Before - Quotes
Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man`s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring.
I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born.
Before you judge me, try hard to love me,
Look within your heart then ask,
Have you seen my Childhood?
Before my life is over, I want to live it. I just want a chance to get a tan, to see a hockey game, get a parking ticket, get bored and when it`s all over die.
The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles?
There are some parts of the soul which we must entirely paralyze before we can live happily in this world.
A timid person is frightened before a danger, a coward during the time, and a courageous person afterward.
Secular people don`t believe in life after death, but rather, they believe in life before death.
You need to love yourself and be yourself one hundred percent before you can actually love someone else.
Our fear of death seems to me to be an error of evolution. Many animals react instinctively with terror and flight at the approach of a predator. It is a healthy reaction, one that allows them to escape from danger. But it`s a terror that lasts an instant, not something that remains with them constantly. Natural selection has produced these big apes with hypertrophic frontal lobes, with an exaggerated ability to predict the future. It`s a prerogative that`s certainly useful but one that has placed before us a vision of our inevitable death, and this triggers the instinct of terror and flight. Basically, I believe that the fear of death is the result of an accidental and clumsy interference between two distinct evolutionary pressures - the product of bad automatic connections in our brain rather than something that has any use or meaning.
The ability to understand something before it`s observed is at the heart of scientific thinking.
Don`t take your intuitions and ideas to be "natural": they are often the products of the ideas of audacious thinkers who came before us.
Slow, technical, cultural, and artistic advances made by innumerable workshops of painters and artisans were necessary before the Sistine Chapel was possible. But in the end, it was Michelangelo who painted it.
It`s better to be bold than meek. [...] If you jump off a cliff at least you`ll fly before you fall.