Quotations Library

“Here’s to another trip around the sun. Happy birthday!”
— Unknown

“And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke

“Chapter 1. I Am Born”
— Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

“…there was a star danced, and under that was I born.”
— William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

“Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.”
— Marcus Aurelius

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If you want to be happy, be.”
— Leo Tolstoy

“The only way to do great work is to love what you do.”
— Steve Jobs

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”
— Marcus Aurelius

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
— Winston Churchill

“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”
— Alan Watts

“Life isn’t about finding yourself. It’s about creating yourself.”
— George Bernard Shaw

“To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.”
— Winston Churchill

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
— Mary Oliver

“One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of shore for a very long time.”
— André Gide

“Nothing is permanent in this wicked world—not even our troubles.”
— Charlie Chaplin

“Teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”
—Book of Psalms (Psalm 90)

“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
— Wayne Gretzky

“When you get done, you get done.”
— Stephen King

“Once I leave, I leave. I am not going to speak to the man on the bridge, and I am not going to spit on the deck.”
— Stanley Baldwin

“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”
— Alan Watts

“Life isn’t about finding yourself. It’s about creating yourself.”
— George Bernard Shaw

“To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.”
— Winston Churchill

“I am still committed to the struggle to be fully human.”
— Adrienne Richl

“Those who love each other shall become invincible.”
— Walt Whitman

“Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke

“For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”
— Carl Sagan

“Where thou art, that is home.”
— Emily Dickinson

“I barely knew I had skin before I met you.”
— Sarah Waters, The Paying Guests

“The best proof of love is trust.”
— Joyce Brothers

“Celebrate what you want to see more of.”
— Tom Peters

“Art is for everyone.”
— Keith Haring

” Novels teach you that actions have consequences. They help you grow up.”
— Hilary Mantel, “Real Books in Imaginary Houses”

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
— James Baldwin

“I knew how words worked in the way that some boys knew how engines worked.”
— Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“Books are, let’s face it, better than everything else.”
— Nick Hornby, Ten Years in the Tub

“If you don’t know the exact moment the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.”
— Clive James, Latest Readings

“I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.”
— Virginia Woolf

“The best kind of reading is when you don’t realize you’re reading.”
— Anonymous

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
— Franz Kafka

“Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.”
— bell hooks

“Do one thing every day that scares you.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt

“Fortune favors the brave.”
— Virgil

“Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.”
— Victor Hugo

“Out of difficulties grow miracles.”
— Jean de La Bruyère

“You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
— Marcus Aurelius

“The oak fought the wind and was broken, the willow bent when it must and survived.”
— Robert Jordan

“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
— Carl Jung

“I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being.”
— Hafiz

“Keep your face always toward the sunshine – and shadows will fall behind you.”
— Walt Whitman

“Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul – and sings the tunes without the words – and never stops at all.”
— Emily Dickinson

“The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials.”
— Seneca

“The wound is the place where the light enters you.”
— Rumi

“Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
— James Baldwin

“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity….We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”
— Toni Morrison

“Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.”
— Rebecca Solnit

“In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.”
— Bertolt Brecht

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror, Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke

“There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”
— Leonard Cohen

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
— Haruki Murakami

“Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.”
— Mahatma Gandhi

“Our strength grows out of our weaknesses.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The greatest test of courage on the earth is to bear defeat without losing heart.”
— Robert Green Ingersoll

“Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass, it’s about learning to dance in the rain.”
— Vivian Greene

“The human spirit is stronger than anything that can happen to it.”
— George C. Scott

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
— Albert Camus

“Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.”
— Helen Keller

“Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.”
— E.B. White

“Be here now.”
— Ram Dass

“The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it.”
— Thich Nhat Hanh

“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow.’”
— Mary Anne Radmacher

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
— Lao Tzu

“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”
— Arthur Ashe

“The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
— Nelson Mandela

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
— Viktor Frankl

“I like dogs”
— Margaret Wise Brown, The Friendly Book

“Until one has loved an animal, a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.”
— Anatole France

“Sometimes losing a pet is more painful than losing a human because in the case of the pet, you were not pretending to love it.”
— Amy Sedaris

“My little dog—a heartbeat at my feet.”
— Edith Wharton

“I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.”
— Emily Dickinson

“You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson

“If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.”
— Will Rogers

“Dogs are better than human beings because they know but do not tell.”
— Emily Dickinson

“Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?”
— Jonathan Safran Foer

“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”
— Groucho Marx

“I like you just the way you are.”
— Walter Trumbull

“When I count my blessings I count you twice!”
— Irish Blessing

“There is beauty in being kind.”
— Walt Whitman

“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.”
— Aesop

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
— Maya Angelou

“To kindness and love, the things we need most!”
— Grinch

“My friends are my estate.”
— Emily Dickinson

“A friend is one that knows you as you are, understands where you have been, accepts what you have become, and still, gently allows you to grow.”
— William Shakespeare

“A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.”
— Walter Winchell

“The greatest gift of life is friendship, and I have received it.”
— Hubert H. Humphrey

“Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It’s not something you learn in school. But if you haven’t learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven’t learned anything.”
— Muhammad Ali

“The only way to have a friend is to be one.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity.”
— Khalil Gibran

“The language of friendship is not words but meanings.”
— Henry David Thoreau

“Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.”
— Elie Wiesel

“One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives.”
— Euripides

“A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself.”
— Jim Morrison

“Friendship is the golden thread that ties the heart of all the world.”
— John Evelyn

“The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart.”
— Elisabeth Foley

“Old friends, they shine like diamonds / Old friends, you can always call / Old friends Lord, you can’t buy ’em / You know it’s old friends after all”
— Guy Clark, “Old Friends”

“Gratitude turns what we have into enough.”
— Aesop

“And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke

“I can no answer make but thanks. And thanks, and ever thanks.”
— William Shakespeare

“There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort.”
— Jane Austen

“The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I would rather walk with a friend in the dark than alone in the light.”
— Helen Keller

“Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.”
— Martin Luther King Jr.

“What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Compassion is the basis of morality.”
— Arthur Schopenhauer

“There is a kind of beauty in imperfection.”
— Ann Lamott

“Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.”
— William Shakespeare

“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.”
— Aesop

“The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, ‘What are you going through?’”
— Simone Weil

“When I was young I admired clever people. Now that I am old I admire kind people.”
— Abraham Heschel

“Yet once you’ve come to be part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”
— Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make

“Where we love is home—home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.”
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

“We Saw A Vision”

In the darkness of despair we saw a vision,
We lit the light of hope and it was not extinguished.
In the desert of discouragement we saw a vision.
We planted the tree of valour and it blossomed.
In the winter of bondage we saw a vision.
We melted the snow of lethargy and the river of resurrection flowed from it.
We sent our vision aswim like a swan on the river. The vision became a reality.
Winter became summer. Bondage became freedom and this we left to you as your inheritance.
O generations of freedom remember us, the generations of the vision.

— Liam Mac Uistín

“The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility.”
— Wendell Berry

“Whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe.”
— Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“Everything has its own life, and everything has its own time.”
— Jane Hirshfield

“Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“The best is the enemy of the good.”
— Voltaire

“Enough is as good as a feast.”
— English proverb

“You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
— Marcus Aurelius

“To be alive is to be attentive, to attend carefully.”
— Wendell Berry

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
— Simone Weil

“Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
— Mary Oliver

“The longer we live, the more we learn what we need.”
— May Sarton

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
— Marcel Proust

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
— Annie Dillard