Thomas Sowell Quotes

The dead are visible only in the terrible lidless eye of memory. The living, thank heaven, retain the ability to surprise and to disappoint. - Van Houten

People's lives often don't turn out as they expect.

Things don't always happen the way one wishes they would.

I have planned my whole future, my whole life. And nine out of 10 times, it never happens the way you want or plan or think it's going to happen.

Love is very complicated and it's never black and white, as I'm sure we all know in our lives.

I had hoped, at my departure, I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead -- after all, I had been "analyzed." Instead, all I could see were question marks.

When I was younger I thought I'd meet the man of my dreams, get married and have a child, but it all went higgledy-piggledy. Never say never, though.

To have lost is less disturbing than to wonder if we may possibly have won; and Eustacia could now, like other people at such a stage, take a standing-point outside herself, observe herself as a disinterested spectator, and think what a sport for Heaven this woman Eustacia was.

To be a man, to have been born without knowing it or wanting it, to be thrown into the ocean of existence, to be obliged to swim, to exist; to have an identity; to resist the pressure and shocks from the outside and the unforeseen and unforeseeable acts - one's own and those of others - which so often exceed one's capacities? And what is more, to endure one's own thoughts about all this: in a word, to be human.

I don't know the meaning of life. I don't know why we are here. I think life is full of anxieties and fears and tears. It has a lot of grief in it, and it can be very grim. And I do not want to be the one who tries to tell somebody else what life is all about. To me it's a complete mystery.

Humans hardly know what they want, how they want it, or when they want it.

In betting on races, there are two elements that are never lacking - hope as hope, and an incomplete recollection of the past.

The only dependable law of life - everything is always worse than you thought it was going to be.

The world, dear Agnes, is a strange affair.

Success, which is something so simple in the end, is made up of thousands of things, we never fully know what.

I would have thought this would make me feel better.. getting to be the one to leave and not the one left behind. But it didn't. Not at all.

Maidens! why should you worry in choosing whom you shall marry? Choose whom you may, you will find you have got somebody else.

You never know what's going to happen, so you just continue with your head down and never expect things to start being handed to you.

The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men, Gang aft a-gley, And leave us nought but grief and pain, For promised joy.

We all want to know what went wrong, even when there isn't really an answer to that question.

Life is never straightforward or emotionally black and white.

From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.

How puzzling all these changes are! I'm never sure what I'm going to be, from one minute to another.

The beginning is never the clear, precise end of a thread, the beginning is a long, painfully slow process that requires time and patience in order to find out in which direction it is heading, a process that feels its way along the path ahead like a blind man the beginning is just the beginning, what came before is nigh on worthless.