Café Philos: an internet café

"Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art."

- Stanislaw Lec

"The search for someone to blame is always successful."

- Robert Half

"Asking the right questions takes as much skill as giving the right answers."

- Robert Half

"When the soul wishes to experience something she throws an image of the experience out before her and enters into her own image."

- Meister Eckhart

"What we cannot do, can never do, is change who we are as a people. We are an open, welcoming nation. So let's not be afraid, America. Let's stand tall, welcome the rest of the world, and show terrorism what democracy and freedom is all about."

- Colin Powell

"It is always our own self that we find at the end of the journey. The sooner we face that self, the better."

- Ella Maillart

"Addiction should never be treated as a crime. It has to be treated as a health problem. We do not send alcoholics to jail in this country. Over 500,000 people are in our jails who are nonviolent drug users."

- Ralf Nader

"An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics."

- Plutarch

"Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other."

- Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become."

- Oliver Wendell Holmes

“You can always count on Americans to do the right thing… after they’ve tried everything else.”

- Winston Churchill

"Pride is never justified. It is based on a mistaken evaluation of oneself, or on successes that are only temporary and superficial. We should remember its negative effects. We should also be aware of our defects and limitations, and realize that fundamentally we are no different from those we see as inferior."

- Dalai Lama

"What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration."

- Elizabeth Bishop

"One problem with atheism as a category of thought, is that it seems more or less synonymous with not being interested in what someone like the Buddha or Jesus may have actually experienced. In fact, many atheists reject such experiences out of hand, as either impossible, or if possible, not worth wanting. Another common mistake is to imagine that such experiences are necessarily equivalent to states of mind with which many of us are already familiar—the feeling of scientific awe, or ordinary states of aesthetic appreciation, artistic inspiration, etc."

"As someone who has made his own modest efforts in this area, let me assure you, that when a person goes into solitude and trains himself in meditation for 15 or 18 hours a day, for months or years at a time, in silence, doing nothing else—not talking, not reading, not writing—just making a sustained moment to moment effort to merely observe the contents of consciousness and to not get lost in thought, he experiences things that most scientists and artists are not likely to have experienced, unless they have made precisely the same efforts at introspection. And these experiences have a lot to say about the plasticity of the human mind and about the possibilities of human happiness."

"So, apart from just commending these phenomena to your attention, I’d like to point out that, as atheists, our neglect of this area of human experience puts us at a rhetorical disadvantage. Because millions of people have had these experiences, and many millions more have had glimmers of them, and we, as atheists, ignore such phenomena, almost in principle, because of their religious associations—and yet these experiences often constitute the most important and transformative moments in a person’s life. Not recognizing that such experiences are possible or important can make us appear less wise even than our craziest religious opponents."

"[O]ur habitual identification with discursive thought, our failure moment to moment to recognize thoughts as thoughts, is a primary source of human suffering."

- Sam Harris

"Religion is the idol of the mob; it adores everything it does not understand. "

- Frederick II

"The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on."

- Anonymous

"A political ideology is a very handy thing to have. It's a real time-saver, because it tells you what you think about things you know nothing about."

- Hendrik Hertzberg

"Judge me on the content of my character, not the underwear on my head."

- Bill in Portland, Maine.

"Every publicly-held company is dependent on the stock market for obtaining more capital. Its stock price reflects the present discounted value that investors place on its future profits and dividends. No matter how far-sighted a company claims it is being, it must watch its stock price; if that price falls too low, investors will either leave the company, causing the price to fall further, or some investors will take over the company. It's very important for progressives to understand that there is no moral company. Companies are not and cannot be socially responsible if that means sacrificing profits. To assume otherwise is to buy into corporate public relations, and to deflect attention away from the far more important job of pushing for new laws and regulations that force companies to act in the public interest and not solely in the interests of shareholders and consumers."

- Robert Reich