Top 500 Kilroy J. Oldster Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Law school is a test – not a test of strength, creativity, or intelligence – but one of endurance. A law student’s greatest nemesis is not mastering legal concepts, but enduring the hours of solitude, which endless studying requires.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

2. “Human migration is an important part of our ancestral story. The places we live shape us, the places we leave behind forges our history, and the places we might travel to becomes our mysterious future.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

3. “The simple life is an authentic life.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

4. “Every action that we take exacts a cost and produces consequences. Nothing can be undone.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

5. “We live in the present with knowledge that the past is alive in us – our history speaks to us. The future represents an idea or expectations that influence our present state of mind.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

6. “The epitome of our life force turns on the seam where our tempered idealistic expectations meet the annealed exigencies fueling the cataclysm of a pressing personal crisis. Many of us do not decipher who we are and what we truly cherish until we experience the terror of an inconsolable loss. Failure and suffering lead to self-scrutiny.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

7. “Death is the great equalizer of human beings. Death is the boundary that we need to measure the precious texture of our lives. All people owe a death. There is no use vexing about inevitable degeneration and death because far greater people than me succumbed to death’s endless sleep without living as many years as me.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

8. “In our formative years, every person begins creating a self that can keep him or her company through later stages in life. It requires concentrated effort to create self-hood. The task of creating a fully developed human being is an ongoing process, an open-ended assignment. The goal of self-hood is to evade slipping into a state of thoughtlessness, where we fail to take ownership of our thoughts, deeds, and lifestyle.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

9. “Language is the gateway of the mind and a bridge that connects us to other human beings. Language enables a person to share their clandestine inner world with other human beings and to learn about other people’s mysterious world of logical thoughts and poetic sentiments.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

10. “Whole life is a search for the splendor of love, companionship, and beauty. When I found you, my search ended, and we began a magnificent journey of one heart, one mind, and one destiny.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

11. “Every person has a story; every person has a wound that he or she seeks to heal.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

12. “Personal essay writing, dialectic discourse with the self, is a process of taking ideas and crushing them like grapes to create a homemade wine.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

13. “We are each a product of our biological endowments, culture, and personal history. Culture ideology and cultural events along with transmitted cultural practices influences each of us. We are each the product of our collective interchanges. Our county’s domestic and interlinked international conflicts fuse us together. We are each a molecule in the helix of human consciousness joined in a physical world. We form a coil of connective tissue soldered together by cultural links.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

14. “A person must claim the meaning behind his or her existence. How we live is our final testament to what we believed in and our journey through the corridor of time determines our decisive character.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

15. “A person must never cease striving to enjoy life. It takes wit, interest, and energy to be happy.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

16. “How we respond to tragedy is the hallmark of character. Suffering a great loss places us at a spiritual milepost. The wind of our souls can either sour and wither or rejoice and thrive.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

17. “Self-knowledge, a spiritual metamorphosis, precedes understanding other people and comprehending the beauty of being part of the spontaneous interplay of the natural world.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

18. “Nature provided human beings with all the gemstones needed to attain happiness – physical abilities, intellectual and cognitive capacity, and emotional indexes, yet surrendering to demanding indices of an inflated ego leads us to living a miserable life.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

19. “Any person is an adept time traveler, if they love people, rejoice in nature, their working charter is to be kind, ethical, compassionate, and they live to preserve the dignity and reduce the pain of other people.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

20. “Writing allows us to exploit the synergistic dynamics of the human brain including memory, the ability to engage in constructive research, visually scrutinize our private thoughts, and discuss and share an evolving linkwork of thoughts with other people.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

21. “Anger and arrogance are defensive mechanisms that preclude self-evaluation. Humility is necessary for a person to step outside his or her own skin and objectively appraise oneself.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

22. “Everything that occurs to us in life is a resource, an experience that we can learn from and grow from.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

23. “Disharmony at home or work is toxic to a person’s physical disposition and mental health.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

24. “Self-questioning – an effort to get in touch with our essential self – is an endless stream of thought.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

25. “A person’s attitude creates the tone of his or her life. The highest expression of human dignity is to live a purposeful life devoted to principles and exhibiting compassion for other people.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

26. “Our thoughts shape us. We become our obsessions. Our thoughts can enslave us or save us.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

27. “A willingness to let go of an old self and allow creative thoughts to remake a person into a better version of oneself requires an act of courage.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

28. “A person imbued with compassion and self-understanding can readily love oneself and exhibit endless sympathy for all people. A person who is unkind to their self can never transcend their corrupt barriers much less run into the world with open arms enthusiastically embracing humankind and all of nature with uninhibited friendliness and goodwill.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

29. “A principled life begins by accepting the evident truth that we must die. Death becomes us. Knowledge of the impermanence of our existence reassures us that how we live does make a difference. Because our allotted time for living is finite, we must make the most of each day.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

30. “A reader can tell if a transcribed story is true because it must contains elements of joy, pain, goodness, and malevolent thoughts. In a true story, not everything fits precisely together; a fortuitous conspiracy of events does resolve all loose ends.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

31. “Daily life is an ongoing adaptation process of imprinting our memory’s storage center with useful data and the ceaseless expurgation of undesirable facts, exfoliation of destructive thoughts, and weeding out annoying emotional quirks that seemingly sprout out of thin air.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

32. “We create our own version of heaven, purgatory, or a hell with how we think, behave, and react to mistreatment.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

33. “A person must escape artificial constraints and unfold the myth of their own being. There is only one path for a thinking person in life, and that is to assume the role of a compassionate observer. I can only achieve personal freedom – liberty of the mind, body, and soul – by stop worrying about how other people perceive me and no longer judge myself in terms of fame and fortune.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

34. “I desire to establish a profound state of peacefulness, an imperturbable stillness of mind, an unconditioned mode of being that is free from mind contaminants of negative thoughts. I pray to undertake a productive emotional, intellectual, and spiritual journey seeking the highest level of personal realization that defines wholeness and finality. In stillness, a state of mental quietude, we enter the worldly womb of creativity.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

35. “Without language we have no past, the present is unquantifiable, and we lack a means to recognize and express the paradoxical future challenges of humanity. In absence of a shared language, we cannot understand prior generation’s conflicts, desires, and achievements, nor can we communicate with future generations our essential values and the wisdom we garner through undergoing our own socioeconomic crises.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

36. “We seek to understand ourselves by telling how we go about securing inner peace, acceptance, and satisfaction intermeshed with layers of pure happiness. Stories allow us to explore the mystery of the universe, share unique experiences, and express personal comprehension.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

37. “In the world of personal development and spiritual growth, a seeker embarks on a path of self-discovery and self-improvement. A seeker desires to discover knowledge and use an enhanced level of personal awareness to alter their behavior, opinions, beliefs, and point of view in order to experience reality in a different and more wholesome manner than the prior path that lead to self-rejection.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

38. “Some people never stop working, especially the demanding type of person whom the world never seems to touch, the indomitable person whom is determined to make the world their own place.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

39. “A person can internalize their expressible thoughts and employ such ideas to modify human behavior.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

40. “Similar to any form of meditation, the act of contemplative writing ultimately changes us since it alters how we view the past, the present, and the future.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

41. “People tend to mistake reading and writing with living passively. Words are actions. Language ignites thoughts and channels emotions. Each sentence written by a literary master is an act of rebellion against the intolerable inadequacies and the outrageous injustices of life. Contemplative reading and writing creates channels of empathy and decreases our sense of aloneness. Many liberating social movements trace their origins back to a heart-wrenching piece of literature.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

42. “Nature is never static. It is always changing. Everything is in a constant state of flux. Nothing endures. Everything is in the process of either coming into being or expiring.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

43. “Life’s most precious moments are not all loud or uproarious. Silence and stillness has its own virtues.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

44. “The greatest challenge in life is to be our own person and accept that being different is a blessing and not a curse. A person who knows who they are lives a simple life by eliminating from their orbit anything that does not align with his or her overriding purpose and values. A person must be selective with their time and energy because both elements of life are limited.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

45. “All humankind is born of the same inner goodness and fundamental ruthlessness as all the other creatures of nature. Man can never totally divorce himself from the beast that comprises part of his essential nature. It is not that our inner natures are entirely self-centered or completely filled with goodness. We can choose to make moral or immoral choices.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

46. “No age of life is inglorious. Youth has its merits, but living to a ripe old age is the true statement of value. Aging is the road that we take to discern our character. Fame and fortune can elude us, but character is immortal. We must encounter a sufficient variety of experiences including both failures and accomplishments in order to gain nobility of character.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

47. “Indecisive people are the most troublesome and frustrating type of persons.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

48. “Self-analysis requires reconsideration of who we think we are. Self-awareness requires us to reassess where we came from and where we are going.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

49. “No one can save a person from his or her thoughts and deeds except oneself. We can reach for particles of light to escape our dark chambers or continue to live with an inky soul. We make the choices that become our destiny.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

50. “The great beauty of life is its mystery, the inability to know what course our life will take, and diligently work to transmute into our final form based upon a lifetime of constant discovery and enterprising effort. Accepting the unknown and unknowable eliminates regret.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster