Quotes I <3
I'm convinced if given the chance I could live off coffee and aphorisms.
“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
~Ray Bradbury
"Love whoever is around to be loved."
~Kurt Vonnegut
"The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, everyday. That is real freedom."
~David Foster Wallace
Proverbs 31:25
1 Corinthians 13:4-8a
"And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good."
~John Steinbeck
"The most wasted of days is one without laughter."
~e.e. cummings
"When you stop doing things for fun you might as well be dead."
~Ernest Hemingway
"Comparison is the thief of joy."
~Theodore Roosevelt
"I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again."
~F. Scott Fitsgerald
“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.”
~Sylvia Plath
"If a man can drive perfectly while kissing a woman, then he is not paying enough attention to the kiss."
~Albert Einstein
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
~Theodore Roosevelt
"I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life."
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
"It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days…Lightly, lightly—it’s the best advice ever given me. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly, my darling."
~Aldous Huxley
"I built this sanctuary to be inhabited by my ideas and my fantasies."
~I.Z.
"Above all, be the heroine of your life--not the victim."
~Nora Ephron
"Being attentive to the needs of others might not be the point of life, but it is the work of life."
~Jonathan Safran Foer
"Dramatic irony, it'll fuck you every time."
~Dustin Hoffman, in Stranger than Fiction
"In the long run the sharpest tool of all is a kind and gentle spirit."
~Anne Frank
"You are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing."
~e.e. cummings
"Our lives will only ever continue be a balancing act that has less to do with pain and more to do with beauty."
~To This Day, Shane Koyzcan
"No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe: every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod be washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friend's or of thine owne were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee."
~John Donne
“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
~Ray Bradbury
"Love whoever is around to be loved."
~Kurt Vonnegut
"The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, everyday. That is real freedom."
~David Foster Wallace
Proverbs 31:25
1 Corinthians 13:4-8a
"And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good."
~John Steinbeck
"The most wasted of days is one without laughter."
~e.e. cummings
"When you stop doing things for fun you might as well be dead."
~Ernest Hemingway
"Comparison is the thief of joy."
~Theodore Roosevelt
"I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again."
~F. Scott Fitsgerald
“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.”
~Sylvia Plath
"If a man can drive perfectly while kissing a woman, then he is not paying enough attention to the kiss."
~Albert Einstein
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
~Theodore Roosevelt
"I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life."
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
"It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days…Lightly, lightly—it’s the best advice ever given me. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly, my darling."
~Aldous Huxley
"I built this sanctuary to be inhabited by my ideas and my fantasies."
~I.Z.
"Above all, be the heroine of your life--not the victim."
~Nora Ephron
"Being attentive to the needs of others might not be the point of life, but it is the work of life."
~Jonathan Safran Foer
"Dramatic irony, it'll fuck you every time."
~Dustin Hoffman, in Stranger than Fiction
"In the long run the sharpest tool of all is a kind and gentle spirit."
~Anne Frank
"You are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing."
~e.e. cummings
"Our lives will only ever continue be a balancing act that has less to do with pain and more to do with beauty."
~To This Day, Shane Koyzcan
"No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe: every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod be washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friend's or of thine owne were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee."
~John Donne