my quote book
I have been collecting quotations that made me smile, reflect, cry, feel inspired, laugh, or just feel good in a blank journal since 1994.
The original journal was lost in 1999, and I began again - adding a number of the original quotes and continuing on with new ones as the years have gone by. It is one of my most prized possessions.
The quotes are in no particular order; they are listed as they are found in my journal.
* If youth but knew; if age but could.
- Henri Estienne
* I always knew that I'd look back at my tears and laugh, but I never thought that I'd look back at my laughter and cry.
* Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
* It's suprising how many persons go through life without ever recognizing that their feelings toward other people are largely determined by their feelings toward themselves, and if you're not comfortable within yourself, you can't be comfortable with others.
- Sydney J. Harris
* Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
* Shoot for the moon...'cause even if you miss you'll end up in the stars.
* To laugh often and love much, to win the respect of intelligent persons and the affection of children; to earn the approbation of honest critics; to appreciate beauty; to give of one's self; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived - that is to have succeeded.
* Years alone cannot measure up to how much one has truly lived.
* This is life, not heaven. You don't have to be perfect.
- from Gia
* Make strangers your friends, and your friends a lot stranger.
* Friends help you move. Real friends help you move dead bodies.
* If you love something, set it free, if it comes back to you, it was meant to be.
* Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them.
* The box is a shape you should be pretty familiar with by now. After all, you sleep in one, eat in one, commute in one, spend your free time watching one and, if your conscience is bothering you, even confess in one. You could easily spend your whole life in a box. But you could just as easily get out.
- from a magazine ad
* Absence extinguishes small passions and increases great ones, as the wind blows out a candle, and blows in a fire.
- Duc de La Rochefoucauld
* There's a saying that holds true for money and sex: both seem very important when you don't have any.
- from a magazine ad
* Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of traveling.
* Having mutilated
and freed myself
from the very wings
which for so long
held me aloft
I have cast my heart
liked a purpled fruit
toward the violent earth,
far from the Heaven
of your arms.
- Freedom by Jewel
* What a wonderful life I've had! I only wish I'd realized it sooner.
* Anger will never disappear so long as thoughts of resentment are cherished in the mind. Anger will disappear just as soon as thoughts of resentment are forgotten.
- Buddha
* I can be your wildest dream, or your worst nightmare. Either way, sleep well.
* A life can be guided by many things. What is fleeting and artificial, or what is eternal and natural.
* The butterfly counts not months, but moments, and has time enough.
* Do more than exist, live.
Do more than touch, feel.
Do more than look, observe.
Do more than read, absorb.
Do more than hear, listen.
Do more than listen, absorb.
Do more than think, ponder.
Do more than talk, say something.
- John H. Roades
* Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.
- Robert F. Kennedy
* Think like a man of action. Act like a man of thought.
* Move out man! Life is fleeting by
Do something worthwhile, before you die.
Leave behind a work sublime,
that will outlive you and time.
* The only thing constant in life is change.
- Duc de La Rochefoucauld
* A day...is a miniature eternity.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
* Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.
- Percey Byshe Shelley
* Love truth, but pardon error.
- Voltaire
* Your heart is broken. Never forget that. Your broken heart is the single most important thing in your life. Your broken heart is the reason that you struggle upward, onward, towards something better. All of our hearts are broken. Everyone's. We are born with a broken heart. It is only the few that accept this break, and lead with it, and feel with it, that can find the light which holds the promise of a new heart.
* Two roads diverged in the woods and I took, I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.
- Robert Frost
* Why torture yourself when life will do it for you.
* Each dawn is gone forever from the world.
* The thing is to look within before looking outside.
* The most beautiful things in the world are not seen or touched. They are felt with the heart.
* It is better to regret something you did, than something you didn't do.
* Be not sad that you have suffered, be glad that you have lived.
* Don't get mad get even; it's so much more fun.
* In every real man, there's a child inside who wants to play.
* The decision to have a child is momentous. It is the decision to have your heart go walking around outside of your body.
* Death is more universal than life; everyone dies, not everyone really lives.
* All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.
- James Thurber
* Your actions create reality. Your reactions create your truth.
* Most students treat knowledge as a liquid to be swallowed rather than as a solid to be chewed, and then wonder why it provides so little nourishment.
- Syndey Harris
* Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want.
* Hey, baby, drink this bleach. I like Goth girls.
- Shanna & Spoon
* Seduce my mind and you can have my body; find my soul and I'm yours forever.
* If you're going to do it, do it with passion.
* Homophobia offends my sensibilities and outrages my sense of fairness.
- Elizabeth Taylor
* The simplest things in life are usually the most complicated.
- Matthew Smith
* To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverant - that is to triumph over old age.
* Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are fools.
* No man is a failure who enjoys life.
* This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men...re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.
- Walt Whitman
* There is no cure for birth and death, save to enjoy the interval.
* There is no failure except in no longer trying.
* There are three things that last: Faith, Hope, and Love, and the greatest of these is LOVE.
- St. Paul
* Paradise is always where love dwells.
* Life itself can't give you joy unnless you really will it. Life just gives you time and space, it's up to you to fill it.
* How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.
- George Washington Carver
* LOVE is: when the thoughts, the wants, the needs, and the feelings of someone else become more important than those of your own.
* Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those I love I can: they all make me laugh.
* You can never control love, but love controls every soul.
* All conditions are temporary. Nothing stays the same, nothing remains static. Which way a thing changes depends on you.
- God
* A problem well defined is a problem half solved.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
* You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's. He's more particular.
- Robert Frost
* Happiness depends upon ourselves.
- Aristotle
* A pessimist is one who builds dungeons in the air.
- Walter Winchell
* 'Tis always morning somewhere in the world.
- Richard Henry Horne
* Forget not that the earth delights to feel your barefeet and the winds long to play with your hair.
- Kahlil Gibran
* To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
- William Blake
* Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.
- Walt Whitman
* I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.
- Alice Walker
* Men always want to be a woman's first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about things. What women like is to be a man's last romance.
- Oscar Wilde
* Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
- Oscar Wilde
* Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
* Without order nothing can exist - without chaos nothing can evolve.
* Pizza is a lot like sex. When it's good, it's really good. When it's bad, it's still pretty good.
* Reality is what happens when you die.
* I've always had a boyfriend, always. But being by myself is empowering. It's hard and it's sad and it's great.
- Gwyneth Paltrow
* The problem with Christianity is, they think everything is about outside forces, good and civil. There's not a lot of inner work encouraged.
- Tori Amos
* You can be the brightest flower in your garden.
* Excuse yourself from the predictable.
* Stick out your tongue. Your world is about to change.
* Violate propriety.
- God
* The only thing that matters now is to be part of that whole that is moving forward to lesson the misery and increase the joy of living for all the peoples of the world.
- Katherine Hepburn
* Inner peace, Outer glow.
* Softness: our most surprising strength.
* Goodbyes aren't forever.
* True happiness arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one's self, and, in the next, from friendship and conversation of a few select companions.
- Joseph Addison
* Dream as if you'll live forever; Live as if you'll die today.
- James Dean
* In youth we learn; in age we understand.
* Love doesn't make the world go 'round. Love is what makes the ride worthwhile.
* Talk not of wasted affection; affection never was wasted.
- Henry Wadsworth
* Even if you fall on your face, you're still moving forward.
- Gallagher
* Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart...who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.
- Carl Jung
* You can't make a heart love somebody,
You can lead a heart to love,
But you can't make it fall.
* In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
- Albert Camus
* A ship in the harbor is safe, but that's not what ships are built for.
* Going to church doesn't make you religious anymore than going into a garage makes you a car.
* Every great achievement was once considered impossible.
* Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men the most.
* Wisdom is the reward for a lifetime of listening...when you'd have preferred to talk.
- D.J. Kaufman
* If you were arrested for kindness, would there be enough evidence to convict you?
* To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.
- Confucius
* We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are.
- Anais Nin
* How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
- William James
* If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
- Henry David Thoreau
* We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
* Flowers have spoken to me more than I can tell in written words. They are the hieroglyphics of angels, loved by all men for the beauty of the character, though few can decypher even fragments of their meaning.
- Lydia M. Child
* The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity...and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.
- William Blake
* When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.
- Helen Keller
* Where all is but dream, reasoning and arguments are of no use, truth and knowledge nothing.
- John Locke
* The Laws of Nature are just, but terrible. There is no weak mercy in them. Cause and consequence are inseparable and inevitable. The elements have no forbearance. The fire burns, the water drowns, the air consumes, the earth buries. And perhaps it would be well for our race if the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Man were as inevitable as the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Nature - were Man as unerring in his judgments as Nature.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
* I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.
- Walt Whitman
* The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
- Henry Adams
* Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.
- Oscar Wilde
* Anything in any way beautiful derives its beauty from itself and asks nothing beyond itself. Praise is no part of it, for nothing is made worse or better by praise.
- Marcus Aurelius
* Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.
* If only we'd stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.
- Edith Wharton
* The earth laughs in flowers.
- E.E. Cummings
* WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.
- Ellie Katz
* I would rather be alone than wish that I were.
* Often the test of courage is not to die but to live.
* I'm so poor I can't even pay attention.
* Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.
* True friendship comes when silence between two people is comfortable.
[To be continued - there are hundreds of quotes and I add as many as I can as often as I can, but it will be sometime before they are all recorded here.]
The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotations.
- Disraeli.
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