Peace quotes
3.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside peace — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Our smile will bring happiness to us and to those around us. Even if we spend a lot of money on gifts for everyone in our family, nothing we buy could give them as much happiness as the gift of our awareness, our smile. And this precious gift costs nothing."
"If we are at war with our parents, our family, our society, or our church, there is probably a war going on inside us also, so the most basic work for peace is to return to ourselves and create harmony among the elements within us - our feelings, our perceptions, and our mental states. That is why the practice of meditation, looking deeply, is so important."
"The real work of this life is not what we do every day from 9-5...The real work is to be passionate, be holy, be wild, be irreverent, to laugh and cry until you awaken the sleeping spirits, until the ground of your being cleaves and the universe comes flooding in."
"Our firm conviction that ours is a just cause and that we must find a peaceful way to attain our goals gave us the strength and the awareness of the limits beyond which we must not go."
"Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind. It is the deed that teaches not the name we give it."
"More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginnings of all wars. Yes, an end to this brutal, inhuman and thoroughly impractical method of settling the differences between Governments. The once powerful malignant Nazi state is crumbling; the Japanese warlords are receiving in their homelands the retribution for which they asked when they attacked Pearl Harbor. But the mere conquest of our enemies is not enough; we must go on to do all in our power to conquer the doubts and the fears, the ignorance and the greed, which made this horror possible."
"Why does man have reason if he can only be influenced by violence?"
"We must not only cease our present desire for the growth of the state, but we must desire its decrease, its weakening."
"Before the war, and especially before the Boer War, it was summer all the year round."
"The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor."
"It is our policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world."
"World War II was the last government program that really worked."
"A man who says that no patriot should attack the Boer War until it is over is not worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it."
"War! When I but think of this word, I feel bewildered, as though they were speaking to me of sorcery, of the Inquisition, of a distant, finished, abominable, monstrous, unnatural thing. When they speak to us of cannibals, we smile proudly, as we proclaim our superiority to these savages. Who are the real savages? Those who struggle in order to eat those whom they vanquish, or those who struggle merely to kill?"
"Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows."
"War vies with magic in its efforts to get something for nothing."
"A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled one is truly vanquished."
"Peace is not merely an absence of war. It is also a state of mind."
"Uncalled-for aggression arouses the hatred of the civilian population."
"Student: Sir, you said you must change the world. How can you change it, sir? Krishnamurti: What is the world? The world is where you live - your family, your friends, your neighbours. And your family, your friends, your neighbours can be extended and that is the world. Now, you are the centre of that world. That is the world you live in. Now how will you change the world? By changing yourself?"
