Don't stop the carnival...

Move out man! Life is fleeting by.
Do something worthwhile, before you die.
Leave behind a work sublime,
that will outlive you and time.
Alfred A. Montepert

Up to a point a man's life is shaped by environment, heredity, and movements and changes in the world about him. Then there comes a time when it lies within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he wishes to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune, or the quirks of fate. Everyone has it within his power to say, "This I am today; that I will be tomorrow."
Louis L'Amour

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.
Helen Keller

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
G. K. Chesterton

It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves--in finding themselves.
André Gide

A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short.
Bertrand Russell

A large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life, by him who interests his heart in everything.
Laurence Sterne

If we do not find anything very pleasant, at least we shall find something new.
Voltaire

If we didn't live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I've no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged.
Virginia Woolf

Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.
Jeanne Moreau

I have the same goal I’ve had ever since I was a girl. I want to rule the world.
Madonna Louise Ciccione

At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.
Salvador Dali

Man is the only creature that strives to surpass himself, and yearns for the impossible.
Eric Hoffer

When you go in search of honey you must expect to be stung by bees.
Kenneth Kaunda

A slave has but one master; an ambitious man has as many masters as there are people who may be useful in bettering his position.
Jean de La Bruyère

If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms.
Henry Miller

As he was valiant, I honour him. But as he was ambitious, I slew him.
William Shakespeare

Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it.
Seneca

Staying angry with you is how I protect myself from you. Refusing to forgive you is not only how I punish you: it is also how I keep you from getting close enough to hurt me again, and nine times out of ten it works - only there is a serious side effect. It is called bitterness, and it can do terrible things to the human body and soul.
Barbara Brown Taylor

Heav'n has no Rage like Love to Hatred turn'd,
Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn'd.
William Congreve

Anger as soon as fed is dead--
'Tis starving that makes it fat--.
Emily Dickinson

In times of great stress or adversity, it's always best to keep busy, to plow your anger and your energy into something positive.
Lee Iacocca

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
John Steinbeck

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.
Helen Keller

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

Outside of a dog, a book is Man’s best friend. And inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.
Groucho Marx

I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind some people dying
all the time
or maybe only starving
some of the time
which isn't half so bad
if it isn't you.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Do not keep the alabaster box of your friendship sealed up until your friends are dead. Fill their lives with sweetness. Speak approving, cheering words while their ears can hear them, and while their hearts can be thrilled and made happier. The kind of things you mean to say when they are gone, say before they go.
George W. Childs

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

The measure of choosing well, is, whether a man likes and finds good in what he has chosen.
Charles Lamb

Nine requisites for contented living:
Health enough to make work a pleasure. Wealth enough to support your needs. Strength to battle with difficulties and overcome them. Grace enough to confess your sins and forsake them. Patience enough to toil until some good is accomplished. Charity enough to see some good in your neighbor. Love enough to move you to be useful and helpful to others. Faith enough to make real the things of God. Hope enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If a man has come to that point where he is so content that he says; I do not want to know any more, or do any more or be any more, he is in a state of which he ought to be changed into a mummy.
Henry Ward Beecher

Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires courage.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.
Hermann Hesse

Destiny is something we've invented because we can't stand the fact that everything that happens is accidental.
Sleepless in Seattle

There is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.
Oscar Wilde

All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.
William Shakespeare

Nothing has turned out as we expected! It never does. Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect. We take what we get and are thankful it's no worse than it is.
Gone With the Wind

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, they make them.
George Bernard Shaw

My mother said to me, "If you become a soldier, you'll be a general; if you become a monk, you'll end up as the pope." Instead, I became a painter, and wound up Picasso.
Pablo Picasso

The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.
Albert Ellis

Remember to always dream. More importantly to make those dreams come true and never give up.
Dr. Robert D. Ballard

You see things and you say Why? But I dream things that never were; and I say Why not?
George Bernard Shaw

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; there is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.
Henry David Thoreau

A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
Oscar Wilde

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
Eleanor Roosevelt

There is only one sound method of moral education. It is teaching people to think.
Everett Dean Martin

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

The essence of our effort to see that every child has a chance must be to assure each an equal opportunity, not to become equal, but to become different - to realize whatever unique potential of mind, body, and spirit he or she possesses.
John Fischer

Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire,
some say ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Robert Frost

What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don't deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don't we just as often draw the wrong ones?
G. C. Lichtenberg

Don't learn to do, but learn in doing. Let your falls not be on a prepared ground, but let them be bona fide falls in the rough and tumble of the world.
Samuel Butler

A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.
Henry James

Many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves--and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves either.
Helen Keller

One thorn of experience is worn a whole wilderness of warning.
James Russell Lowell

When one has finished building one's house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way--before one began.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
George Bernard Shaw

To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.
Oscar Wilde

Seven National Crimes:
1. I don't think.
2. I don't know.
3. I don't care.
4. I am too busy.
5. I leave well enough alone.
6. I have no time to read and find out.
7. I am not interested.
William J. H. Boetcker

The world is made of people who never quite get into the first team and who just miss the prizes at the flower show.
Jacob Bronowski

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did--which was to hide.
James Baldwin

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett

Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements, and doubts. We tend to forget the past difficulties, the many false starts, and the painful groping. We see our past achievements as the end result of a clean forward thrust, and our present difficulties as signs of decline and decay.
Eric Hoffer

The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it: so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it.
Elbert Hubbard

There is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life.
Thomas Henry Huxley

I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure--which is: Try to please everybody.
Herbert B. Swope

One who fears failure limits his activities. Failure is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again.
Henry Ford

I believe that more unhappiness comes from this source than from any other--I mean from the attempt to prolong family connections unduly and to make people hang together artificially who would never naturally do so.
Samuel Butler

we are each other's business:
we are each other's magnitude and bond.
Gwendolyn Brooks

There's no vocabulary
For love within a family, love that's lived in
But not looked at, love within the light of which
All else is seen, the love within which
All other love finds speech.
This love is silent.
T.S. Eliot

Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds; they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

The only rock I know that stays steady, the only institution I know that works, is the family.
Lee Iacocca

As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.
Pope John Paul II

There is not enough magic in a bloodline to forge an instant, irrevocable bond.
James Earl Jones

As to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals-- or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all. A group of closely related persons living under one roof; it is a convenience, often a necessity, sometimes a pleasure, sometimes the reverse; but who first exalted it as admirable, an almost religious ideal?
Rose Macaulay

All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Leo Tolstoy

Don't hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them.
Evelyn Waugh

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes, they forgive them.
Oscar Wilde

Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority of government has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us put on this world has been put there for a reason and has something to offer.
Ronald Reagan

Friendship is different from all other relationships. Unlike acquaintanceship, it is based on love. Unlike lovers and married couples, it is free of jealousy. Unlike children and parents, it knows neither criticism nor resentment. Friendship has no status in law. Business partnerships are based on a contract. So is marriage. Parents are bound by the law, as are children. But friendship is freely entered into, freely given, freely exercised. Friends never cheat each other, or take advantage, or lie. Friends do not spy on one another, yet they have no secrets. Friends glory in each other's successes and are downcast by the failures. Friends minister to each other, nurse each other. Friends give to each other, worry about each other, stand always ready to help. Perfect friendship is rarely achieved, but at its height, is an ecstasy.
E. Ambrose Comrades

There is a magnet in your heart that will attract true friends. That magnet is unselfishness, thinking of others first. When you learn to live for others, they will live for you.
Paramahansa Yogananda

Friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life; and thanks to a benevolent arrangement of things, the greater part of life is sunshine.
Thomas Jefferson

Of all the things which wisdom provides to make life entirely happy, much the greatest is the possession of friendship.
Epicurus

Every now and again take a good look at something not made with hands —a mountain, a star, the turn of a stream. There will come to you wisdom and patience and solace and, above all, the assurance that you are not alone in the world.
Sidney Lovett

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

I am not in this world to live up to other people's expectations, nor do I feel that the world must live up to mine
Fritz Perls

The future belongs to those who are virile, to hom it is a pleasure to live, to create, to whet their intelligence on that of the others.
Sir Henri Deterding

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that me may become robots.
Erich Fromm

There are in the end three things that last: Faith, Hope, and Love, and the greatest of these is love.
St. Paul

I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again...the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.
J. G. Ballard

Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.
Albert Camus

Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.
Lyndon B. Johnson

The architecture of our future is not only unfinished; the scaffolding has hardly gone up.
George Lamming

Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass?
Maurice Maeterlinck

I believe the future is only the past again, entered through another gate.
Sir Arthur Wing Pinero

Surprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable.
Jane Austen

Giving presents is a talent; to know what a person wants, to know when and how to get it, to give it lovingly and well. Unless a character possesses this talent there is no moment more annihilating to ease than that in which a present is received and given.
Pamela Glenconner

There is sublime thieving in all giving. Someone gives us all he has and we are his.
Eric Hoffer

Bounty always receives part of its value from the manner in which it is bestowed.
Samuel Johnson

Some people have a knack of putting upon you gifts of no real value, to engage you to substantial gratitude. We thank them for nothing.
Charles Lamb

What is called generosity is usually only the vanity of giving; we enjoy the vanity more than the thing given.
François Duc de La Rochefoucauld

This is what is hardest: to close the open hand because one loves.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Every man shall give as he is able , according to the blessing of the Lord, thy God which he hath given thee.
Deuteronomy 16:17

Aim high! It is no harder on your gun to shoot the feathers off an eagle than to shoot the fur off a skunk.
Troy Moore

I go walking, and the hills loom above me, range upon range, one against the other. I cannot tell where one begins and another leaves off. But when I talk with God, He lifts me up where I can see clearly where everything has a distinct contour.
Madam Chaiang Kai-shek

We are as gods. We might as well get good at it.
Stewart Brand from The Whole Earth Catalog

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature - trees, flowers, grass - grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence...We need silence to be able to touch souls.
Mother Teresa

When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say 'I used everything you gave me.
Erma Bombek

Greatness is not in where we stand, but in what direction we are moving. We must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it - but sail we must, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

It is only too easy to compel a sensitive human being to feel guilty about anything.
Morton Irving Seiden

Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.
Hannah Arendt

In the small circle of pain within the skull
You still shall tramp and tread one endless round
Of thought, to justify your action to yourselves,
Weaving a fiction which unravels as you weave,
Pacing forever in the hell of make-believe
Which never is belief: this is your fate on earth
And we must think no further of you.
T. S. Eliot

This is his first punishment, that by the verdict of his own heart no guilty man is acquitted.
Juvenal

I have never smuggles anything in my life. Why, then, do I feel an uneasy sense of guilt on approaching a customs barrier?
John Steinbeck

The monument of a great man is not of granite or marble or bronze. It consists of his goodness, his deeds, his love and his compassion.
Alfred A. Montapert

Happiness isn't something you experience, it's something you remember.
Oscar Levant

There is this difference between happiness and wisdom, that he that thinks himself the happiest man really is so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.
Charles Caleb Colton

The outside world doesn't have a lot to offer. You have to make your own heaven in your own home.
Bette Midler

A home is no home unless it contains food and the fire for the mind as well as for the body. For human beings are not so constituted that they can live without expansion. If they do not get in one way, they must in another, or perish.
Margaret Fuller

Ninety-eight of 100 of the rich men in America are honest. That is why they are rich.
Russell Herman Conwell

Peace is to be found only within, and unless one finds it there he will never find it at all. Peace lies not in the external world. It lies within one's own soul.
Ralph W. Trine

I expect to pass through this life but once. If, therefore, there be any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do to any fellow being, let me do it now, and not defer or neglect it, as I shall not pass this way again.
William Penn

We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that a savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.
Mark Twain

For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.
Bible. Ecclesiastes 1:18

Knowledge is two-fold, and consists not only in an affirmation of what is true, but in the negation of that which is false.
Charles Caleb Colton

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky

A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

A man can only attain knowledge with the help of those who possess it. This must be understood from the very beginning. One must learn from him who knows.
George Gurdjieff

The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.
Laurence Sterne

There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating—people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
Oscar Wilde

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
Aldous Huxley

We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last we destroy them out of discretion, and so disappears the most beautiful, the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverable for ourselves and for others.
Goethe

And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart.
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
W. H. Auden

Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls.
For, thus friends absent speak.
John Donne

I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.
D. H. Lawrence

Correspondences are like smallclothes before the invention of suspenders; it is impossible to keep them up.
Sydney Smith

A man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist— nothing shields him from the world’s gaze except his bare skin. A writer, writing away, can always fix himself up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.
E. B. White

I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent plant. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste may days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.
Jack London

1. Do more than exist, live.
2. Do more than touch, feel.
3. Do more than look, observe.
4. Do more than read, absorb.
5. Do more than hear, listen.
6. Do more than listen, understand.
7. Do more than think, ponder.
8. Do more than talk, say something.
John H. Rhoades

Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
George Bernard Shaw

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.
George Santayana

No one gets out of this world alive, so the time to live, learn, care, share, celebrate, and love is now.
Dr. Leo Buscaglia

Life is eternal and love is immortal, and death is only a horizon...
And a horizon is nothing, save the limit of our sight.
Carly Simon

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

Live all you can. It is a mistake not to. It doesn't matter so much what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?
Henry James

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.
C.S. Lewis

If thou must love me, let it be for naught except for love's sake only.
Elizabeth Barret Browning

Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.
Jeanne Moreau

Each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.
Oscar Wilde

Lots of people are willing to die for the person they love, which is a pity, for it is a much grander thing to live for that person.
Jason Hurst

Love wasn't put in your heart to stay. Love isn't love 'til you give it away.
Oscar and Hammerstein, "Sixteen Going on Seventeen" from the Sound of Music

Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it.. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk everything, you risk even more.
Erica Jong

Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not.
Friedrich Nietzsche

The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is mingled with grief, love grows perhaps the greater.
From The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien

True love doesn't consist of holding hands, it consists of holding hearts.
O.A. Battista

I feel that there is someone in the world who can complete me, make me feel whole, and who I can laugh with. That person will love me not because he decides to, but because of the fact that when he is near me, he will feel the way I do: like one full entity, concerted. I also believe that love is something that no one person can fix the limits of, because it is as infinite and mysterious as the stars that it's written on. No one really should attempt to explain it, because it is one of the greatest natural phenomena in the world that all people should just have blind faith in. Love is trust and certitude in the unknown, for without that faith, emotions can die.
Mary Pat Michalek

The first sight of him did something to her, twisted her heart round so that it almost hurt. Absurd that a man--an ordinary, yes, a perfectly ordinary young man-- should be able to do that to one! That the mere look of him should set the world spinning, that his voice should make you want--just a little--to cry...love surely should be a pleasurable emotion, not one that hurts you with its intensity.
Agatha Christie

Put away the book, the description, the tradition, the authority, and take the journey of self-discovery. Love, and don't be caught in opinions and ideas about what love is or should be. When you love, everything will come right. Love has its own action. Love, and you will know the blessings of it. Keep away from the authority who tells you what love and what it is not. No authority knows and he who knows cannot tell. Love, and there is understanding.
Krishnamurti

It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them.
Agatha Christie

The path to love isn't a choice, for all of us must find out who we are. This is our spiritual destiny. The path can be postponed; you can lose faith in it or even despair that love exists. None of that is permanent; only the path is.
Deepak Chopra

Tis said of love that it sometimes goes, sometimes flies; runs with one, walks gravely with another; turns a third into ice, and sets a fourth in a flame: it wounds one, another it kills: like lightning it begins and ends in the same moment: it makes that fort yield at night which it besieged but in the morning; for there is no force able to resist it.
Miguel de Cervantes

I do my thing, and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations.
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I,
And if by chance we find each other,
It's beautiful.
Frederick S. Perls

I never married because there was no need. I have three pets at home which answer the same purpose as a husband. I have a dog which growls every morning, a parrot which swears all afternoon and a cat that comes home late at night.
Marie Corelli

Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.
Katharine Hepburn

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
Friedrich Nietzsche

If men can run the world, why can't they stop wearing neckties? How intelligent is it to start the day by tying a little noose around your neck?
Linda Ellerbee

If I had my life to live over again, I'd dare to make more mistakes the next time.
Nadine Stair

If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner.
Tallulah Bankhead

Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.
Walter Benjamin

It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.
John Cheever

So far as I know, anything worth hearing is not usually uttered at seven o'clock in the morning; and if it is, it will generally be repeated at a more reasonable hour for a larger and more wakeful audience.
Moss Hart

The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible.
Jean Kerr

Oft when the white, still dawn Lifted the skies and pushed the hills apart, I have felt it like a glory in my heart.
Edwin Markham

At first a small line of inconceivable splendor emerged on the horizon, which, quickly expanding, the sun appeared in all of his glory, unveiling the whole face of nature, vivifying every color of the landscape, and sprinkling the dewy earth with glittering light.
Ann Radcliffe

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.
Albert Camus

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work.We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.
Lewis Thomas

There is something very wonderful in music. Words are wonderful enough; but music is even more wonderful. It speaks not to our thoughts as words do; it speaks straight to our hearts and spirits, to the very core and root of our souls. Music soothes us, stirs us up; it puts noble feelings in us; it melts us to tears; we know not how; - it is a language by itself, just as perfect, in its way, as speech, as words; just as divine, just as blessed.
Charles Kingsley

The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever galling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.
John Muir

I think I could turn and live with the animals. They are so placid and self-contained. They do not sweat and whine about their condition. Not one is dissatisfied. Not one is demented with the maia of owning things. Not one is disrespectful or unhappy over the world.
Walt Whitman

The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending we lay waste our powers. Little we see in nature that is ours.
William Wordsworth

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.
Walt Whitman

Nature has no mercy at all. Nature says, “I’m going to snow. If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that’s tough. I am going to snow anyway.
Maya Angelou

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

How cunningly nature hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and morning dew!
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.
Kahlil Gibran

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

Nature is unfair? So much the better, inequality is the only bearable thing, the monotony of equality can only lead us to boredom.
Francis Picabia

Of all the things that oppress me, this sense of the evil working of nature herself— my disgust at her barbarity— clumsiness— darkness— bitter mockery of herself— is the most desolating.
John Ruskin

In choosing where to live or vacation, we may be setting the stage for the play of ourselves, treating nature as a prop.
Deborah Tall

In the country the darkness of night is friendly and familiar, but in a city, with its blaze of lights, it is unnatural, hostile and menacing. It is like a monstrous vulture that hovers, biding its time.
Somerset Maugham

I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.
Jorge Luis Borges

Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o'clock is a scoundrel.
Samuel Johnson

Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The day is done, and the darkness
Falls from the wings of Night,
As a feather is wafted downward
From an eagle in his flight.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Learn to reverence night and to put away the vulgar fear of it, for, with the banishment of night from the experience of man, there vanishes as well a religious emotion, a poetic mood, which gives depth to the adventure of humanity.
Henry Beston

The follies a man regrets most in his life are those which he didn't commit when he had the opportunity.
Helen Rowland

The essence of optimism is that it takes no account of the present, but it is a source of inspiration, of vitality and hope where others have resigned; it enables a man to hold his head high, to claim the future for himself and not to abandon it to his enemy.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

These are not dark days: these are great days— the greatest days our country has ever lived.
Sir Winston Churchill

I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.
Antonio Gramsci

Let us be of good cheer, however, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come.
James Russell Lowell

Man’s real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.
Edgar Allan Poe

In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you wake in the morning.
Carl Sandburg

One day everything will be well, that is our hope. Everything's fine today, that is our illusion.
Voltaire

One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.
Gaston Bachelard

A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular you don't find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting.
J. M. Barrie

The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.
Wendell Berry

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.
George Eliot

To what a degree the same past can leave different marks-and especially admit of different interpretations.
Andre Gide

The past, with its pleasures, its rewards, its foolishness, its punishments, is there for each of us forever, and it should be.
Lillian Hellman

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
George Orwell

One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.
Oscar Wilde

The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach - waiting for a gift from the sea.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh

You would attain to the divine perfection,
And yet not turn your back upon the world.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Perfection is a trifle dull. It is not the least of life's ironies that this, which we all aim at, is better not quite achieved.
W. Somerset Maugham

The most vigilant self-criticism of course is necessary, but the time comes when the artist must tell himself he is good or he will go under.
Gerald Moor

I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active- not more happy- nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.
Edgar Allan Poe

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

How many things by season seasoned are
To their right praise and true perfection!
William Shakespeare

It is through Art, and through Art only, that we can realize our perfection.
Oscar Wilde

History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats.
B. C. Forbes

Why not seize the pleasure at once? How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation?
Jane Austen

It is in vain to expect our prayers to be heard, if we do not strive as well as pray.
Aesop

To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention- on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God- that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying... The primary task of the schoolteacher is to teach children, in a secular context, the technique of prayer.
W. H. Auden

I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in, and invite God, and his Angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his Angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door.
John Donne

Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one's weakness... It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.
Mahatma Gandhi

There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.
Victor Hugo

Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you a car.
Laurence J. Peter

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
George Bernard Shaw

Religion is not a popular error; it is a great instinctive truth, sensed by the people, expressed by the people.
Ernest Renan

The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but moralitytouched by emotion.
Matthew Arnold

It may be that religion is dead, and if it is, we had better know it and set ourselves to try to discover other sources of moral strength before it is too late.
Pearl S. Buck

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
Sigmund Freud

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, then that of blindfolded fear.
Thomas Jefferson

A religion true to its natures must also be concerned about man's social conditions. Religion deals with both earth and heaven, both time and eternity. Religion operates not only on the vertical plane but also on the horizontal. It seeks not only to integrate men with God but to integrate men with men and each man with himself.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

In the long term we can hope that religion will change the nature of man and reduce conflict. But history is not encouraging in this respect. The bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars.
Richard Nixon

It is convenient that there be gods, and, as it is convenient, let us believe that there are.
Ovid

Nobody can deny but religion is a comfort to the distressed, a cordial to the sick, and sometimes a restraint on the wicked; therefore whoever would argue or laugh it out of the world without giving some equivalent for it ought to be treated as a common enemy.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.
George Santayana

And what's romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything As You Like It, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose and it's always daisy-time.
D. H. Lawrence

Why one man rather than another? It was odd. You find yourself involved with a fellow for life just because he was the one that you met when you were nineteen.
Simone De Beauvoir

The essence of romantic love is that wonderful beginning, after which sadness and impossibility may become the rule.
Anita Brookner

I do my thing, & you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you and I am I, and if buy chance we find each other - it is beautiful. If not it can't be helped.
Fritz Perls

He must have a truly romantic nature, for he weeps when there is nothing at all to weep about.
Oscar Wilde

Is not this the true romantic feeling--not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you?
Thomas Wolfe

If I couldn't laugh I just would go insane
If we couldn't laugh we just would go insane
If we weren't all crazy we would go insane.
Jimmy Buffett

Sanity -- that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought.
Erich Fromm

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
Marcus Aurelius

Success, instead of giving freedom of choice, becomes a way of life. There's no country I've been to where people, when you come into a room and sit down with them, so often ask you, "What do you do?" And, being American, many's the time I've almost asked that question, then realized it's good for my soul not to know. For a while! Just to let the evening wear on and see what I think of this person without knowing what he does and how successful he is, or what a failure. We're ranking everybody every minute of the day.
Arthur Miller

The ability to convert ideas to things is the secret of outward success.
Henry Ward Beecher

The toughest thing about success is that you've got to keep on being a success.
Irving Berlin

If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.
Albert Einstein

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
Flaubert

Consult not your fears but your hopes and your dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what it is still possible for you to do.
Pope John

Think of all the really successful men and women you know. Do you know a single one who didn't learn very young the trick of calling attention to himself in the right quarters?
Storm Jameson

The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic, and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary, it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant, and kind. Failure makes people cruel and bitter.
W. Somerset Maugham

The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men!
Thomas Merton

He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much; who has enjoyed the trust of pure women, the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who has left the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who has never lacked appreciation of Earth's beauty or failed to express it; who has always looked for the best in others and given them the best he had; whose life was an inspiration; whose memory a benediction.
Betty Anderson Stanley

I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has had to overcome while trying to succeed.
Booker T. Washington

Teachers are expected to reach unattainable goals with inadequate tools. The miracle is that at times they accomplish this impossible task.
Haim G. Ginott

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
Henry Brooks Adams

Television hangs on the questionable theory that whatever happens anywhere should be sensed everywhere. If everyone is going to be able to see everything, in the long run all sights may lose whatever rarity value they once possessed, and it may well turn out that people, being able to see and hear practically everything, will be specially interested in almost nothing.
E. B. White

Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.
Jean Baudrillard

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.
Salvador Dali

There are days when any electrical appliance in the house, including the vacuum cleaner, seems to offer more entertainment than the TV set.
Harriet van Horne

Do not, on a rainy day, ask your child what he feels like doing, because I assure you that what he feels like doing, you won't feel like watching.
Fran Lebowitz

Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America-not on the battlefields of Vietnam.
Marshall McLuhan

If we had had the right technology back then, you would have seen Eva Braun on the Donahue show and Adolf Hitler on Meet the Press.
Ed Turner

I'm always amazed that people will actually choose to sit in front of the television and just be savaged by stuff that belittles their intelligence.
Alice Walker

I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.
Orson Welles

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.
Rabindranath Tagore

Since time is the one immaterial object which we cannot influence--neither speed up nor slow down, add to nor diminish--it is an imponderably valuable gift.
Maya Angelou

There was no "before" the beginning of our universe, because once upon a time there was no time.
John D. Barrow

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven
Bible, Ecclesisates 3:1

The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Dost thou love life, then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of.
Benjamin Franklin

O, for an engine, to keep back all clocks,
Or make the sun forget his motion!
Ben Jonson

There is one kind of robber whom the law does not strike at, and who steals what is most precious to men: time.
Napoleon I

We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we’re in the present, but we aren’t. The present we know is only a movie of the past.
Tom Wolfe

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.
Sir J. Lubbock

A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.
John Steinbeck

The longing to get away from it all never was so great as in our present time of tension and trouble. We want something to lift us out of the mess into which much of life seems to have fallen.
Glenn Stewart

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one either.
Mark Twain

Man cannot degrade woman without himself falling into degradation; he cannot elevate her without at the same time elevating himself.
Alexander Walker

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
H. L. Mencken

You see an awful lot of smart guys with dumb women, but you hardly ever see a smart woman with a dumb guy.
Erica Jong

A strong man doesn't have to be dominant toward a woman. He doesn't match his strength against a woman weak with love for him. He matches against the world.
Marilyn Monroe

I don't mind living in a man's world, as long as I can be a woman in it.
Marilyn Monroe

Why does a woman work ten years to change a man's habits and then complain that he's not the man she married?
Barbra Streisand

Women who insist upon having the same options as men would do well to consider the option of being the strong, silent type.
Fran Lebowitz

If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.
Orson Welles

The woman is the fiber of the nation. She is the producer of life. A nation is only as good as its women.
Muhammad Ali

Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel.
Bella Abzug

But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
Lord Byron

Words not only affect us temporarily; they change us, they socialize or unsocialize us.
David Riesman

Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.
Mother Teresa

People are at their most mindful when they are at play. If we find ways of enjoying our work - blurring the lines between work and play - the gains will be greater.
Ellen Langer

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