“To find yourself, think for yourself.”

-Socrates

There are seven things that will destroy us:

Wealth without work;

Pleasure without conscience;

Knowledge without character;

Religion without sacrifice;

Politics without principle;

Science without humanity;

Business without ethics.

- Gandhi (1869-1948)

In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don't have the first, the other two will kill you.

- Warren Buffett (Businessman, 1930-)

• You cannot step in the same river twice.
• Death need not concern us because when we exist death does not, and when death exists we do not.
• A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any other purpose.
• Man is born free and is everywhere in chains.
• The unexamined life is not worth living

http://listverse.com/2011/10/11/top-10-philosophical-one-liners/

Krishnan - Thank you. - "You cannot step in the same river twice," by Heraclitus, sounds like it might have been the forerunner of You can't go home again - by Thomas Wolfe.

Also, I was just reading from a book by Jim Holt, and he mentioned the very popular movie, It's a Wonderful Life." It is from a story originally by Philip Van Doren Stern, not exactly a household name, but the movie was/is very popular. It premiered in 1946. Much of it concerns what would have happened to a great many people if the protagonist, character George Bailey, had never existed.  

Considering the theme of existence as an entire story, there is also Philip K. Dick's, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which later lead to the Ridley Scott directed movie, Blade Runner. There might be considered an 'up-grade' in the romantic involvement in the movie, but the general theme remained the same.

Comments?   Other examples?  

Dear @James, you may find this quote in the field about (my profile - Overview). Albert Einstein said:“Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”

“Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more” ― Nikola Tesla

Well, I have always in mind this quote of Julius Caesar:

Alea iacta est, means, the die is cast.

I think he said this quot to differentiate between those who gain their goal in life and those who not. So a man dying after gaining his goal still is alive, and those who did not gain are even never borne.

“To find yourself, think for yourself.”

-Socrates

There are seven things that will destroy us:

Wealth without work;

Pleasure without conscience;

Knowledge without character;

Religion without sacrifice;

Politics without principle;

Science without humanity;

Business without ethics.

- Gandhi (1869-1948)

In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don't have the first, the other two will kill you.

- Warren Buffett (Businessman, 1930-)

Hi thanks a lot for your good question. i ve just prefer to read these perfect answers.

• Listen! Clam up your mouth and be silent like an oyster shell, for that tongue of yours is the enemy of the soul, my friend. When the lips are silent, the heart has a hundred tongues.

~ Rumi

I think that the above participants have covered the core of the question.

However, my moto, after several years of suffering while following such 'quotes' is this:

"The safest way to suffer is to follow a quote that:

Never get into your home by the same door because if you do it you will not see how different you home is every day. Flowers in the pot will have different shapes and  different colours.

[1] “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit” – Aristotle

[1] Meaning: One is proficient in what one's doing best.

[2] “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation” – Plato

[2] Meaning: Test one's ability through actual doing, for example, solving a real case during a job interview.

[3] “Happiness is the highest good” – Aristotle

[3] Meaning: Happiness proceeds anything (I will add under ethical conditions).

[4] “That man is wisest who, like Socrates, realizes that his wisdom is worthless” – Plato

[4] Meaning: We have to remain modest even if we have accomplished a lot.

[5] “Happiness lies in virtuous activity, and perfect happiness lies in the best activity, which is contemplative” – Aristotle

[5] Meaning: This actually complement quote [3].

Mark Twain deserves to be quoted here,

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

Vilemar  -  This is all good, but what you have is something more like what I had in mind in the beginning. Thanks.  -   Also, are there any other stories like the movie, "It's A Wonderful Life," (1946): 

http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0038650/

Sophie's World: A Novel about the History of Philosophy -by Jostein Gaarder

A novel about the fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" 

A man has to know his limitations (Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry)

A man = the human species.

"It's A Wonderful Life," (1946) is a beautiful film.

Samuel L. Clemens is Mark Twain (pen name). 

Unity is a famous ingredient for every successful recipe. Be it strengthening family bonds, winning games, or experiencing mere miracles of friendship, unity plays an important role in achieving everything that is positive.

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/famous-quotes-about-unity.html

I'm not sure that looking for Great Quotes by Great Men (it's nearly always men) is always terribly informative; unless the author is very good, one can too easily fall into the facile "Readers Digest" way of thinking.

Organic chemistry leading to biological chemistry just sort of emerged, with great difficulty, over something like half a century. The quotes (Kekule, etc.) are lousy. I don't know if people like Emil Fischer (amino acids *and* carbohydrates) did quotes.

One almost quoteless story, that generates a lot of speculation but has more than a grain of truth, concerns Joseph Haydn's visit to William Herschel. They saw through Herschel's telescope, among other things, galaxies seen to be great clusters of stars and presumably they knew what that meant. Some of us still living may understand that (like Darwin and ice-age specialists after them) they would be far more scared of the archbishop than of scientific peers; consequently, not too much interpretation would have been committed to paper. So no great existential quotes from those two, except in Haydn's oratorio Creation. Specially relevant are three movements: 'Representation of Chaos', 'In the Beginning - Let there be Light', and the astonishing "astronomical" movement 'In Splendour Bright' (each movement takes only two pages of short score).

On a different note, cartoonists often do deep messages, but writing today from France...

Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.- Nikola Tesla

Read more at: http://www.azquotes.com/author/14543-Nikola_Tesla

"To share is to live", by Alvaro Cepeda Zamudio, a colombian writer and journalist of XXth century. He was the leader of a literarian group that also included Nobel prize García Márquez, painters, and other figures of Caribean region. They used to meet at a bar called "La Cueva" in the city of Barranquilla.

In science and philosophy writer/commentator Jim Holt's book published in 2012, Why Does the World Exist?, he interviewed various people ranging in scope from science to religion to novelist John Updike. Holt notes that in one of Updike's novels, Roger's Version, published in 1986, someone goes on apparently something of a rant at a party, proposing a theory of existence, trying to derail someone else's theory.   

(Late) Kannadasan  was a Tamil Poet and lyricist, heralded as one of the greatest and most important writers in the Tamil language. Frequently called Kaviarasu (King of Poets), Kannadasan was most familiar for his song lyrics in Tamil films and contributed around 5000 lyrics apart from 6000 poems and 232 books, including novels, epics, plays, essays, his most popular being the 10-part religious essay on Hinduism, captioned Arthamulla Indhumatham (Meaningful Hindu Religion).

From one of his outputs.....

• When You cry, do it alone
• When you laugh, do it with friends
• When you cry in a crowd, they would say, "you are acting"
• when you laugh alone, they would term is "Mad"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kannadasan

A. P. Chekhov: "The creation of a genius is SIMPLE".