#though

To go wrong in one's own way is better then to go right in someone else's. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#self-determination #self-expression #right

Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking... ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#independent-thought #right

Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them. ↗

— Hermann Hesse

#comfort

One minute was enough, Tyler said, "A person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection. ↗

— Chuck Palahniuk

#perfection #effort

Inevitably it follows that anyone with an independent mind must become 'one who resists or opposes an authority or established convention': a rebel. ...And if enough people come to agree with—and follow—the REBEL, we now have a DEVIL. Until, of course, still more people agree. And then, finally, we have ... GREATNESS. ↗

— Nicholas Tharcher

#independent-thought #metaphysics #philosophy #independence

A lot of people never use their initiative because no-one told them to. ↗

— Banksy

#initiative #oxymoron #paradox #independence

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive. ↗

— Robert Louis Stevenson

#individualism #preference #independence

Uncouth, clannish, lumbering about the confines of Space and Time with a puzzled expression on his face and a handful of things scavenged on the way from gutters, interglacial littorals, sacked settlements and broken relationships, the Earth-human has no use for thinking except in the service of acquisition. He stands at every gate with one hand held out and the other behind his back, inventing reasons why he should be let in. From the first bunch of bananas, his every sluggish fit or dull fleabite of mental activity has prompted more, more; and his time has been spent for thousands of years in the construction and sophistication of systems of ideas that will enable him to excuse, rationalize, and moralize the grasping hand. His dreams, those priceless comic visions he has of himself as a being with concerns beyond the material, are no more than furtive cannibals stumbling round in an uncomfortable murk of emotion, trying to eat each other. Politics, religion, ideology — desperate, edgy attempts to shift the onus of responsibility for his own actions: abdications. His hands have the largest neural representation in the somesthetic cortex, his head the smallest; but he's always trying to hide the one behind the other. ↗

— M. John Harrison

#greed #human-nature #thought #dreams

Det är ett faktum som ingen kan bestrida att hon under hela denna långa tid inte en dag vikit från min sida. Om dagarna har hon ständigt varit i mina tankar. Om nätterna har hon varit i mina drömmar. ↗

— Stig Dagerman

#love #thoughts #dreams

An educated man is not, necessarily, one who has an abundance of general or specialized knowledge. An educated man is one who has so developed the faculties of his mind that he may acquire anything he wants, or its equivalent, without violating the rights of others. – ↗

— Napoleon Hill

#new-thought #science-of-mind #education