Humanists

"To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation, namely an imitation of its opposite."

"Cultivate that kind of knowledge which enables us to discover for ourselves in case of need that which others have to read or be told of."

"There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself."

"When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?"

"What makes our poetry so contemptible nowadays is its paucity of ideas. If you want to be read, invent. Who the Devil wouldn't like to read something new?"

"That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim."

"Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer."

"The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak."

"Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads."

"Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm."

"If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger."

"The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing."

"Once the good man was dead, one wore his hat and another his sword as he had worn them, a third had himself barbered as he had, a fourth walked as he did, but the honest man that he was — nobody any longer wanted to be that."

"Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age."

"Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit."

"Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is."

"Do not commence your exercises in philosophy in those regions where an error can deliver you over to the executioner."

"What concerns me alone I only think, what concerns my friends I tell them, what can be of interest to only a limited public I write, and what the world ought to know is printed..."

"We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves. Even if my philosophy does not extend to discovering anything new, it does nevertheless possess the courage to regard as questionable what has long been thought true."

"If an angel were ever to tell us anything of his philosophy I believe many propositions would sound like 2 times 2 equals 13."

"People often become scholars for the same reason they become soldiers: simply because they are unfit for any other station. Their right hand has to earn them a livelihood; one might say they lie down like bears in winter and seek sustenance from their paws."

"Here take back the stuff that I am, nature, knead it back into the dough of being, make of me a bush, a cloud, whatever you will, even a man, only no longer make me me."

"As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a raindrop that an apothecary wouldn't let it go for less than half-a-crown."

"He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards."

"I have written a good number of drafts and small reflections. They are not waiting for the last touch but for the sunlight to wake them up."

"There are two ways of extending life: firstly by moving the two points "born" and "died" farther away from one another... The other method is to go more slowly and leave the two points wherever God wills they should be, and this method is for the philosophers."

"Every man has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum."

"We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms."

"Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them."

"Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient. … To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject."

"It is we who are the measure of what is strange and miraculous: if we sought a universal measure the strange and miraculous would not occur and all things would be equal."

"Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of men. Wine exercises a more visible influence, food does it more slowly but perhaps just as surely. Who knows if a well-prepared soup was not responsible for the pneumatic pump or a poor one for a war?"

"It is hardly to be believed how spiritual reflections when mixed with a little physics can hold people's attention and give them a livelier idea of God than do the often ill-applied examples of his wrath."

"One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them."

"So wie wir ein Paar Hosen verwachsen, so verwachsen wir Umgang, Bibliotheken, Grundsätze und dergleichen, zuweilen, ehe sie abgenutzt sind und zuweilen, welches der schlimmste Fall ist, ehe wir neue haben."

"The motives that lead us to do anything might be arranged like the thirty-two winds and might be given names on the same pattern: for instance, "bread-bread-fame" or "fame-fame-bread.""

"A good means to discovery is to take away certain parts of a system to find out how the rest behaves."

"A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books."

"Where the frontier of science once was is now the centre."

"All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty. They give me no pleasure. They are merely auxiliaries. At close range it is all not true."

"Those words "We the People" were a way of deceiving people into thinking that there was a national interest. The term national interest is what the novelist Kurt Vonnegut called a granfalloon (this is one of his invented words), which is sort of an artificial constellation of people, people who are artificially brought together but really don't have any common interests."

"I felt like he educated me in... in the genre of optimistic, cynical humanism. [...] He fought in World War II, he saw Dresden. That's what Slaughterhouse-Five was about, it was about his experiences seeing the worst that people could do. And people always took his cynicism as... Or his, I guess I should say, his dryness as cynicism. But it was really idealism. He believed so much in people that he couldn't help but be somewhat disappointed that we were blowing it in the way that we were blowing it? But I would say, line your desk with Kurt Vonnegut and you cannot go wrong."

"Like Mark Twain, Mr. Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well? He also shared with Twain a profound pessimism. "Mark Twain," Mr. Vonnegut wrote in his 1991 book, Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage, "finally stopped laughing at his own agony and that of those around him. He denounced life on this planet as a crock. He died." … His novels — 14 in all — were alternate universes, filled with topsy-turvy images and populated by races of his own creation, like the Tralfamadorians and the Mercurian Harmoniums. He invented phenomena like chrono-synclastic infundibula (places in the universe where all truths fit neatly together) as well as religions, like the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent and Bokononism (based on the books of a black British Episcopalian from Tobago "filled with bittersweet lies," a narrator says). The defining moment of Mr. Vonnegut's life was the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces in 1945, an event he witnessed firsthand as a young prisoner of war. … His experience in Dresden was the basis of Slaughterhouse-Five, which was published in 1969 against the backdrop of war in Vietnam, racial unrest and cultural and social upheaval. The novel, wrote the critic Jerome Klinkowitz, "so perfectly caught America's transformative mood that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age." To Mr. Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness."

"Of all the American writers in my time, Vonnegut is streets ahead of all of them."

"A leftist anti-authoritarian of sorts, he exposed the horrors of totalitarianism as he saw them, including on the left. His political and economic blindspots are hardly a blemish for this libertarian reader, who enjoyed his wonderful and scathing attacks on moral hypocrisy and atrocity. In Slaughterhouse Five, he took on morally nihilistic determinism and the terror bombing of Dresden, where he had been an American POW. In his often-neglected work of brilliance, Mother Night, Vonnegut discussed the moral dilemmas of being an agent who had infiltrated the Nazis and served as a Nazi propagandist — all on behalf of the Allies, but with the effect of bolstering the National Socialist regime. Throughout many of his books and short stories, the latter of which can be read in Welcome to the Monkey House, he examined various forms of modernist dystopianism and displayed a charming quality of shunning the PC orthodoxy when old-fashioned sensibility would better serve. Many readers might most appreciate his short story "Harrison Bergeron," an anti-egalitarian masterpiece that takes place in "2081, and everybody was finally equal." Vonnegut was a great writer with a great sense of humanity."

"When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of "getting to know you" questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What's your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don't play any sports. I do theater, I'm in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes. And he went WOW. That's amazing! And I said, "Oh no, but I'm not any good at ANY of them.""

"Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let the pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place."

"Ladies and gentlemen of the class of '97: ."

"We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down."

"We could have saved the earth, but we were too damned cheap."