Edifying Quotations

Over the last two years I have sent out work emails concluding with signature quotes. I would most like to come out and tell everyone about what a difference Jesus has made in my life, but I feel indirect communication is required. Note this: the practice I have developed is in open violation of company email policy. When I told a friend and fellow believer I was doing this, he told me he would never do it. On the other hand, no one has asked me to stop, and as for myself I have no regret.

Feel free to copy and use them as your signature quotes. I usually added a new one every week. Here they are:

The greatest danger, that of losing oneself, can pass off in the world as quietly as if nothing at all had happened.
Anticlimacus

To have a self, to be a self, is the greatest concession made to man, but at the same time it is eternity's demand upon him.
Anticlimacus

It is the minor players that make up the cast of the drama of life ... for they are life!
Bob Kane

The most improbable things sometimes turn out to be quite true!
Batman (Bob Kane)

The apostle of humiliated thought will find at the very end of humiliation the means of regenerating being to its very depth.
Camus

We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives ... inside ourselves.
Camus

Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief.
Charles Saunders Peirce

No one can harm the man who does himself no wrong.
John Chrysostum

No one is free who does not reign over himself.
Cladius

Existence itself mocks everyone who is engaged in becoming purely objective.
Climacus

Immortality is subjectivity's most passionate interest, and it is precisely in interest that the proof lies.
Climacus

If truth has to be true for all, then it is no more than a consensus of generalized opinion.
Climacus

The thinker who can forget in all his thinking also to think that he is an existing individual, will never explain life.
Climacus

Be careful not to let the world squeeze you into its mold.
Craig Englert

Genuine punishment, the only effective kind, that deters and pacifies ... is contained in an awareness of one's own conscience.
Dostoyevski

In the majority of instances human beings, even the evil-doers among them, are far more naive and straightforward than we suppose. And that includes ourselves.
Dostoyevski

Beauty is not only a terrifying thing - it is also a mysterious one. In it the Devil struggles with God, and the field of battle is the hearts of men.
Dostoyevski

Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and the whole world will be clean.
Goethe

I'm not a smart man, but I know what love is.
Forest Gump

Most people want to be some place else. Few want to be where they are.
Martin Heidigger

You have to go on and be crazy. Craziness is like heaven.
Hendrix

Blues is easy to play, but hard to feel.
Hendrix

Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.
Lou Holtz

Nothing is beautiful from every point of view.
Horace

A bruised reed He will not crush.
A smoldering wick He will not snuff out.
Isaiah

Some people are so fond of bad luck they run half way to meet it.
Douglas William Jerrold

Clean the inside of the cup and the outside will be clean as well.
Jesus

Narrow is the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.
Jesus

Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.
Each day has enough troubles of its own.
Jesus

A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.
Franz Kafka

Affliction is able to drown out every earthly voice ...
but the voice of eternity within a man it cannot drown.
Kierkegaard

The more definitely conscience is developed in a person, the more expansive he is, even if in other respects he closes himself off from the entire world.
Kierkegaard

At the hour of death there is only this one consolation,
that one has not avoided opposition but has survived it.
Kierkegaard

A genius is not a little candle that goes out in the wind, but is a raging fire that the storm merely incites.
Kierkegaard

The measure of a man's fundamental disposition is this:
how far is what he understands from what he does?
Kierkegaard

Human beings are perfectible. One can easily get them to do one thing as another, just as easily get them to fast as to live in worldly entertainment - only one thing is important to them, that they are just like the others.
Kierkegaard

Personality is only ripe when a man has made the truth his own.
Kierkegaard

The more a man can forget, the greater the number of metamorphoses which his life can undergo. The more he can remember the more divine his life becomes.
Kierkegaard

If someone thinks that love and peace is a cliche that must have been left behind in the Sixties, that's his problem. Love and peace are eternal.
-Lennon

I don't care what they say I won't stay in a world without love.
John Lennon

Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it is impossible. Humans hide their secrets too well...
Rene Magritte

I only know that when I'm in it, love isn't silly at all.
-McCartney

Somebody once asked me if I ever went up to the plate trying to hit a home run. I said, 'Sure, every time.'
Mickey Mantle

The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite.
Parkinson's Law

At the far end of an infinite distance, a coin is being spun. How will you wager?
Pascal

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.
Pascal

Blessed is the man who does not condemn himself in what he approves.
Paul

Where there are tongues they will be stilled.
Where there is knowledge it will pass away.
Paul

If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging symbol.
Paul

On wild trees, the flowers are fragrant, on cultivated trees, the fruits.
Flavius Philostratus

Time goes by … and when it’s gone … love goes on and on.
Robin Hood

Discovering the truth about outselves is a lifetime's work, but it's worth the effort.
Mister Rogers

Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others.
Mister Rogers

Freedom is what you do with what has been done to you.
Sartre

Life begins on the other side of despair.
Sartre

Heat not a furnace for thy foe so hot that it do singe yourself.
Shakespeare

Leaves appear green while they are alive.
Only after their death do we see their true color.
The Shepherd of Canaan

The calculated often fool themselves, but even a fool can fall in love.
The Shepherd of Canaan

The age demands comedy. If this were actually what our generation needed, then the theater perhaps needs a new play in which someone's dying for love is made ludicrous.
John the Silent

Spiritually speaking, he is only deceived who deceives himself.
John the Silent

In eternity, there is not the slightest complication to make the accounting difficult and the evasion easy.
SK

Alas the door of fortune does not open inwards so that one can force it by charging at it; it opens outwards and so there is nothing one can do.
SK

I would rather speak with children. For one may still dare to hope that they may become rational beings; but those who have become that-- God help us!
SK

What do busy botchers achieve? Are they not like the housewife who, in confusion at the fire in her house, saved the fire-tongs? What else do they salvage from the great fire of life?
SK

The distinction which the world makes is namely this: if a person wants to be all by himself in being selfish - which, after all, is rarely seen - the world calls it selfishness, but if in selfishness he wants to form a group with several other selfish people, the world calls it love.
Kierkegaard

It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey.
SK

There is a lot of talk in the world about treachery and faithlessness-and, God help us, it is all too true-but still let us never because of this forget that every man has in himself the most dangerous traitor of all.
SK

The law is like a ponderous speaker who cannot say everything in spite of all his efforts, but love is the fulfillment.
Kierkegaard

The past can be regarded as nececssary only if one forgets that it came into existence,
but is that kind of forgetfulness supposed to be necessary?
Kierkegaard

He who in truth loves his neighbour loves also his enemy.
The distinction friend or enemy is a distinction in the object of love,
but the object of love to one's neighbour is without distinction.
Kierkegaard

Every man has in himself the most dangerous traitor of all.
Kierkegaard

The poet understands everything, in riddles, and marvellously explains everything, in riddles, but he cannot understand himself, or understand that he himself is a riddle.
Kierkegaard

Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like.
Will Smith

The unexamined life is not worth living.
Socrates

You are not ready to face so great an enemy. Not until you have vanquished the enemy within yourselves.
The Sphinx

Patience, my son. To summon your power for the conflict
to come, you must first have power over that which conflicts you.
The Sphinx

When you doubt your powers, you give power to your doubts.
The Sphinx

He who questions training only trains himself at asking questions.
The Sphinx

The wise man knows that he is weakest when he thinks himself strong.
The Sphinx

It is certain because it is impossible.
Tertullian

There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women.
Margaret Thatcher

The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself, in spite of being unacceptable.
Tillich

The awareness of the ambiguity of one's highest achievements (as well as one's deepest failures) is a definite symptom of maturity.
Tillich

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
Tolstoy

The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.
-Wittgenstein

Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep.
Wittgenstein

It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed "Wisdom." And then I know exactly what is going to follow: "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."
Wittgenstein

The one who lies to himself and believes his own lies comes to a point where he can distinguish no truth either within himself or around him, and thus enters into a state of disrespect towards himself and others.
Zosima