were hanged on the highest hill,
Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!
I know whose love would follow me still,
Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!

Henry Kissinger

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.

There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.

Paul Klee

Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.

Arthur Koestler

The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.

If the creator had a purpose in equipping us with a neck, he surely meant us to stick it out.

C. Everett Koop

Both sides, pro-life, pro-abortion... care simply about winning: winning each court case, each legislative battle, each electoral contest, each rally. They glare and shout at each other over an unbridgeable chasm... I wonder if each side has forgotten the human element that originally prompted the debate: the innocent unborn child, the agonized pregnant woman.

Sheldon Kopp

All of the significant battles are waged within the self.

In the long run, we get no more than we have been willing to risk giving.

Jonathan Kozol

Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.

Krishnamurti

It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

Irv Kupcinet

What can you say about a society that says that God is dead and Elvis is alive?

Akira Kurosawa

In a mad world only the mad are sane.