John Holmes Quotes
American - Poet January 6, 1904 - June 22, 1962

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
John Holmes

It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.
John Holmes

Yes, we love peace, but we are not willing to take wounds for it, as we are for war.
John Holmes

Every genuine boy is a rebel and an anarch. If he were allowed to develop according to his own instincts, his own inclinations, society would undergo such a radical transformation as to make the adult revolutionary cower and cringe.
John Holmes


Joey Adams Quotes
American - Comedian January 6, 1911 - December 2, 1999


Do not worry about avoiding temptation. As you grow older it will avoid you.
Joey Adams

Never let a fool kiss you, or a kiss fool you.
Joey Adams

If it weren't for the fact that the TV set and the refrigerator are so far apart, some of us wouldn't get any exercise at all.
Joey Adams

Rockefeller once explained the secret of success. 'Get up early, work late - and strike oil.'
Joey Adams

The difference between playing the stock market and the horses is that one of the horses must win.
Joey Adams

Marriage is give and take. You'd better give it to her or she'll take it anyway.
Joey Adams

A psychiatrist asks a lot of expensive questions your wife asks for nothing.
Joey Adams

If you break 100, watch your golf. If you break 80, watch your business.
Joey Adams

People are still willing to do an honest day's work. The trouble is they want a week's pay for it.
Joey Adams


Jacques Ellul Quotes
French - Philosopher January 6, 1912 - May 19, 1994

Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity.
Jacques Ellul

Mass media provides the essential link between the individual and the demands of the technological society.
Jacques Ellul

It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale.
Jacques Ellul

The goal of modern propaganda is no longer to transform opinion but to arouse an active and mythical belief.
Jacques Ellul

In sum, thought and reflection have been rendered thoroughly pointless by the circumstances in which modern men and women live and act.
Jacques Ellul

The Holy Spirit alone can do this, the Holy Spirit alone can establish this link with one's neighbor.
Jacques Ellul

The orchestration of press, radio and television to create a continuous, lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda virtually unnoticed precisely because it creates a constant environment.
Jacques Ellul

Thinking has become a superfluous exercise... purely internal, without compelling force, more or less a game.
Jacques Ellul

Prayer holds together the shattered fragments of the creation. It makes history possible.
Jacques Ellul

The intellectual who wants to do her work properly must today go back to the starting point: the woman whom she knows, and first of all to herself. It is at that level, and at no other, that she ought to begin to think about the world situation.
Jacques Ellul

For the word is dialectical in itself and at the same time is integrated into the whole of existence. By this I mean that the word is intended to be lived.
Jacques Ellul

All human language draws its nature and value from the fact that it both comes from the Word of God and is chosen by God to manifest himself. But this relationship is secret and incomprehensible, beyond the bounds of reason and analysis.
Jacques Ellul


Alan Watts Quotes
English - Philosopher January 6, 1915 - November 16, 1973


The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
Alan Watts

To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.
Alan Watts

The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.
Alan Watts

You don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.
Alan Watts

We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.
Alan Watts

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
Alan Watts

No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
Alan Watts

I owe my solitude to other people.
Alan Watts

But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything.
Alan Watts

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.
Alan Watts

Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.
Alan Watts

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
Alan Watts

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.
Alan Watts

How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.
Alan Watts

Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.
Alan Watts

No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
Alan Watts

You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.
Alan Watts

The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.
Alan Watts

The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it - aliens.
Alan Watts

Saints need sinners.
Alan Watts

So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.
Alan Watts

Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done; it's just doing it.
Alan Watts

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
Alan Watts

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.
Alan Watts

So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.
Alan Watts

So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.
Alan Watts

But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.
Alan Watts

What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do.
Alan Watts

The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.
Alan Watts

But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful.
Alan Watts

Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
Alan Watts

We identify in our exerience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.
Alan Watts

In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.
Alan Watts

The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.
Alan Watts

Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.
Alan Watts

And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment.
Alan Watts

And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on.
Alan Watts

In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.
Alan Watts

But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.
Alan Watts

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.
Alan Watts

A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.
Alan Watts

Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.
Alan Watts

The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible.
Alan Watts

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.
Alan Watts

Wars based on principle are far more destructive... the attacker will not destroy that which he is after.
Alan Watts

The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile.
Alan Watts

Faith is a state of openness or trust.
Alan Watts

Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.
Alan Watts