Top 500 Kilroy J. Oldster Quotes (2026 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. “Every action that we take exacts a cost and produces consequences. Nothing can be undone.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

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

— Kilroy J. Oldster

5. “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

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

— Kilroy J. Oldster

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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

11. “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

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

— Kilroy J. Oldster

13. “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

14. “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

15. “We create our sense of self by merging our fragmented thoughts in a coherent conception of our being.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

16. “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

17. “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

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

— Kilroy J. Oldster

19. “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

20. “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

21. “Growing old is humbling and it takes effort to accomplish this stage of life with dignity.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

22. “A person’s greatest limitations are not genetic, but imposed by self-doubt, insecurities, indecision, and timidity.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

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

— Kilroy J. Oldster

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

— Kilroy J. Oldster

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

— Kilroy J. Oldster

30. “We gain knowledge about the interworking of our personal mind through observation of the external world and personal introspection. Contemplation requires a degree of stillness, the willingness to consider deep thoughts.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

31. “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

32. “The purpose of life is to become acquainted with the deepest recesses of a person’s own mind by reflecting upon what a person reads, witnesses, and personally experiences. Wisdom is a form of power. Lacking knowledge of the world and without comprehending the essence of humanity, we can never know the truth of our own being.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

33. “Personal growth commences with an ego death. Self-pride blunts personal growth because the ego resists change. The ego wants to maintain the status quo by holding onto false notions of the self. The ego desires me to see all of my failures as someone else’s fault.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

40. “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

41. “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

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

— Kilroy J. Oldster

43. “Change is essential for survival. All life forms must adapt to their fluctuating circumstances. All form of life result from the process of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance. The universe is in a constant state of chaos. We each have chaos implanted into our bones. Nature wires all of us for change.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

44. “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

45. “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

46. “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

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

— Kilroy J. Oldster

48. “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

49. “Our performances of engaging, applying, exercising, realizing, or acting out ideas influences how we perceive ourselves. How we act and how we perceive ourselves affects how other people view each of us. Both personality and praxis affect our self-determination of who we are as individuals.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

50. “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