Profound Thoughts

Profound thoughts and their authors, on a quiet globe made of text. Drag to explore. Click a thought to read it.

• “Happiness is overrated. Meaning is underrated.” — Tom Hiddleston (unverified)
• “Happiness is like a sunrise. The moment is lovely, and then it is over. If you chase it forever, you will be unhappy, because it slips through your fingers when you try to hold it.” — Tom Hiddleston (unverified)
• “Meaning is a structure that only you create in your own life.” — Tom Hiddleston (unverified)
• “Meaning yields joy. But joy is deeper than happiness.” — Tom Hiddleston (unverified)
• “The more you resist, the more friction, and the more unhappiness. Acceptance says: it is a bad day, and meaning is still there.” — Tom Hiddleston (unverified)
• “You can always pull joy from meaning.” — Tom Hiddleston (unverified)
• “Meaning is self-authored and unique to you. That is why it is special.” — Tom Hiddleston (unverified)
• “To accept that life contains hardship is to release something in yourself. You no longer have to resist it.” — Tom Hiddleston (unverified)
• “Hardship comes to all of us. Nobody gets out.” — Tom Hiddleston (unverified)
• “If you are alive, you are dead or dying.” — Kareem Rahma (unverified)
• “Whatever you want to do (climb the mountain, write the song, go back to school), do it. We only have now.” — Tom Hiddleston (unverified)
• “It is never too late to start.” — Tom Hiddleston (unverified)
• “If you are ready, you are late.” — Tom Hiddleston
• “We all have two lives. The second begins when you realize you only have one.” — Unknown (unverified)
• “Take off your shoes and socks, and go barefoot on the grass. You move fast in your life. Be grounded in the earth.” — A traditional doctor in Upper Mustang
• “We don't need to stop and smell the roses. We need to stop and feel our feet on the grass.” — Kareem Rahma (unverified)
• “If you chase happiness, you have to chase it every day. You need a little hit of it, and it always goes away. Life is like a casino: some days you get happy, and some days you don't.” — Kareem Rahma (unverified)
• “I was unhappy my whole life until I found a job I like. Then everything changed. It took me 33 years to get there.” — Kareem Rahma (unverified)
• “It is a great privilege to be alive and to get to do this.” — Kareem Rahma (unverified)
• “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” — Oscar Wilde
• “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.” — Oscar Wilde
• “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” — Oscar Wilde
• “To define is to limit.” — Oscar Wilde
• “Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” — Oscar Wilde
• “The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.” — Oscar Wilde
• “Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.” — Oscar Wilde
• “The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.” — Oscar Wilde
• “The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly, that is what each of us is here for.” — Oscar Wilde
• “Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.” — Oscar Wilde
• “Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.” — Oscar Wilde
• “Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.” — Oscar Wilde
• “I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.” — Oscar Wilde
• “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” — Oscar Wilde
• “I can resist everything except temptation.” — Oscar Wilde
• “Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes.” — Oscar Wilde
• “In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.” — Oscar Wilde
• “Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.” — Oscar Wilde
• “Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.” — Oscar Wilde
• “The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.” — Oscar Wilde
• “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.” — Oscar Wilde
• “Life is never fair… And perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.” — Oscar Wilde
• “It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love.” — Oscar Wilde
• “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” — Oscar Wilde
• “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” — Oscar Wilde
• “Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.” — Oscar Wilde
• “The supreme vice is shallowness. Whatever is realised is right.” — Oscar Wilde
• “The final mystery is oneself.” — Oscar Wilde
• “Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask.” — Oscar Wilde
• “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” — Oscar Wilde
• “Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.” — Oscar Wilde
• “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.” — Oscar Wilde
• “Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue.” — Oscar Wilde
• “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” — Leo Tolstoy
• “All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.” — Leo Tolstoy
• “Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.” — Leo Tolstoy
• “My whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.” — Leo Tolstoy
• “Spring is the time of plans and projects.” — Leo Tolstoy
• “If you look for perfection, you will never be satisfied.” — Leo Tolstoy
• “So many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.” — Leo Tolstoy
• “Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait.” — Leo Tolstoy
• “It is not difficult to capture a fortress but it is difficult to win a campaign. For that, not storming and attacking but patience and time are wanted.” — Leo Tolstoy
• “Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly.” — Leo Tolstoy
• “Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.” — Leo Tolstoy
• “Life is everything. Life is God. Everything changes and moves and that movement is God. … To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one's sufferings, in innocent sufferings.” — Leo Tolstoy
• “All we can know is that we know nothing. And that's the height of human wisdom.” — Leo Tolstoy
• “Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.” — Leo Tolstoy
• “Man can be master of nothing while he fears death, but he who does not fear it possesses all.” — Leo Tolstoy
• “If there were no suffering, man would not know his limitations, would not know himself.” — Leo Tolstoy
• “Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
• “What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
• “The secret of man's being is not only to live but to have something to live for.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
• “Love all God's creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
• “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
• “If the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
• “The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
• “The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
• “Men reject their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and honor those whom they have slain.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
• “Every one of us is undoubtedly responsible for all men and everything on earth.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
• “Love a man even in his sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
• “Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
• “To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
• “Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
• “It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
• “Nothing in the world is harder than speaking the truth and nothing easier than flattery.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
• “To be too conscious is an illness, a real thorough-going illness.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
• “Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
• “I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
• “Compassion is the chief law of human existence.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
• “If Columbus was happy, it was not after he had discovered America, but when he was discovering it!” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
• “One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.” — Franz Kafka
• “It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.” — Franz Kafka
• “You don't need to accept everything as true, you only have to accept it as necessary.” — Franz Kafka
• “Don't take somebody else's opinion without checking it.” — Franz Kafka
• “Nobody else could have got in this way, as this entrance was meant only for you. Now I'll go and close it.” — Franz Kafka
• “It is often better to be in chains than to be free.” — Franz Kafka
• “The logic cannot be refuted, but someone who wants to live will not resist it.” — Franz Kafka
• “Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep.” — Naval Ravikant
• “The purpose of wealth is freedom; it's nothing more than that.” — Naval Ravikant
• “To win at a status game you have to put somebody else down. That's why you should avoid status games in your life.” — Naval Ravikant
• “Play iterated games. All returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge come from compound interest.” — Naval Ravikant
• “Play long-term games with long-term people.” — Naval Ravikant
• “Escape competition through authenticity.” — Naval Ravikant
• “Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.” — Naval Ravikant
• “Apply specific knowledge, with leverage, and eventually you will get what you deserve.” — Naval Ravikant
• “When you're finally wealthy, you'll realize it wasn't what you were seeking in the first place.” — Naval Ravikant
• “You can't earn non-linearly when you're renting out your time.” — Naval Ravikant