I've always loved Fight Club and the last chapter finishes the novel perfectly

“I’ve met God across his long walnut desk with his diplomas hanging on the wall behind him, and God asks me, “Why?”
Why did I cause so much pain?
Didn’t I realize that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness?
Can’t I see how we’re all manifestations of love?
I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God’s got this all wrong.
We are not special.
We are not crap or trash, either.
We just are.
We just are, and what happens just happens.
And God says, “No, that’s not right.”
Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can’t teach God anything.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

"...For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, th'oppresors wrong, the proud man's contumely, the pangs of despised loved, the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of th-unworthy takes, when he himself might his quietus make, with a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but for the dread of something after death, that undiscovered country from whose bourn, no traveler returns, puzzles the mind, and makes us rather bear those ills we know, than turn to others we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution, is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought..." -Hamlet

“Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”
― Thomas Paine, Rights Of Man

“The world is indeed full of peril and in it there are many dark places.
But still there is much that is fair. And though in all lands, love is now
mingled with grief, it still grows, perhaps, the greater.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Now I am light, now I fly, now I see myself beneath myself, now a god dances through me. -Friedrich Nietzsche

On the note of Shakespeare:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing. — Macbeth

I also kind of cried when Sherlock Holmes told Watson that he loved him. I don't remember the context, or which book it was, but that line taught me the meaning of bromance.

“Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Marcus Aurelius is my philosophical wet dream. A Roman emperor. A goddamn Roman Emperor.

Also if anyone's played Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, there are some great (fictional) quotes:

In the great commons at Gaia's Landing we have a tall and particularly beautiful stand of white pine, planted at the time of the first colonies. It represents our promise to the people, and to Planet itself, never to repeat the tragedy of Earth.
Lady Deirdre Skye, "Planet Dreams"

If our society seems more nihilistic than that of previous eras, perhaps this is simply a sign of our maturity as a sentient species. As our collective consciousness expands beyond a crucial point, we are at last ready to accept life's fundamental truth: that life's only purpose is life itself.
Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Looking God in the Eye"

“Me miserable! Which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep,
Still threat'ning to devour me, opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“If I could believe in myself, why not give other improbabilities the benefit of the doubt? I accepted the idea that an omniscient God had cast me in his own image and that he watched over me and guided me from one place to the next. The virgin birth, the resurrection, and the countless miracles -my heart expanded to encompass all the wonders and possibilities of the universe.

A bell, though, that's fucked up.”

- David Sedaris

“I come Des Moines. Somebody had to.”

- Bill Bryson

One of my favorites.. too precise yet too true.

"When I was in school I studied biology. I learned that in making their experiments scientists will take some group--bacteria, mice, people--and subject that group to certain conditions. They compare the results with a second group which has not been disturbed. This second group is called the control group. It is the control group which enables the scientist gauge the effect of his experiment. To judge the significance of what has occurred. In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who o not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God--who knows all that can be known--seems powerless to change."

- Cormac McCarthy

“My own mind is my own church.”
― Thomas Paine, The Age Of Reason


Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.
Viktor E. Frankl

There can be only one permanent revolution — a moral one; the regeneration of the inner man.
How is this revolution to take place? Nobody knows how it will take place in humanity, but every man feels it clearly in himself. And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself. - Leo Tolstoy

Incidentally, the choice of quotes leads me to believe that all webdippers are inherently nihilistic?

@Synapse
Just for that, you're getting a Biblical quote (from a Secular Humanist)

"Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature? So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble."
Matthew 6:25-34 (NKJV)

"Consider the lillies"

So that's what Monty Python were referencing!!

My criteria is "quotes that fundamentally altered my philosophy and changed the course of my life":

"O Lord, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O Lord....Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast....For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well....." - selected verses from Psalm 139

My criteria is a union of FlemGem's and "quotes that I just really really love."

"Her romantic mind was like the tiny boxes, one within the other, that come from the puzzling East, however many you discover there is always one more; and her sweet mocking mouth had one kiss on it that Wendy could never get, though there it was, perfectly conspicuous in the right-hand corner.

The way Mr. Darling won her was this: the many gentlemen who had been boys when she was a girl discovered simultaneously that they loved her, and they all ran to her house to propose to her except Mr. Darling, who took a cab and nipped in first, and so he got her. He got all of her, except the innermost box and the kiss. He never knew about the box, and in time he gave up trying for the kiss. Wendy thought Napoleon could have got it, but I can picture him trying, and then going off in a passion, slamming the door." -- J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan.

"Beauty is truth, truty beauty -- that is all
Ye know on earth and all ye need to know." -- John Keats

"Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day." -- William Wordsworth

"'Meaningless! Meaningless!'
says the Teacher.
'Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.'

What do people gain from all their labors
at which they toil under the sun?
Generations come and generations go,
but the earth remains forever.
The sun rises and the sun sets,
and hurries back to where it rises.
The wind blows to the south
and turns to the north;
round and round it goes,
ever returning on its course.
All streams flow into the sea,
yet the sea is never full.
To the place the streams come from,
there they return again.
All things are wearisome,
more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing,
nor the ear its fill of hearing.
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there anything of which one can say,
'Look! This is something new'?
It was here already, long ago;
it was here before our time.
No one remembers the former generations,
and even those yet to come
will not be remembered
by those who follow them." -- Ecclesiastes

"I forget 'em after I kill 'em." -- Peter Pan

"... to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee." - Capt. Ahab, Moby Dick, Herman Melville. [Seems perfect for this game.]

The rest of these are from memory ...

"You're smarter than them. You can beat them. But don't wait! If this reaches you then the Pak fleet that was tough enough to defeat us will be following this message beam at almost light speed. Now Move! Goodbye and good luck. I love you." - The last lines of "Protector", by Larry Niven. [These lines round the story off perfectly, but it haunts me. I want the story to continue.]

"He's tracked me over distances you couldn't even write down." - from "The Meddler", by Larry Niven.

On the Disk World, Terry Pratchett twists events from Earth history
"Undead or alive, you're coming with me!" - is from "Feet of Clay", I met Terry at a convention about 10 years ago. I told him this was the funniest book I'd ever read and that this line made me laugh so hard it hurt. It's full of Terminator/Robocop references too. He wrote this as a quote in the book when he signed it for me.

A quick extract from "Eric"[Faust] - Men burst into the room where Elenor of Tsort (Helen of Troy) had been for 11 years ... "There was a woman there - plump, good looking in a slightly faded way, wearing a black dress. Seven children of varying sizes were hiding behind her skirts ... 'Well it's been a long siege see ... it was chilly up here and he was very kind...'"

And from Maskerade - "I've been grilling the pasta for hours, but with wont go soft!"

“Only when the last fish is gone, the last river poisoned, the last tree cut down...will mankind realize they cannot eat money.”
― Greenpeace

It's smaller on the outside.
--Clara Oswin Oswald

"The Three Laws of Robotics:

1: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm;

2: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law;

3: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law"

- Isaac Asimov (I, Robot)

“Democracy is a poor system of government at best; the only thing that can honestly be said in its favor is that it is about eight times as good as any other method the human race has ever tried. Democracy's worst fault is that its leaders are likely to reflect the faults and virtues of their constituents - a depressingly low level, but what else can you expect?”

― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.”

-- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

"But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For awhile these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, the greatest writer in American history

Angela Dodson: I guess God has a plan for all of us.
John Constantine: God's a kid with an ant farm, lady. He's not planning anything.

@bo_sox48 - He may be the best in your book, but no American author, in MY book, can hold a candle to:

“...surely there is something in madness, even the demoniac, which Satan flees, aghast at his own handiwork, and which God looks on in pity..”

― William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

I just know that somebody is going to post after this, just to spoil the moment, but a great quote is Hamlet's last words.

"The rest is silence"

"A little more than kin and less than kind." - Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2

Cogito ergo sum

"The rest is silence"

anyone read this, or your just post for yourself?

me ;P

"You talkin' to me?" - Travis Pickle

@jim ... Faulker is right up there. Anyone who can use "my mother is a fish" and make it make sense is a great writer.

"Hi,

This and 11 other accounts I control were created to fill slots in a large game with some friends. We wanted to play the 17 player map with less than 17 people (we are aware of balance issues with this), and our schedules are varied which disallows us from having shorter turns."

-JackBot

+1 redhouse

This was what happened when I read that:

"Hi,

This and 11 other accounts I control...

http://pandawhale.com/post/10781/bert-looks-up-from-book-while-ernie-laughs-gif

"Poof, gone like a fart in the wind."

- Tettleton's Chew, The Failure of European Socialism

"The only true knowledge consists in knowing that you know nothing."

-Socrates

"In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you."

- Jane Austen

"I'm looking for courage, for some evidence
my life will change, though
it takes forever, checking
each clump for the symbolic
leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already
the leaves turning, always the sick trees
going first, the dying turning
brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform
their curfew of music. You want to see my hands?
As empty now as at the first note.
Or was the point always
to continue without a sign?"

- Louise Glück


Anything, really, from The Adventures of a Simpleton by Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen.

Travis Pickle? Sounds like a Sesame Street character, Draug.

Nope. Travis was the character played by Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver.

En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor.