Top 500 Kilroy J. Oldster Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Humankind’s perpetual affinity for telling stories that depict the weal of life shapes and reflects human consciousness. Stories are the most ancient form of art. All societies, from the tribes scratching the earliest cave drawings, employed the art of storytelling. We hunger to hear other people’s stories and to tell our own stories to an appreciative audience.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

152. “Conflicting egos destroy many relationships. Lasting, stable marriages are a true treasure because they demand that both parties adjust to the constant cellular flux of their partner as they metaphase through changing seasons of life.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

153. “People cannot escape the looming specter of a deathwatch and the imposing emptiness that comes with the termination of their existence. People resist going silently into the night. We seek to howl at the moon and make known our search for a diagrammatic overture that voices our unquantifiable existence.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

154. “The artistic creation of the poet, painter, photographer, and writer is a reflection of the artist’s inner world. The agenda of consciousness that spurs all forms of art is not to represent the outward appearance of things, but to portray its inward significance to the creator. A great poem, painting, photograph, and written composition fully express what the creator feels, in the deepest sense, about the distinctively depicted image that captured their imagination.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

155. “We can learn personal humility from episodes that generate shame and guilt. After retiring from worldly affairs and drawing useful lessons from personal disgrace, we must resume living an expedient life devoted to appreciating truth, beauty, and love.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

156. “We each possess the ability creatively to respond to the ontological mystery of our existence.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

157. “We learn invaluable life lessons from people whom exhibit courage and grace under extraordinary circumstances.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

158. “Nature blessed every person with the innate capacity to express wonder and awe for the eternal world and act with a kind and unstinting soul.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

159. “Personal dignity begins by accepting responsibility for our actions, acting humbly, and extending compassion to other people. Personal humility requires choosing living with quietness of the heart over living in the depths of animosity, despair, and discord.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

160. “When I write, I enter a transpersonal state of consciousness, a lightheaded realm of mental imagination, a cognitive place where I can lithely finger the coherent and the absurd. I seek to cross over an intricate boarder where the conscious and unconscious minds meet, traversing the aperture where the real and the imaginary intermingle. I aspire to establish a detached vantage point where I can survey the entire human condition.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

161. “Life flows at ease whenever a person ceases complaining about the past, worrying about the future, lives in the now without resisting pain, and accepts the moral sublimity of living in a state of grace.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

162. “The self is a subjective entity created by our thoughts and deeds. All sense of happiness and emotional wellbeing turns upon how a person organizes their stream of consciousness into a creation and development of a positive or negative self-image.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

163. “Personal discontent and lost illusion is the catalysis and the principal theme for every book ever written. The sign of maturity is when a person finally realizes that they would rather live truthfully than persist indulging his or her comforting delusions.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

164. “Writing about personal struggles and a disorganized life responding to the chaotic tumult and toils of an individual life connects a person with the touchstone of all humanity.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

165. “The human mind’s innate ability to imagine and create ensures that we never remain stalled out in who we are. We constantly seek to amend our circumference and circumstances, craft and redraft our emotional, social, political, economic, and artistic being.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

166. “The thing I most fear when writing is my paucity of ideas and the thinness of my emotional lining. I audaciously resolve to write about my greatest fears in an effort to transcend what I most despise about myself – intellectual and emotional poverty. Perchance by making use of all my thoughts and matrix of emotions – both positive and negative – I can escape the labyrinth constructed of my terrible ignorance of the world and an appalling lack of self-awareness.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

167. “Life is the one riddle that is denotative, referential. Although every person shares a common ultimate destiny, each person must work out their own life, script their own personal salvation, and wrestle with the fear and trembling that is inherent when we consider our mortality.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

168. “Existential anguish derives from the human freedom to think and act, experience love for life, and fear death. We must decide whether we wish to embrace all experience and encounters in life or seek escape from various aspect of human nature. How we resolve to address existential anguish becomes a large part of our personal story.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

169. “We hold within ourselves the medicinal materials to mend self-inflicted injuries sustained while traversing the thorny obstacle course of life.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

170. “Attempting to succeed in a competitive external environment, we can lose track of how to live without anxiety.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

171. “A liberated person abdicates from society’s expectations and embraces living an authentic life undeterred by external determinates.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

172. “We sacrifice our youth in order to gain needed experience. When we gain experience, we continue to grind just as hard as we did during our apprenticeships.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

173. “The ability to experience bliss requires the gift of attentive awareness, curiosity, and constant learning. We are ultimately the product of what we want – our personal obsessions – and how we think. Thoughts merge into feelings that determine if we are happy or sad. Feelings can manifest into thoughts that drive our ambitions and guide our personal actions, which enable us to live an intensified life.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

174. “The universe is eternal; every person appears in the stream of time, and then disappears. The ego does not survive. Life is significant despite that it ends. The products of human life that we cherish – love, happiness, beauty, art, kindness, – have value without being everlasting. We must conquer human fearfulness in order to live a dignified life.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

175. “All writing is essentially autobiographical because our composed thought patterns reflect our accumulated life experiences. At some level, every type of work, whether it is literature, poetry, music, painting, photography, sculpture, or architecture, is always a portrait of the creator. We cannot escape ourselves any more than we can outrun our shadow.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

176. “We bring happiness into the world one day at a time by accepting pain and returning understanding and compassion.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

177. “Suffering is an essential component of life. No person escapes suffering, which is indivisible from life itself. Suffering is what places in in contact with the self; it is what allows us to understand the spiritual nature behind our existence.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

178. “Reality does not create the entire womb of human life. We have eyes that witness truth and beauty. We are creatures that think, plan, dream, and remember. The lambent luminescence supplied by human memory reveals that we live in a dream world. Human imagination tied to memory tells us how to live today and forevermore.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

179. “The fresh and crisp air of the country reminds us that our blood surges from of the natural world and how tied we are to the sprung rhythms of earth and sky, weather and season.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

180. “A person desires to achieve the apex of his or her potentiality.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

181. “Without opposition, there could be no creation. All life would cease without resistance. Emotions also have their polar opposites: attraction – repulsion, love – hate, aggression – meekness, and mercy – callousness.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

182. “An emotionally locked person refuses to let go of their sad memories and live in the now.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

183. “A personal essay is probably the most malleable form of writing style, because it enables a writer to engage in a felicitous conversation with oneself. The more formal rules that govern academic writing are largely inapplicable to personal essay writing. Personal essays are free from the forbidding cadence and rigid structure of thesis writing. A personal essay’s lilt reflects the movement of the writer’s mind.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

184. “The negative feelings of anger, bitterness, guilt, regret, resentment, and sadness represent a failure of a person to accept that the past is an event that holds no power over the present. The thought that the future will bring salvation is an illusion. We must exist in the present.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

185. “Love, reverence, and adoration, are multifaceted emotions. Similar to a painting by an artist, how we respond to a beautiful woman, nature, and the world that we encounter reveals the spectator and not life.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

186. “We achieve emotional equanimity and self-control by discovering how to live in accord with our capabilities, character, and evolving ethical values.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

187. “Writing is a method to stanch a person’s deepest lacerations.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

188. “Disquietude that springs from the fundamental nature of being a human being is vaster and more encompassing than depression, which has a cause and therefore a cure.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

189. “We live mindfully by harvesting evocative scenes to pay attention to including the mountains and oceans, flowers and trees, love and friendship, music and literature, art and poetry.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

190. “A person desires to lead a self-constructed life rather than live a life duplicating other people’s footsteps.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

191. “Human beings possess the gift of personal freedom and liberty of the mind. We each possess the sovereignty over the body and mind to define ourselves and embrace the values that we wish to exemplify. Personal autonomy enables humans to take independent action and use reason to establish moral values. We are part of nature. Consciousness, human cognition, and awareness of our own mortality allow us to script an independent survival reality and not merely react to environmental forces.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

192. “In any important relationship, we must always ask should we stay or leave. Perchance the correct answer exits in the reason for hanging on and the reason for finally moving on. Perchance self-sacrifice is required. Conversely, perhaps selfishness is called for as an act of self-preservation.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

193. “We cannot achieve personal enlightenment – a clarification of our souls – until we cease deluding ourselves. We must accept that life includes witnessing and personally experiencing pain.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

194. “In order to make a lasting contribution to humanity, we cannot allow other people’s expectancies to limit our development or restrict our dreams. We must live our own lives unaffected by other people’s expectations.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

195. “Writing a sincere narrative account of personal adversities and misfortunes is one way to become acquainted with the rifts of a person’s inmost self, the smothered pieces of want that lie separate and undetected amid the customs, habits, vices, and tedium that encases us in the hubbub of daily living.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

196. “Similar to a how a flower grows incrementally, people also blossom in stages. As we age, we expand our knowledge of how the world works and how other people respond to our deeds. We also expand our language skills in order to communicate both our thoughts and feelings.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

197. “A person only experiences the fathomlessly beautiful and mysterious particulars that constitute reality by giving up the distorting spectacles of our egotistical appetites and repulsive pretensions, shedding artificial attachments, living without grand illusions, and free of deceptive delusions.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

198. “Experiencing terrible pain opens our hearts and minds to express compassion for other people and communion with ourselves.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

199. “Personal essayists attempt to create stories out of their true-life events in order to interpret reality, that is, they attempt to use writing to escape a vapid reality where they remain fixated upon their private deprivations and personal deformities.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

200. “A person who holds strong convictions might appear inflexible, impolite, or exceptionally obtuse, when they are merely direct.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster