Quotes

I love quotes that are succinct and honest. Included below are some of my favorites.

Marcus Aurelius

If you are pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs you, but your own judgement about it. And it is in your power to wipe out this judgement now.

We don't get to choose what happens to us, but we can always choose how we feel about it. And why on earth would you choose to feel anything but good?

Benjamin Franklin

Great affairs sometimes take their rise from small circumstances.

Seneca

It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness.

What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed, Whatever years be behind us are in death's hands.

We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

Stephen King

His fingers were permanently yellowed with chalk dust rather than nicotine, but it was still the residue of an addicting substance.

Alone. Yes, thats the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.

Frank Herbert

Your habits always come hunting after you. The self you construct will haunt you

And the price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life — we went soft, we lost our edge.

Hope clouds observation.

It is so shocking to find out how many people do not believe that they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.

To stay awake all night adds a day to your life.

Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place.

Show me a completely smooth operation and I’ll show you someone who’s covering mistakes. Real boats rock.

And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning "That path leads ever down into stagnation."

Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern.

Laws to suppress tend to strengthen what they would prohibit.

Vladamir Zworykin

One cannot stumble on an idea unless one is running.

Alan Watts

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

Kurt Vonnegut

Later on in life, the Tralfamadorians would advise Billy to concentrate on the happy moments of his life, and to ignore the unhappy ones -- to stare only at pretty things as eternity failed to go by.

William Shakespeare

There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures.

Fernando Pessoa

“There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.”

In these random impressions, and with no desire to be other than randon, I differently narrate my factless autobiography, my lifeless history. These are my Confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it's because I have nothing to say.

Could it think, the heart would stop beating."

I have to choose what I detest - either dreaming which my intelligence hates, or action, which my sensibility loathes; either action, for which I wasn't born, or dreaming, for which no one was born. Detesting both, I choose neither; but since I must on occasion either dream or act, I mix the two things together.

Literature – which is art married to thought, and realization untainted by reality – seems to me the end towards which all human effort would have to strive, if it were truly human and not just a welling up of our animal self. To express something is to conserve its virtue and take away its terror. Fields are greener in their description than in their actual greenness. Flowers, if described with phrases that define them in the air of the imagination, will have colours with a durability not found in cellular life.

Whenever I see a dead body, death seems to me a departure. The corpse looks to me like a suit that was left behind. Someone went away and didn't need to take the one and only outfit he'd worn.

Every dream is the same dream, for they're all dreams.

I weep over my imperfect pages, but if future generations read them, they will be more touched by my weeping than by any perfection I might have achieved, since perfection would have kept me from weeping and, therefore, from writing.

The saint weeps, and is human. God is silent. That is why we can love the saint but cannot love God.

A sunset is an intellectual phenomenon.

There's a thin sheet of glass between me and life. However clearly I see and understand life, I can't touch it.

One day, I don’t know which, I found myself in this world, having lived unfeelingly from the time I was evidently born until then. When I asked where I was, everyone misled me, and they contradicted each other. When I asked them to tell me what I should do, they all spoke falsely, and each one said something different. When in bewilderment I stopped on the road, everyone was shocked that I didn’t keep going to no one knew where, or else turn back – I, who’d woken up at the crossroads and didn’t know where I’d come from. I saw that I was on stage and didn’t know the part that everyone else recited straight off, also without knowing it. I saw that I was dressed as a page, but they didn’t give me a queen, and blamed me for not having her. I saw that I had a message in my hand to deliver, and when I told them that the sheet of paper was blank, they laughed at me. And I still don’t know if they laughed because all sheets are blank, or because all messages are to be guessed. Finally I sat down on the rock at the crossroads as before the fireplace I never had. And I began, all by myself, to make paper boats with the lie they’d given me. No one would believe in me, not even as a liar, and there was no pond where I could try out my truth.