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“Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war”
John Green,
[ "alaska-young" ]
“God alert!" Blackjack yelled. "It's the wine dude!Mr. D sighed in exasperation. "The next person, or horse, who calls me the 'wine dude' will end up in a bottle of Merlot!”
Rick Riordan,
[ "blackjack", "dionysus", "percy-jackson" ]
“Humor is reason gone mad.”
Groucho Marx
[ "humor", "reason" ]
“It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.”
Victor Hugo,
[ "death", "living-life" ]
“Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.”
Aldous Huxley
[ "hell", "life" ]
“Seventeen, eh!" said Hagrid as he accepted a bucket-sized glass of wine from Fred."Six years to the day we met, Harry, d’yeh remember it?""Vaguely," said Harry, grinning up at him. "Didn’t you smash down the front door, give Dudley a pig’s tail, and tell me I was a wizard?""I forge’ the details," Hagrid chortled.”
J.K. Rowling,
[ "birthday", "dursley", "hagrid", "harry-potter", "humor", "pig", "wizard" ]
“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”
Cormac McCarthy,
[ "healing", "injuries", "memory", "past", "reality", "scars", "time" ]
“We learn from failure, not from success!”
Bram Stoker,
[ "doubt", "experience", "learning", "mistakes", "records", "wisdom" ]
“God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”
Terry Pratchett,
[ "einstein", "gaiman", "god", "humor" ]
“Marriage can wait, education cannot.”
Khaled Hosseini,
[ "education", "marriage" ]
“We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.”
Philip Pullman
[ "books", "inspirational" ]
“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”
Mahatma Gandhi
[ "animals", "ethics", "gandhi", "morals" ]
“There are much worse games to play.”
Suzanne Collins,
[ "katniss", "mockingjay" ]
“I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception.”
Groucho Marx
[ "humor" ]
“This is where it all begins. Everything starts here, today.”
David Nicholls,
[ "hope", "love" ]
“But until a person can say deeply and honestly, "I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday," that person cannot say, "I choose otherwise.”
Stephen R. Covey,
[ "choices", "misattributed-eleanor-roosevelt" ]
“I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.”
Herman Melville,
[ "adventure", "laughter" ]
“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”
John Keats,
[ "art", "depression", "growth", "life", "pain", "suffering", "wisdom" ]
“A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.”
Stephen King,
[ "reading", "writing" ]
“To give pleasure to a single heart by a single act is better than a thousand heads bowing in prayer.”
Mahatma Gandhi
[ "inspiration" ]
“There are perhaps many causes worth dying for, but to me, certainly, there are none worth killing for.”
Albert Dietrich,
[ "martyrdom", "misattributed-to-albert-camus", "pacifism", "principles", "war" ]
“Don't let the muggles get you down.”
J.K. Rowling,
[ "encouragement", "muggles", "wit" ]
“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”
Gabriel García Márquez,
[ "birth", "identity", "life", "self" ]
“No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.”
Aristotle
[ "aristotle", "genius", "great-minds", "madness" ]
“The mountains are calling and I must go.”
John Muir
[ "nature" ]
“My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.”
Dalai Lama XIV
[ "buddism", "kindness", "religion" ]
“Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.”
Terry Pratchett,
[ "books", "humor" ]
“She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum.”
Jonathan Safran Foer,
[ "grief", "mourning", "sadness", "sorrow", "suffering" ]
“There is no such thing as a "broken family." Family is family, and is not determined by marriage certificates, divorce papers, and adoption documents. Families are made in the heart. The only time family becomes null is when those ties in the heart are cut. If you cut those ties, those people are not your family. If you make those ties, those people are your family. And if you hate those ties, those people will still be your family because whatever you hate will always be with you.”
C. JoyBell C.
[ "broken-families", "divorce", "family", "family-ties", "forgiveness", "hate", "inspirational-life", "inspirational-quotes", "letting-go", "marriage", "moving-on", "soul-ties", "the-nature-of-family", "true-family" ]
“You're something between a dream and a miracle.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
[ "dream" ]
“Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.”
Roberto Bolaño,
[ "books", "reading" ]
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
George Orwell,
[ "language", "power-of-words", "propaganda", "thought" ]
“Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”
Mary Oliver
[ "life-lessons" ]
“After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations.”
Oscar Wilde,
[ "family", "food", "thanksgiving" ]
“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”
Anais Nin
[ "writing" ]
“Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along.”
Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi
[ "lovers" ]
“Fear is a phoenix. You can watch it burn a thousand times and still it will return.”
Leigh Bardugo,
[ "fear" ]
“It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.”
John Steinbeck,
[ "absence", "loss" ]
“My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-seven now, and we don't know where the heck she is.”
Ellen DeGeneres
[ "age", "exercise", "family", "grandmothers", "grandparents", "humor", "walking" ]
“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing. ”
Walt Disney
[ "motivation", "success" ]
“Death is so terribly final, while life is full of possibilities.”
George R.R. Martin,
[ "death", "life" ]
“Freedom (n.): To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.”
Ayn Rand,
[ "independence" ]
“I'm going to keep going until I succeed — or die. Don't think I don't know how this might end. I've known it for years.”
J.K. Rowling,
[ "harry-potter" ]
“I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.”
H.L. Mencken
[ "bibliophiles", "book-lovers", "whiskey" ]
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”
George Orwell,
[ "future" ]
“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.”
G.K. Chesterton
[ "books", "literature", "on-fiction" ]
“If you are a student you should always get a good nights sleep unless you have come to the good part of your book, and then you should stay up all night and let your schoolwork fall by the wayside, a phrase which means 'flunk'.”
Lemony Snicket
[ "humor" ]
“Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires.”
William Shakespeare,
[ "concealment", "dark-plans", "darkness", "stealth" ]
“We are all born sexual creatures,thank God, but it's a pity so many people despise and crush this natural gift.”
Marilyn Monroe
[ "beauty", "femininity", "sex" ]
“There is a saying in Tibetan, 'Tragedy should be utilized as a source of strength.'No matter what sort of difficulties, how painful experience is, if we lose our hope, that's our real disaster.”
Dalai Lama XIV
[ "hope", "life", "pain", "strength", "tragedy" ]
“It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson,
[ "essay", "inspirational", "lecture", "nonfiction", "philosophy", "self-reliance", "social-commentary", "transcendentalism" ]
“Life has no remote....get up and change it yourself!”
Mark A. Cooper,
[ "confidence", "inspirational", "inspirational-attitude", "life", "life-philosophy", "optimism", "power-of-words" ]
“I want to be the friend you fall hopelessly in love with. The one you take into your arms and into your bed and into the private world you keep trapped in your head. I want to be that kind of friend. The one who will memorize the things you say as well as the shape of your lips when you say them. I want to know every curve, every freckle, every shiver of your body. I want to know where to touch you, I want to know how to touch you. I want to know convince you to design a smile just for me. Yes, I do want to be your friend. I want to be your best friend in the entire world.”
Tahereh Mafi,
[ "love" ]
“And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it's already happened.”
Douglas Coupland,
[ "life-lessons" ]
“Jane, be still; don't struggle so like a wild, frantic bird, that is rending its own plumage in its desperation.""I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.”
Charlotte Brontë ,
[ "freedom", "inspirational", "literature" ]
“Music is ... A higher revelation than all Wisdom & Philosophy”
Ludwig van Beethoven
[ "music", "philosophy", "revelation", "wisdom" ]
“When things break, it's not the actual breaking that prevents them from getting back together again. It's because a little piece gets lost - the two remaining ends couldn't fit together even if they wanted to. The whole shape has changed.”
John Green,
[ "inspirational", "life" ]
“To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balancedlife.”
Elizabeth Gilbert,
[ "love" ]
“Damn, Claire. Warn a guy before you do a face-plant on the floor next time. I could have looked all heroic and caught you or something -Shane”
Rachel Caine,
[ "funny", "morganvillevampires" ]
“We are always the same age inside. ”
Gertrude Stein
[ "self-confidence" ]
“Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.”
Mahatma Gandhi
[ "abilities", "capability", "confidence", "optimism", "possibility", "skills", "strength" ]
“Ask for what you want and be prepared to get it!”
Maya Angelou
[ "inspirational" ]
“Never leave a friend behind. Friends are all we have to get us through this life--and they are the only things from this world that we could hope to see in the next.”
Dean Koontz,
[ "friendship" ]
“It is not the length of life, but the depth.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
[ "life" ]
“When I'm good, I'm very good, but when I'm bad, I'm better. ”
Mae West
[ "goodness", "sexuality", "virtue" ]
“Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not. ”
Pablo Picasso,
[ "creativity", "inspirational" ]
“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”
Fernando Pessoa
[ "hope", "longing", "pain", "regret", "yearning" ]
“I think and think and think, I‘ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.”
Jonathan Safran Foer
[ "happiness", "thinking", "wisedom" ]
“Holding people away from you, and denying yourself love, that doesn't make you strong. if anything, it makes you weaker. Because you're doing it out of fear.”
Sarah Dessen,
[ "sarah-dessen", "this-lullaby" ]
“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.”
Anaïs Nin,
[ "anais", "nin" ]
“So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?”
Hunter S. Thompson
[ "gonzo", "happiness", "risk" ]
“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”
Arthur Conan Doyle,
[ "deception", "detection", "evidence", "facts", "obviousness", "sherlock-holmes" ]
“The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.”
Mark Twain
[ "humor", "philosophy", "religion" ]
“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.”
Isaac Asimov
[ "assumptions", "close-mindedness", "intelligence", "isaac-asimov", "knowledge", "open-mind", "open-mindedness", "open-minds", "opinions", "receptivity", "science", "science-of-mind" ]
“Can you be a girl for a few seconds?""I'm always a girl" I frown."You know what I mean. Like a silly, annoying girl"I twirl my hair around my finger. "Kay.”
Veronica Roth,
[ "christina", "divergent", "funny", "humor", "tris", "veronica-roth" ]
“Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.”
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
[ "perseverance", "suicide", "survival" ]
“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.”
Gilles Deleuze,
[ "anarchy", "freedom", "inspirational", "lateral-thinking", "philosophy", "rationalism" ]
“I don't suffer from my insanity -- I enjoy every minute of it.”
Sherrilyn Kenyon,
[ "zarek" ]
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
George Orwell,
[ "april", "dystopia", "first-sentence", "opening-lines" ]
“Help others without any reason and give without the expectation of receiving anything in return.”
Roy T. Bennett,
[ "give", "giving", "inspiration", "inspirational", "inspirational-quotes", "inspire", "inspiring", "kindness", "life", "life-quotes", "living" ]
“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”
G.K. Chesterton
[ "fairy-tales", "hope", "paraphrased", "possiblity" ]
“One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.”
Charles Baudelaire,
[ "drunk", "poetry", "virtue", "wine" ]
“It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.”
George Washington
[ "confession", "excuses", "honesty", "lies", "lying", "truth" ]
“Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.”
Anais Nin
[ "dreams", "life", "love" ]
“Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.”
Woody Allen
[ "art", "humor", "life" ]
“Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.”
Albert Camus,
[ "carpe-diem", "future", "present" ]
“Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.”
Ken Kesey,
[ "relationships" ]
“The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.”
Ben Okri
[ "human", "life" ]
“We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste!”
Andre Aciman,
[ "aciman", "call-me-by-your-name", "italy", "love" ]
“I just want to be wonderful.”
Marilyn Monroe
[ "marilyn-monroe" ]
“An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. "Can they be brought together?" This is a practical question. We must get down to it. "I despise intelligence" really means: "I cannot bear my doubts.”
Albert Camus
[ "intellectuals", "intelligence", "philosophy", "scholars" ]
“I have accepted fear as part of life – specifically the fear of change... I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back....”
Erica Jong
[ "change", "courage", "fear", "life" ]
“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.”
Doris Lessing,
[ "conformity", "education", "feminism", "knowledge-power", "quip", "school" ]
“If I should have a daughter…“Instead of “Momâ€�, she’s gonna call me “Point B.â€� Because that way, she knows that no matter what happens, at least she can always find her way to me. And I’m going to paint the solar system on the back of her hands so that she has to learn the entire universe before she can say “Oh, I know that like the back of my hand.â€�She’s gonna learn that this life will hit you, hard, in the face, wait for you to get back up so it can kick you in the stomach. But getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air. There is hurt, here, that cannot be fixed by band-aids or poetry, so the first time she realizes that Wonder-woman isn’t coming, I’ll make sure she knows she doesn’t have to wear the cape all by herself. Because no matter how wide you stretch your fingers, your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal. Believe me, I’ve tried.And “Baby,â€� I’ll tell her “don’t keep your nose up in the air like that, I know that trick, you’re just smelling for smoke so you can follow the trail back to a burning house so you can find the boy who lost everything in the fire to see if you can save him. Or else, find the boy who lit the fire in the first place to see if you can change him.â€�But I know that she will anyway, so instead I’ll always keep an extra supply of chocolate and rain boats nearby, ‘cause there is no heartbreak that chocolate can’t fix. Okay, there’s a few heartbreaks chocolate can’t fix. But that’s what the rain boots are for, because rain will wash away everything if you let it.I want her to see the world through the underside of a glass bottom boat, to look through a magnifying glass at the galaxies that exist on the pin point of a human mind. Because that’s how my mom taught me. That there’ll be days like this, “There’ll be days like this my momma saidâ€� when you open your hands to catch and wind up with only blisters and bruises. When you step out of the phone booth and try to fly and the very people you wanna save are the ones standing on your cape. When your boots will fill with rain and you’ll be up to your knees in disappointment and those are the very days you have all the more reason to say “thank you,â€� ‘cause there is nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline no matter how many times it’s sent away.You will put the “windâ€� in win some lose some, you will put the “starâ€� in starting over and over, and no matter how many land mines erupt in a minute be sure your mind lands on the beauty of this funny place called life.And yes, on a scale from one to over-trusting I am pretty damn naive but I want her to know that this world is made out of sugar. It can crumble so easily but don’t be afraid to stick your tongue out and taste it.“Baby,â€� I’ll tell her “remember your mama is a worrier but your papa is a warrior and you are the girl with small hands and big eyes who never stops asking for more.â€�Remember that good things come in threes and so do bad things and always apologize when you’ve done something wrong but don’t you ever apologize for the way your eyes refuse to stop shining.Your voice is small but don’t ever stop singing and when they finally hand you heartbreak, slip hatred and war under your doorstep and hand you hand-outs on street corners of cynicism and defeat, you tell them that they really ought to meet your mother.”
Sarah Kay
[ "inspirational", "poem" ]
“Lord, what fools these mortals be!”
William Shakespeare,
[ "comedy", "elizabethan", "robin-goodfellow" ]
“If we listened to our intellect we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go in business because we'd be cynical: "It's gonna go wrong." Or "She's going to hurt me." Or,"I've had a couple of bad love affairs, so therefore . . ." Well, that's nonsense. You're going to miss life. You've got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down.”
Ray Bradbury
[ "inspirational" ]
“When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.”
John Irving,
[ "death", "grief", "loss" ]
“What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”
Jack Kerouac,
[ "adventure", "goodbye", "travel" ]
“I address you all tonight for who you truly are: wizards, mermaids, travelers, adventurers, and magicians. You are the true dreamers.”
Brian Selznick,
[ "dreamers", "magic", "mermaids", "travel", "wizard" ]
“Hang on, did you just call me Angel?" I asked."If I did?""I don't like it."He grinned. "It stays, Angel.”
Becca Fitzpatrick,
[ "angel", "becca-fitzpatrick", "hush", "nora-grey", "patch" ]