My favourites :)

Still Leviathan:

"Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words"

"no Law can oblige a man to abandon his own preservation"

Spinoza, On the Improvement of Understanding... something trivial... but we all should remember it

"in order to know that I know, I must first know"

I try to keep a notebook for each book I ready, be it history, a novel, of philosophy. As a result, I have thousands of witty quotations at the ready, I just never remember where to find them when I'd like to use them.

Great Hoobes' quotes, friend. Leviathan is a book I read at the age of 17, a book I certainly need to read again. A treasure trove of insight, and I did not rightly understand the text at the time.

I know what you mean. I read Plato's Republic couple of times and I thought that I understand it... Recently I got Yale's lectures Introduction to Political Philosophy... And I think that I have to read Republic again... and again.

Hey, but that's just any good book - a book you keep reading again and again.

Don't know how many times I've read The Sun Also Rises. Can one ever read Macbeth too many times?

Here's some of mine:

We are what we think, having become what we thought.
-- The Dhammapada

Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.
-- Jean Racine

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool. -- Confucius

A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding. -- Marshal McLuhan

It is much easier to bury a problem than to solve it.
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein

An undefined problem has an infinite number of solutions.
-- Robert A. Humphrey

Perhaps the major challenge to philosophy in the last decades of the twentieth century is where it can face the future imaginatively and creatively or whether it will simply be content with a status as a second-order discipline, able only to analyze and evaluate the concepts and ideas of other disciplines. -- Richard Doss

Knowledge is never finished.
-- Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The last creature in the world to discovery water would be the fish precisely because he is always immersed in it.
-- Ralph Linton

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. -- Arthur Schopenhauer

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me lay an invincible summer. -- Albert Camus

They are playing a game. They are playing a game of not playing a game. If I show them I see the game, they will punish me. I must play their game of not seeing I see the game. -- R. D. Laing

All children paint like geniuses. What do we do to them that so quickly dulls this ability? -- Pablo Picasso

Nothing is more wondrous than a human being when they begin to discover themselves. -- Chinese Proverb

Every time you teach a child something, you keep them from reinventing it. -- Jean Piaget

I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.
-- Walt Whitman

The passion for truth is silenced by answers which have the weight of undisputed authority.
-- Paul Tillich

The surest way to corrupt a young man is to teach him to esteem more highly those who think alike than those who think differently.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche

The reasonable man attempts to adapt himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
-- George Bernard Shaw

The highest duty of the composer, the writer, the artist is to be true to themself and let the chips fall where they may.
-- John F. Kennedy

Where Id was, there shall Ego be. -- Sigmund Freud

You can't go through life applying Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle to everything. -- Sidney Harris

The life so short, the craft so long to learn. -- Hippocrates

You don't stop playing because you grow old; you grow old because you stop playing. -- "Dad" Miller, 105 years old

We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood. -- William James

It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem real when you viddy them on the screen. -- Alex, A Clockwork Orange

The subtlest and most pervasive of influences are those which create and maintain the repertory of stereotypes. We are told about the world before we see it; we imagine most things before we experience them.
-- Walter Lippman

No man is so wrong as the man who knows all the answers.
-- Thomas Merton

What is Truth but to live for an idea? ...It is a question of discovering a truth which is truth for me, of finding an idea for which I am willing to live and die. -- Soren Kierkegaard

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche

Ful wys is he that can himselven knowe! (Fully wise is he than can know himself). -- Geoffrey Chaucer

Little drops fill the waterpot. Little virtues make a wise man.
-- The Dhammapada

Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.
-- Arthur Rimbaud

Men are freest when they are unconscious of freedom.
-- D. H. Lawrence

"When I use a word," Humpty-Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean different things."
"The question is," said Humpty-Dumpty, "which is to be master. That's all!"
-- Lewis Carroll

We were given two ears and but a single mouth in order that we hear more and talk less. -- Zeno of Citium

On this planet, anything we think may be held against us.
-- Mr. Spock, Star Trek, 'Once Upon A Planet'

Bloom where you are planted. -- Hindu Proverb

Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens:

"for to have faith is to have wings" ...I really like this one

What I believe by Russell:

"A certain percentage of children have the habit of thinking, one of the aims of education is to cure them of this habit"

The Whitman is:

"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

More favorites:

No empirical knowlege is ever certain. To every statement, one can imagine an exception. -- James L. Christian

Metaphysicians are musicians without musical talent.
-- Rudolf Carnap

We are free to choose which elements we wish to apply in construction of physical reality. -- Albert Einstein

This alone I know, that I know nothing. -- Socrates

I cannot know either whether I know or know not. -- Arcesilaus

Nature loves to hide. -- Heraclitus

At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanation of natural phenomena.
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein

Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought.
-- Alfred North Whitehead

IThere are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt in your philosophy. -- William Shakespeare, Hamlet

We must deal with the real world and not one on paper.
-- Galileo Galilei

The more humanoid Aliens appeared to us, the more easily we would be offended by behavior that, if we indulged in it, would be defined and felt as immoral. -- James L. Christian

In the deepest sense, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for who we are. -- Carl Sagan

We have seen the highest circle of spiraling powers. We have named that circle God. We might have given it any other name we wished: Abyss, Mystery, Absolute Darkness, Absolute Light, Matter, Spirit, Ultimate Hope, Ultimate Despair, or Silence. -- Nikos Kazantzakis

We are all children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God's name with the wrong blocks. -- Tennessee Williams


-ITL-

The birth of Tragedy by Nietzsche

"From the smile of Dionysus sprang the Olympian gods, from his tears sprang man"

and a really good one:

"We talk so abstractly about poetry, because we are all bad poets"