DEEP THOUGHTS: Confusing quotes that will get you thinking

This article was published in The Mindful Word journal of engaged living (http://www.themindfulword.org)

To do two things at once is to do neither. – Publilius Syrus

The great blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach; but we shut our eyes, and like people in the dark, we fall foul on the very thing we search for, without finding it. – Seneca the Younger

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness. – Bertrand Russell

To be 70 years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be 40 years old. – Oliver Wendell Holmes

The enemy is fear. We think it is hate, but it is fear. – Mahatma Gandhi

I don’t understand why when we destroy something created by man we call it vandalism, but when we destroy something created by nature we call it progress. – Ed Begley, Jr.

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. – Mark Twain

Sometimes you face difficulties not because you’re doing something wrong, but because you’re doing something right. – Joel Osteen

Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than the arguments of its opposers. – William Penn

No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell. – Carl Jung

The art of living well and the art of dying well are one. – Epicurus

By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher. – Socrates

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing. – Socrates

I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good. – Socrates

Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance. – Plato

There are two things a person should never be angry at, what they can help, and what they cannot. – Plato

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal. – Aristotle

Jealousy is both reasonable and belongs to reasonable men, while envy is base and belongs to the base, for the one makes himself get good things by jealousy, while the other does not allow his neighbour to have them through envy. – Aristotle

A friend to all is a friend to none. – Aristotle

What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do. – Aristotle

If you are lonely when you’re alone, you are in bad company. – Jean-Paul Sartre

There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck. – Jean-Paul Sartre

Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat. – Jean-Paul Sartre

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. – Friedrich Nietzsche

Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal. – Friedrich Nietzsche

The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking. – Martin Heidegger

Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one. – Martin Heidegger

Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights. – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

You can have religion with spirituality. You can also have religion without spirituality. – Eckhart Tolle

You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger. – Buddha

I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means—except by getting off his back. – Leo Tolstoy

The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life. – Leo Tolstoy

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can’t eat it. – Leo Tolstoy

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

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