Top 500 Kilroy J. Oldster Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

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

— Kilroy J. Oldster

156. “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

157. “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

158. “We are all the products of nature composed with essential elements. Every natural force has an opposite. The components of earth, wind, water, and fire comprise nature. Similar to nature, we contain complementary, contradictory, and counterpoising elements.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

159. “Rudeness is a means to attract attention, assert power, cover-up ineptitude, deflect personal insecurities, and intimidate meeker people.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

160. “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

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

— Kilroy J. Oldster

162. “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

163. “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

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

— Kilroy J. Oldster

165. “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

166. “Pain is essential for survival, pain is the tangible material that creeps into our mind and screams at us to recognize that something is terribly wrong.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

167. “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

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

— Kilroy J. Oldster

169. “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

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

— Kilroy J. Oldster

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

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

— Kilroy J. Oldster

175. “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

176. “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

177. “Self-mastery epitomizes the height a person’s of measureable success. Conversely, we can gauge the depth of personal failure by a person’s degree of lack of self-control and self-abandonment.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

178. “Being is not full transcendence. We learn about ourselves by discovering our imperfections. Experience corrupts any romantic notions that we ever held of achieving perfection. We must live with our limitations and our imperfections. We must cherish the blemishes in people who we love.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

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

— Kilroy J. Oldster

180. “As we go through life, we essentially grow a personality. Our personality branches out in many directions to assist us organize our thoughts, feelings, values, ideas, and coping mechanisms. Our exhibited behavior – the way we organize and deal with life – becomes an external representation of our central self.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

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

— Kilroy J. Oldster

182. “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

183. “The most difficult journey any of us ever take in our adulthood is the return to our parents’ house. A home visit makes us recall all of the childhood events that formed us. Returning home reacquaints us with family members and our former self.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

184. “All things want to float as light as air through the world witnessing all that is. I am a mote of dust floating freely in the firmament, a person who merely is, and I feel full of joy for all worldly treasures, the immaculate gift of life.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

185. “The act of writing is a contemplative vision quest, a somber expedition of discovery that requires the writer to subordinate their ego in order to travel in soulful solitude towards a desirable personal haven of rejuvenating enlightenment. Writing for personal growth entails unconditionally surrendering oneself to the struggle of tearing their sense of self apart. It demands the solemn willpower to dissect and analyze the fissures of a self-absorbent soul one layer at a time.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

186. “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

187. “A person experiences anxiety when they realize their insignificance in the cosmic field, which present state of angst can exacerbated by other confusing life questions.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

188. “We each sketch the story of our lives. We tell other people whom we have become by making decisions how we carry out our daily affairs, how we confront personal crisis, and when we extend comfort to other people. By talking about our secret dreams, we reveal who we hope to become. Writing changes us. A sentence on paper reflects not only who we now are, but it also exposes who we used to be.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

189. “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

190. “Our most potent memories include the taste and smells of foods we enjoyed as a child in part because it reminds us of who fed us a meal.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

191. “Writing is part of life, but it is not part of the ordinary busyness of life.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

192. “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

193. “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

194. “At some point in life every person encounters haunting feelings of loneliness, because the feeling of being alone and withdrawing deeply into the inner self is part of the human condition. A person might choose to countenance or even cultivate their loneliness and turn the poignant hours of unerring solitude into poetry of their soul.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

195. “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

196. “Living is a constant process of debunking our romantic notions of how our personal life will unfold. Reality oftentimes fails to meet a person’s glamorous expectations.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

197. “Human life is an incongruous combination of tragedy and comedy.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

198. “The only recourse for an escape artist from world affairs is to explore their inner sanctum where hopes, dreams, insecurities, and despair collide.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

199. “Maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, emotions, and sensations occurring in the present moment is essential to comprehend and appreciate the beauty of existence. Living in the moment in a non-judgmental manner allows a person to accept what is without wasting emotional energy and valuable time wishing or hoping for something besides objective reality.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

200. “A person who accepts that they are condemned to death and who holds no belief in a god created afterlife is a realist.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster