Quotes, thoughts, and philosophy — a treasury of extraordinary ideas.

A collection for those who don’t just read words, but seek to truly understand them.

yoice.net is a growing treasury of quotes, ideas, and reflections — for people who want to explore, question, and be inspired.

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"Every adversity brings with it the seed of an equivalent advantage." Napoleon Hill
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"Most failures happen just before the goal is reached." Thomas Alva Edison
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"Obstacles and difficulties are the steps on which we climb higher." Friedrich Nietzsche
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"Experience is a lantern that hangs on our backs and only ever illuminates the part of the path that already lies behind us." Confucius
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"If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got." Henry Ford
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"It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure." Bill Gates
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"Courage is the strength to let go of the familiar" Raymond Lindquist
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"In all beginnings dwells a magic force for guarding us and helping us to live." Hermann Hesse
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"What Lies Behind Us and What Lies Before Us are Tiny Matters Compared to What Lies Within Us" Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"Whatever happens: Never stoop so low as to drink the cocoa you’re being dragged through." Erich Kästner
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"Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of traveling." Margaret Lee Runbeck
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"The future belongs to those who believe in their dreams." Eleanor Roosevelt
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"They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom." Confucius
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"Our greatest glory is not to never fall, but to get up again every time" Nelson Mandela
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"Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible." Franz von Assisi
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"We can’t direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails. For maximum happiness, peace, and contentment, may we choose a positive attitude." Thomas S. Monson
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"You never create change by fighting what already exists. To change something, you build new models that make the old obsolete" Buckminster Fuller
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"Everything will be fine in the end. If it doesn't turn out well, it's not the end." Oscar Wilde
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"The one who plants trees, knowing that he will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life." Rabindranath Tagore
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"Change is the law of life. Those who look only to the past or the present will miss the future" John F. Kennedy
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"God grant me the serenity to accept things that I cannot change, the courage to change things that I can, and the wisdom to distinguish one from the other" Reinhold Niebuhr
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"By stumbling, one sometimes moves forward—one must simply not fall and remain lying there." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves." Sir Edmund Percival Hillary
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"The best way to predict your future is to create it." Abraham Lincoln
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"Whoever said, 'It's not whether you win or lose that counts,' probably lost." Martina Navratilova
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"Excellence is not a singular act, but a habit. You are what you repeatedly do." Shaquille O’Neal
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"People have been known to achieve more as a result of working with others than against them." Allan Fromme
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"It’s not about whether you get knocked down. It’s about whether you get up." Vinc Lombardi
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"Only those who dare to suffer great failures can also achieve great successes." Will Smith
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"You can only win if your will to win is greater than your fear of losing." Unknown
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"Money comes as a result of success. But those who chase money alone will never build true wealth." René Benko
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"Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein." Horace Jackson Brown Jr.
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"The road to success is dotted with many tempting parking spaces." William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
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"Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration." Thomas Alva Edison
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"If you really want to do something, you'll find a way. If you don't, you'll find an excuse." Jim Rohn
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"It is not the Beginning that is rewarded, but only Perseverance" Katharina von Siena
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"I just didn’t want to be fat. I got tired of breathing hard. I got tired of my joints hurting. I just got tired of being lied to" Waka Flocka Flame
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"Regardless of anyone’s dietary motivations, the healthiest lifestyle is the one that’s most compassionate." Stephen Gilchrist Glover
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"The systematic study of mass psychology revealed to students the potentialities of invisible government of society by manipulation of the motives which actuate man in the group." Edward Bernays
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"Make every detail perfect and limit the number of details that need to be perfected." Jack Patrick Dorsey
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"We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception." Walter Lippmann
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"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return. Learning never exhausts the mind. Art is never finished, only abandoned. Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen. The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art. It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things. I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do. As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death. Water is the driving force of all nature.”" Leonardo da Vinci
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"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit." Aristoteles
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"Success comes from keeping the ears open and the mouth closed." John D. Rockefeller
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"If we fail to find any of this—even at the highest energies we can reach—then we’ll have to do some serious rethinking and essentially start over from scratch. Which, of course, is exciting in its own way. Science is always exciting: if you don’t find anything, you simply have to come up with something new. Imagination is always the foundation of science." Wolfram Zeuner
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"The public is not cognizant of the real value of education, and does not realize that education as a social force is not receiving the kind of attention it has the right to expect in a democracy." Edward Bernays
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"Whether you want to uncover the secrets of the universe, or you just want to pursue a career in the 21st century, basic computer programming is an essential skill to learn." Stephen W. Hawking
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"Whoever stops wanting to become better, stops being good." Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
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"If you are not patient when it comes to small things, you will cause big projects to fail." Confucius
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"A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new" Albert Einstein
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"Truth was never the highest priority of human society. It was the highest priority of some individuals, but never of society as a whole — because society as a whole does not function on the basis of truth. If you take two of the most powerful institutions of humankind — science and the scientific community, and religion and churches — neither of them has truth as their chief value. For individuals, yes. But as institutions, no. The chief value of science is power. The chief value of religion is order — organization. Religion is all about maintaining order in society, and science is mainly about gaining power." Yuval Noah Harari
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"Success is not about always winning, but never being discouraged." Napoleon Bonaparte
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"Do not lament what cannot be changed, but change what is to be lamented." William Shakespeare
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"In the heart of a person lies the beginning and the end of all things." Leo Tolstoi
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"Give every day the chance to become the most beautiful day of your life." Mark Twain
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"The problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude about the problem" Captain Jack Sparrow
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"Eskimos are always found telling the inhabitants of the Congo what to do." Stanisław Jerzy Lec
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"Take risks in your life. If you win, you can lead. If you lose, you can guide." Swami Vivekananda
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"The gods created certain kinds of beings to replenish our bodies... they are the trees and the plants and the seeds." Platon
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"The hen is the cleverest creature in the animal kingdom. She clucks only after the egg is laid." Abraham Lincoln
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"He who admits that he is a coward has courage." Fernand Joseph Désiré Contandin
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"Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers in the preceding generation (…) When someone says, “Science teaches such and such,” he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach anything; experience teaches it. If they say to you, “Science has shown such and such,” you might ask, “How does science show it? How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?” It should not be “science has shown” but “this experiment, this effect, has shown.” And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments–but be patient and listen to all the evidence–to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at. (…) The experts who are leading you may be wrong. (…) I think we live in an unscientific age in which almost all the buffeting of communications and television-words, books, and so on-are unscientific. As a result, there is a considerable amount of intellectual tyranny in the name of science." Richard Phillips Feynman
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"We have to acknowledge that most of us love their hypotheses, and, as I once said, it is a painful exercise, but one that keeps us young and healthy like morning gymnastics, to throw your favorite hypothesis overboard every day." Konrad Lorenz
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"Although human ingenuity may devise various inventions which, by the help of various instruments, answer to one and the same purpose, yet will it never discover any inventions more beautiful, more simple or more practical than those of nature, because in her inventions there is nothing lacking and nothing superfluous; and she makes use of no counterpoise when she constructs the limbs of animals in such a way as to correspond to the motion of their bodies, but she puts into them the soul of the body" Leonardo da Vinci
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"One day the world will look upon research upon animals as it now looks upon research on human beings" Leonardo da Vinci
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"The fundamental point has always been this: climate change is governed by hundreds of factors, or variables, and the very idea that we can manage climate change predictably by understanding and manipulating at the margins one politically-selected factor is as misguided as it gets." Philip Stott
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"The problem of the source of a star’s energy will be considered, by a process of exhaustion we are driven to conclude that the only possible source of a star’s energy is subatomic yet it must be confessed that the only hypothesis shows little disposition to accommodate itself to the detailed requirements of observation, and a critic might count up a large number of fatal objections." Arthur Eddington
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"So far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from astronomy, which cannot furnish it, lest he accept as the truth ideas conceived for another purpose, and depart from this study a greater fool than when he entered it." Nikolaus Kopernikus
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"After 3 years of propaganda is apparent: - Covid was just flu - The mortality figures were fake - Masks were useless - Vaccination was useless and harmful - School closures were useless - The high priests of the Covid cult are corrupt profiteers What now?" Dr. Markus Krall
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"And remember Carol, the last card is the alien card. We are going to have to build space-based weapons against aliens and all of it is a lie" Wernher von Braun
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"I should like to say two things, one intellectual and one moral. The intellectual thing I should want to say is this: When you are studying any matter, or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe, or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed. But look only, and solely, at what are the facts. That is the intellectual thing that I should wish to say. The moral thing I should wish to say…I should say love is wise, hatred is foolish. In this world which is getting more closely and closely interconnected we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don't like. We can only live together in that way and if we are to live together and not die together we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet." Bertrand Russell
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"The earth is flat and stationary, while the sun, moon and stars are in constant motion. This is the Enlightenment of the World." John George Abizaid
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"We know this by patient and long continued investigations - the surface of water is a LEVEL SURFACE. This is the key which is unlocking the minds of the people and letting in a flood of light upon the question of the shape of the earth. We know consequently that the surface of earth is a plane surface and that the earth itself can NOT be a globe." John Hampden
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"There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning." Warren Buffet
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"And so, one must keep repeating the truth, because error is constantly being preached all around us as well—not by individuals, but by the masses. In newspapers and encyclopedias, in schools and universities—everywhere error is on top, and it feels comfortable and at ease, in the awareness of the majority that is on its side." Wolfgang von Goethe
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"The mass media are a kind of mouthpiece for the consciousness of the population. If this powerful instrument falls into the wrong hands, it can cause more damage than all available nuclear weapons combined." Christian Faltermeier
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"You can't rely on what is said before the elections actually applying after the elections. And we have to expect that this could happen again in various ways." Angela Merkel
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"True democracy knows neither rich nor poor! Only those with a truly ‘free spirit’, independent of money, possessions, servitude, and wage labor, independent of state or social constraints and positions, are truly free!" Horst Bulla
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"If a government can define how far criticism of it can go, then criticism is worthless and freedom of expression is an illusion." H.-Th. Tillschneider
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"It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself." Thomas Jefferson
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"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around these banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered." Thomas Jefferson
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"Some people think the Federal Reserve Banks are US government institutions. They are not... they are private credit monopolies which prey upon the people of the US for the benefit of themselves and their foreign and domestic swindlers, and rich and predatory money lenders. The sack of the United States by the Fed is the greatest crime in history. Every effort has been made by the Fed to conceal its powers, but the truth is the Fed has usurped the government. It controls everything here and it controls all our foreign relations. It makes and breaks governments at will." Louis Thomas McFadden
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"We can’t be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans..." William Jefferson „Bill“ Clinton
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"It’s organized crime. All you do is you call the Republicans the Genoveses and you call the Democrats the Gambinos. The people at the top, they treat it like a crap game. It’s their crap game, like they’re making lots of money. Occasionally, somebody at the table shoots each other, but the moment anything threatens their crap game, they all unite to protect it. ... They’re both controlled by the same financial, economic and corporate interests." Michael Ruppert
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"Delusion is a self-contained value system that leads to a loss of rationality because it blocks open and critical thinking. When delusion arises in a community, irrational beliefs are amplified in the communal experience, reaching a fever pitch in moments of ecstasy that give individuals a feeling of happiness and power. Mass delusion can have a neurotic and a psychotic component. Neurosis is the struggle between inner and outer reality. It is designed to win, otherwise it succumbs to panic. Psychosis is a closed value system in which the affected person feels completely secure. They are not in conflict with the reality of the outside world, but live in their own value system, which they perceive as real. A closed system defends its autonomy by developing a self-contained logic and deriving norms from it that must be accepted without question. People who find themselves in a closed system become blind to reality and, when their irrational forces are unleashed, easily slip into dangerous delusion." Hermann Broch