Top 500 Kilroy J. Oldster Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 10

51. “The most important thing in life it to be true to ourselves, to never give up attempting to become the very finest version of what we wish to be, no matter how arduous that proves to be.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

52. “We create a meaningful life by what we accept as true and by what we create in the pursuit of truth, love, beauty, and adoration of nature.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

53. “Embracing human frailty, fallibility, and heartbreaking aloneness is crucial for any person seeking to attain self-actualization and self-realization.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

54. “There are many types of teachable moments in life. Contentment is not always the most fertile ground to garner self-knowledge. At times, bitter memories can force us to change and teach us to avoid duplicating past conduct that led to regret and remorse. The greater the degree of anxiety that we assign to periods of uncertainty and distress the less likely we will resort to duplicating these problematic experiences in the future.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

55. “Every form of life must struggle. Life is an aberration; death is ordinary. Life requires obstruction, conflict, reverses, and resolve. Life requires questing. Questing provides the meaning that we seek, a purpose to justify the inevitable struggle to live knowing the absurdity that we must die.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

56. “Driving a car provides a person with a rush of dopamine in the brain, which hormonal induced salience spurs modalities of creative and critical thinking regarding philosophical concepts such as truth, logical necessity, possibility, impossibility, chance, and contingency.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

57. “We must treasure our memories just as we cherish our dreams because without dreams and memory human life would be sad, brutal, and meaningless.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

58. “People frequently ask me why I work so hard – prolong hours, infrequent vacations, and never calling in sick or missing work for any other reason. The short answer is that work is indivisible from life itself.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

59. “Most new ideas come to us not through pure logic, but through a fusion of memory and imagination. If new ideas were purely a product of rationality, other people would quickly grasp and embrace novel solutions. People’s lack of imagination prevents them from comprehending the significance of an innovative idea.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

60. “The ego with its protective defense mechanisms is the biggest impediment to attaining spiritual growth.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

61. “Each person must develop a wholesome personal response to enduring the hardships of daily life and witnessing the discord, disharmony, dissension, and suffering of the world. We can either become an emotional hypochondriac or accept the fact that we are insignificant in a desolate and meaningless world. How we respond to the vale of tears until we shuffle off this mortal coil imbrues poetic meaning to our life.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

62. “Self-hate takes a person only so far. Bitterness and self-loathing might spur a person towards seeking personal improvement. To live productively and happily one must find internal peace.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

63. “Each of us experiences the perpetual revival of the self. We constantly recast our connate emotional index by perceiving each encounter in life as a marvel, impedance, problem, disaster, or nothing at all. Living in the moment allows us to escape the lonely landscape of self-interest and be part of a larger world filled with beauty, reverence, and adoration.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

64. “A life without a storm would lack drama. Pounding waves of a tempestuous sea test a person’s mettle. A fearless sailor climbs the rigging and shouts out at the top of their lungs into the wind and rain whipping across their face that they will not go quietly into the good night without a fight.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

65. “Living is a process of developing oneself. Without experiencing pain from disconcerting periods of our lives, we would be different person, perhaps a lesser person.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

66. “Self-healing requires tremendous action, a willingness to go beyond the normative to discover something transcending.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

67. “Nature endowed human beings with two teleological components that define our essential humanity: consciousness and memory. Consciousness enables people to make decisions, and memory allows us to learn and share our accumulated knowledge. Cognitive endowments of consciousness and knowledge allow people to ascribe a meaning to existence, by establishing a direction and purpose to their life.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

68. “Life has a tendency to provide a person with what they need in order to grow. Our beliefs, what we value in life, provide the roadmap for the type of life that we experience. A period of personal unhappiness reveals that our values are misplaced and we are on the wrong path. Unless a person changes their values and ideas, they will continue to experience discontentment.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

69. “Many aspects of the human condition are beautiful and many others are vile. Betrayal and personal agony represent a maddening part of being human. A person can maintain personal dignity by exercising restraint, remaining true to their conscience, and preserving under difficult conditions.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

70. “A person shattered by their loss in faith must come to terms with the underlying fear and tension of his or her austere solitude and knowingly accept that the universe is utterly indifferent to a person’s survival. Establishment of an ethical code – a philosophical stance – that enables a person to accept the absurdity of living in a world indifferent to them is the ultimate challenge.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

71. “Examination of our past is never time-wasting. Reverberations from the past provide learning rubrics for living today.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

72. “Writing at its foundation stone is the transmutation of personal experience into thought and weaving intricate patterns of thoughts into graphic scenes.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

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

— Kilroy J. Oldster

74. “A poet warrior realizes both the brutality and the beauty in life, and apprehends that the suffering we tragically endure is partly what makes us human. What also makes us human is the ability to love, the ability to stand in nature’s presence, and to nurture this earthly paradise to tend to our family’s needs.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

75. “Life is the constant process of self-creation. We constantly make and remake our personal version of the self. Personal introspection is critical to ascertain who we want to become by ascertaining what traits we wish to eradicate and what qualities we wish to embody.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

76. “A life of living free and taking endless satisfaction from a person’s promiscuous meanderings entails intermittently retooling oneself to meet a desired future. Perhaps the most difficult challenge of life is detecting when the ground moves beneath us and then nimbly shifting our mental perspective.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

77. “People outwardly project their innermost insecurities.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

78. “We are always in the process of becoming. Self-identity is a fusion of our prior decisions and our current thoughts.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

79. “An authentic life facing reality without mental equivocation is the simplest type of life.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

80. “Behind every creative act is a statement of love. Every artistic creation is a statement of gratitude.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

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

— Kilroy J. Oldster

82. “A pensive personality and ambivalent attitude towards power and money can cause other people to take a high production or creative person for granted.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

83. “Personal struggles, mistakes, and perseverance are part of every person’s life story. A proper mindset can turn failure into a gift. Specific human qualities such as intelligence and adaptive skills can be cultivated through applied effort to assist a person overcome a resounding failure. Each person would be wise to ask how does a person cope – grapple – with failure? We derive strength from our struggles.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

84. “Using reason without applying it to experience only leads to theoretical illusions. Ideas derived from real world experiences lead to acquisition of knowledge, and the accumulation of time-tested principles leads to wisdom.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

85. “Self-doubt and lack of conscious awareness undermine a person’s quest to live a life of dutiful service. Self-assurance infuses us with poise and the strength of character to blunt our destructive impulses. Self-awareness allows us to be cognizant of the whirlwind of infinite beauty that surrounds us and reinforces us with the forte to apply our vibrant life force in an expressive motif that exposes the mistiness of our inner soul to the outer world.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

86. “A person whom lives by faith is not bound to feel hopelessness or the agony of infinite despair.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

87. “We must master many subjects in order to implement our dreams. Our personal journey begins by gathering appropriate learning experiences and awakening our minds to observe, evaluate, and recall what we experience.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

88. “Every time that we consider our past, examine our present environment, and speculate about the future, we engage in mental projection. Contemplation merges into thinking, and thinking unspools into theorizing suppositions. Every act of attentiveness expands our state of awareness. Deductive surmises represent an ongoing process of making applicable connections between theories and facts. Devising working hypothesis represents one of the highest intellectual achievements of humankind.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

89. “We can imprison ourselves with our wants, wishes, and false dreams.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

90. “The greatest act of personal courage is conscientiously to mature, by resolutely striving to achieve self-actualization and self-realization. A person who knows their true self and lives their life in an authentic manner while pursuing their honest passions will lose his misery.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

91. “Stories trace their roots to impassioned human interactions with the world. I always sense a storyline as an emotional yearning embedded in a deep fissure waiting to erupt.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

92. “Writing is an exhausting and demoralizing task that destroys human conceits. Writing an elongated series of personal essay opens a person’s mind to explore paradoxes and discover previously unrealized personal truths. Writing is as arduous as any trek into the wilderness. Every sentence takes a writer deeper into the jungle of the mind, a world of frightening inconsistencies created by our waking life’s desire that the world of chaos conform to our convenience.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

93. “All human beings experience a life framed by the sky, wind, sun, stars, the earth, the great waters, and small streams. We possess nothing in life other than the landscape of our own minds. We cannot take anything from life. The universe is not something that we possess.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

94. “A person whom trains alone in isolation for extended hours or otherwise lives in a state of exile from civilization while pursuing his or her private passions can fall victim to the solipsism syndrome, a psychological state where they do not perceive the world as external to their mind. Feelings of loneliness, detachment, and indifference to the outside world characterize this syndrome.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

95. “There are times in life that we ascribe qualities or traits to other people that are inaccurate or fail to recognize other aspects of their being because we are emotionally invested in that person fulfilling a specific role in our life. When we claim that the other person changed it is not so much that they altered their core composition, but we now must admit to ourselves that our original perception of them was imprecise.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

96. “Storytelling connects us with all of humanity.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

97. “Tact by its nature entails staying mum, prudently electing to forgo urging other people to pursue an alternative course of action. Creation of silent spaces in our own life and equitable distribution of periods of respite that allow for periods of equable inner reflection is necessary to spur personal growth. It is equally important to honor other people’s intrinsic need for periods of introspection, uninterrupted by unsolicited advice.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

98. “The nonessential employees, the type of workers whom remain at home when it snows, are the quickest to complain about how the talented persons of an organization behave.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

99. “An enlightened person strives to live a meaningful life, defined by their personal humility joy, passion, and profound reverence for life.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

100. “Life toughens us while also softening us.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster