c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
WE CONTINUE TO DWELL AMONG THE LIVING AFTER WE DIE. WE LIVE ON IN MINDS, HEARTS AND LIPS.
— Kamil Ali, Profound Vers-A-Tales
By his [God's] help I will arise and address myself diligently to my appointed duty. If happiness in this world is not for me, I will endeavor to promote the welfare of those around me, and my reward shall be hereafter.
— Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey
It has been suggested that the color of an aura can reveal characteristics about the generating source.
— Mark Ireland, Messages from the Afterlife: A Bereaved Father's Journey in the World of Spirit Visitations, Psychic-Mediums, and Synchronicity
Through discussions, reading, contemplation, and practice I've come to recognize the importance of subtle feelings and symbols. By paying attention to subtle energy, typically in the form of thoughts and feelings, we began to tap into our inner capacity to commune with those we've loved and lost, as well as other streams of consciousness and information.
— Mark Ireland, Messages from the Afterlife: A Bereaved Father's Journey in the World of Spirit Visitations, Psychic-Mediums, and Synchronicity
We don’t see the life after life as it truly is, because in our eyes it conforms to our mechanics of nature.
— Scott Lynch, The Republic of Thieves
People can fall into habitual programmed patterns of thinking, underpinned by long-held beliefs and blind acceptance of conventional wisdom. Lying beneath such surface thoughts are mental cues that operate on the subconscious level, compelling people to act in certain ways, yielding conclusions that fit within their pre-existing biases. Many people are unaware that these processes are even occurring.
— Mark Ireland, Messages from the Afterlife: A Bereaved Father's Journey in the World of Spirit Visitations, Psychic-Mediums, and Synchronicity
Perhaps the day will come when Western science is able to confirm the existence of immaterial forces and realms. Compelling research in the field of parapsychology indirectly points to this possibility, yet most people in mainstream science can't bring themselves to consider the implications.
— Mark Ireland, Messages from the Afterlife: A Bereaved Father's Journey in the World of Spirit Visitations, Psychic-Mediums, and Synchronicity
Some contemporary mediums dislike the term 'psychic' because they feel it carries a negative connotation, leading people to associations with crystal balls, tea-leaf reading, fortune-telling, or other stereotypes.
— Mark Ireland, Messages from the Afterlife: A Bereaved Father's Journey in the World of Spirit Visitations, Psychic-Mediums, and Synchronicity
First, I have culled evidence that physical death is not the end of the road for any of us. I know this message is critical because I've seen people consumed by fear of death or suffering unbearable grief after losing a loved one. Some can draw into a shell, ceasing all efforts to reach their potential, or even give up on life.
— Mark Ireland, Messages from the Afterlife: A Bereaved Father's Journey in the World of Spirit Visitations, Psychic-Mediums, and Synchronicity
Reductionism argues that we can learn what 'makes things tick' by looking more closely at matter, examining the underlying units. There are at least two problems with this approach. First, reductionism assumes that only observable, material items are 'real,' even though the vacuum of space is known to contain vast amount of inaccessible, 'invisible' energy. Subatomic particles go in and out of observable 'existence,' and science does not know 'where' they go when they are not manifesting here. Second, this path of reasoning ignores a major quandary encountered in the realm of quantum physics. When examining matter more closely--diving down from the molecular level to the subatomic--a point is soon reached where there is virtually nothing present, at least not an obvious 'material something.
— Mark Ireland, Messages from the Afterlife: A Bereaved Father's Journey in the World of Spirit Visitations, Psychic-Mediums, and Synchronicity
For some, reassessing concepts about truth and reality can be a scary proposition.
— Mark Ireland, Messages from the Afterlife: A Bereaved Father's Journey in the World of Spirit Visitations, Psychic-Mediums, and Synchronicity
Many people profess a belief in the existence of a spiritual realm, often aligning with their religious training or background. (Recent surveys indicate that, on average, between 48 percent and 59 percent of Europeans claim to believe in an afterlife, while between 72 percent and 74 percent of people in the United States assert a belief in life after death.) But when confronted with the loss of a child, a spouse, or another deeply loved person, one may find that his or her belief set is deeply challenged, and some suffer a crisis of faith.
— Mark Ireland, Messages from the Afterlife: A Bereaved Father's Journey in the World of Spirit Visitations, Psychic-Mediums, and Synchronicity
In Western culture, the 'miracles' referenced in scripture seem to have been relegated to the past as if to imply that they were reserved exclusively for certain historical periods.
— Mark Ireland, Messages from the Afterlife: A Bereaved Father's Journey in the World of Spirit Visitations, Psychic-Mediums, and Synchronicity
Natural law has decreed it so. Isn't death as much a part of the flow as life? Why fight it? Because maybe the flow splashes into a bottomless pit past that blind turn.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Find What You Love and Let It Kill You
All three explanations—eternal life, reincarnation, and nothingness—are descriptions of the same reality.
— John K.  Brown
Oh, how crafty of religion, I cried out indignantly, to transplant rewards and punishments into a future life in order to comfort cowards and the enslaved and aggrieved, enabling them to bow their necks patiently before their masters, and to endure this earthly life without groaning (the only life of which we can be sure)!
— Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco
In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear to thinkof shutting. My mind when I was a boy of ten or eleven sent up its silent scream at the thought of future aeons -- at the thought of the cosmic party going on without me. The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise of the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
— John Updike, Self-Consciousness
There was no attack on religion because people were generally indifferent to religion. They were neither hot nor cold. They were the tepid, the materialistic, who hoped that by Sunday churchgoing they would be taking care of the afterlife, if there were an afterlife. Meanwhile they would get everything they could in this.
— Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist
The faith in an afterlife, however much our reason ridicules it, very modestly extends our faith that each moment of our consciousness will be followed by another - that a coherent matrix has been prepared for this precious self of ours. The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, of what we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.
— John Updike, Self-Consciousness
...the one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death.
— Socrates trans. G.M.A. Grube
The only satisfactory thing about death is that our knowledge about it is unsatisfactory.
— Raheel Farooq
I used to be terrified of death. My grandfather was terminal in the hospital across from my high school, yet I never visited him. That fact still haunts me to this day. Years later, my arms were around my grandmother as she struggled with her last breaths. I told her we were with her and everything was going to be okay. She died as I held her tightly and I felt her body lose life. It was the most peaceful moment I ever experienced, and I felt joy for her. It was an emotional, intellectual, and spiritual moment for me. I wasn’t afraid anymore.... One day years later I received the phone call every parent dreads. My daughter was in a serious automobile accident. As I raced to her I prepared myself for the news she had died. Once again, I felt an unexpected and profound emotion. She lived, but in the face of that horrifying time there was a strange overall calm. I realized, no matter what, everything was going to be okay. I remembered I wasn’t afraid anymore.
— John K.  Brown
The average human lifespan compared to the age of the universe is the same as comparing a blink of an eye to that human lifespan. Relatively speaking, short and long lifespans are the same. Both are non-existent compared to the infinite that’s ahead. Furthermore, we cannot change the past, and have no guarantees for the future. We are only in charge of the present. The present is nothing—and it is everything.
— John K.  Brown
When we were alive, they told us that when we died we'd go to heaven. And they said that heaven was a place of joy and glory and we would spend eternity in the company of saints and angels praising the Almighty, in a state of bliss. That's what they said. And that's what led some of us to give our lives, and others to spend years in solitary prayer, while all the joy of life was going to waste around us and we never knew. Because the land of the dead isn't a place of reward or a place of punishment, it is a place of nothing. The good come here as well as the wicked, and all of us languish in this gloom forever, with no hope of freedom, or joy, or sleep, or rest, or peace. But now this child has come offering us a way out and I'm going to follow her. Even if it means oblivion, friends, I'll welcome it, because it won't be nothing. We'll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we'll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we'll be glistening in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.
— Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass
...We die, we turn, we are reborn as we deserve to be reborn, based on our doings in this world." Will looked down at his bitten nails. "I will probably be reborn as a slug that someone salts.
— Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince
I suppose that now would be the time to ask for forgiveness for all the things I've done, but I'm sure my list would never be complete. I also don't believe that whatever comes after life depends on my correctly reciting a list of my transgressions...I don't believe that what comes after depends on anything I do at all.
— Veronica Roth, Insurgent
The chief problem about death, incidentally, is the fear that there may be no afterlife - a depressing thought, particularly for those who bothered to shave. Also, there is the fear that there is an afterlife but no one will know where it's being held. On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done as easily laying down.
— Woody Allen, Without Feathers
Reincarnation?”He shrugged. “I’ve never seen any evidence that it’s real. But I’ve never seen anything that disproves it either. I believe the afterlife is better than what we have here—and it would take something extraordinary to make someone willing to come back.
— Patricia Briggs, Hunting Ground
Death is the only serious preoccupation in life.
— Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we want another which will be eternal.
— Anatole France
People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn’t bare the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn’t bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn’t even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn’t bear not to.
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
We are medium-sized mammals who only prosper because we've developed a half-arsed ability to terraform the less suitable bits of the planet we evolved on, and we're conscious of our inevitable decay and death, and we can't live anywhere else. There is no invisible sky daddy to give us immortal life and a harp and wings when we die.
— Charles Stross, The Rapture of the Nerds: A tale of the singularity, posthumanity, and awkward social situations
And what if there are only spiders there, or something of that sort
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
The Angel of Death took the woman's frail hand. "Don't be afraid." she said. "Life is your past. Death, on the other hand, is your soul preparing for a new beginning. A brand new adventure, if you like." An excerpt from Paradox - Equilibrium. Book 4 in the Paradox series (release date 2013)
— Patti Roberts
Be patient, child!” said the Music. “But she will forget me.” “Do not worry, child. I am there. I shall not forget.”And she stared out at the planets and gentle stars and the galaxies and became forlorn for she had known a special love.“The Universe is so large, just look at it!” she cried. “Believe.” The Music sang.
— David Paul Kirkpatrick, The Address Of Happiness
The present life of man upon earth, O King, seems to me in comparison with that time which is unknown to us like the swift flight of a sparrow through the mead-hall where you sit at supper in winter, with your Ealdormen and thanes, while the fire blazes in the midst and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest, but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter to winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all.
— Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People
All have their worth and each contributes to the worth of the others.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
Even though human life may be the most precious thing on earth, we always behave as if there were something of higher value than human life.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Night Flight
He picked up one of Lorna's roses and set it in my lap. "Here." I picked it up and smelled it. He poked me in the shoulder. "See what I mean? Thorns don't stop you from sniffing. Or putting them in a vase on the kitchen table. You work around them.... Cause the rose is worth it... Think what you'd miss.
— Charles Martin, Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery
Two bubbles found they had rainbows on their curves. They flickered out saying: "It was worth being a bubble, just to have held that rainbow thirty seconds.
— Carl Sandburg
She could not admit but that he had remarkable qualities, sometimes she thought that there was even in him a strange and unattractive greatness; it was curious then that she could not love him, but loved still a man whose worthlessness was now so clear to her.
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil
...Erich Fromm wondered why most people did not become insane in the face of the existential contradiction between a symbolic self, that seems to give man infinite worth in a timeless scheme of things, and a body that is worth about 98¢.
— Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
But we have seen how brightly light shines in the dark, how sweetly music fills the quiet. All these years you have known only shadow and silence, and we have so much to show you. To sav
— Amie Kaufman, Their Fractured Light
Don't ever reject a smallwhen you can't take it all.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
You don’t have to stop fighting for others, you just have to remember to fight for yourself too.
— Liz  Newman
You’re looking for real love in a ‘right now’ culture. And, many people might mistake you for just a ‘right now’ person. But, don’t let that fool you. You deserve the real love, the forever love. It might not be ‘right now’, but it’ll be the right love. And, it’ll be worth the wait.
— Liz  Newman
A picture is worth a thousand words.......and a video is worth a million pictures.....
— Ankala Subbarao
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush......unless the bird has the flu!
— Ankala Subbarao
We feel our lives are worth living after we discover something worth dying for.
— Jeffrey Fry
A key that opens many locks is worth buying. A lock that can be opened with many keys isn't.
— Nabil N. Jamal
You are worth infinitely more than you could possibly imagine.
— Seth Adam Smith, Rip Van Winkle and the Pumpkin Lantern
In the end it was worth it.
— Anthony T. Hincks
Even years from now, once I've stopped drinking, I will never stop trusting extremes. I will always believe that anything worth having is worth having in excess. The good things are worth hoarding until you have a cookie-fat ass, sex-aching loins, joy that fires through you like popping popcorn, or love, the weakness at the sight of some boy who makes your chest ache like indigestion. If it's good for you, it ought to be good for you in any amount, and you should track down every available bit of it. And if it's toxic, if it turns your liver into a hard little rock of scar tissue, or curls your memory at the edges like something burned in a fire, or makes your stomach flop, or your mind ache, or your personality contorted, you shouldn't buy into the bullshit about temperance.
— Koren Zailckas, Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood
Self-worth and net worth are not the same.
— Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here for?
Godliness should promote the posture worth of exercise and fitness
— Sunday Adelaja
You once told me some lives are worth more than others. How many deaths before the scales tipout of our favor?”She had no answer.
— Kiersten White, And I Darken
The biggest battles you face in love are the battle to know your worth and the battle to know when your boundaries need to be protected.
— Shannon L. Alder
When I wait for only half a second,it all makes worth waiting for,Petra Cecilia Maria HermansWorldpoet 546September 1, 2016
— Petra Hermans
We are constantly on battlefield, fighting for love, life, and anything that matters to us. Fighting for what we believe is worth fighting for.
— Aireen C. Pontillo
Don't ask whether it's going to be easy. Ask whether it's going to be worth it.
— Michael Josephson
Who said that the sailing is going to be smooth?Though, isn't it worth when you're someone's number one?
— Vaishnavi Vatsyayan
My uncle always said that it was the sword in a man's hand that determined his worth, not the one between his legs.
— George R.R. Martin, A Feast for Crows
What is worth pursuing is worth staying on course for.
— Steven Redhead, Life Is Simply A Game
I’ve always felt a person’s worth is equal to how much of themselves they willingly invest into something they know no one else sees value in.
— Rebecca Timberlake, Independent Will
I understand the logic behind removing toxic people from one’s life. But I also understand that many who are “toxic” are acting out of a painful past… and that to marginalize someone who’s not known much love is to validate that they don’t matter. To live in the world we desire – a world of good people, safe places – requires less fence-building and more heart-building. It requires valuing the worth of all people and loving the hurt as much as possible.
— Renata Bowers
There is worth everywhere and in everything we see.
— Sunday Adelaja
Don't Wait on Someone to Love You, Love Yourself...Embrace your Worth
— Travess
I am ready for love, but I am not a seeker of it. My truth is; the more I love who I am, the more I will attract my perfect mirror of love to meet me halfway.
— Nikki Rowe
Never stop. Never stop fighting. Never stop dreaming. And don't be afraid of wearing your heart on your sleeve - in declaring the films that you love, the films that you want to make, the life that you've had, and the lives you can help reflect in cinema. For myself, for a long time... maybe I felt inauthentic or something, I felt like my voice wasn't worth hearing, and I think everyone's voice is worth hearing. So if you've got something to say, say it from the rooftops.
— Tom Hiddleston
Either write something worth reading, or do something worth writing.
— John Green
Your enormous soul had so many choices of who it could show up as. It chose you.
— Jacob Nordby
If you cherish something enough", she told me, "it doesn't matter how old or worn or useless it's become; your caring for it immediately raises its value in somebody else's eyes. It's just like rehab- a body's got to believe in their own worth before anybody can start fixing them, but most people need someone to believe in them before they can start believing in themselves.
— Charles de Lint, Waifs and Strays
Just because it won't last doesn't mean it isn't worth something.
— Nina de Gramont
Everything worth having comes with a trial worth withstanding
— Debalina Haldar, The Female Ward
I Would Force Myself Edge Of The Life,To Know Its Really Worthy Being Alive.
— venky Naidu
Living life without hardships is simply not living at all.
— Chris Imholte
My worth to God publicly is measured by what I really am in my private life.” Oswald Chambers
— Oswald Chambers
Whenever you appreciate a certain thing you become conscious of its real quality, and whenever you become conscious of the quality of anything, you begin to develop that quality in yourself. When we appreciate the worth of a person, we tend to impress the idea of that worth in our own minds, and thereby cause the same effect to be produced, in a measure, in ourselves.
— Christian D. Larson, Your Forces and How to Use Them
If people want something to be wrong about you— they are going to make things wrong about you. That is why it is my belief to never try and prove anything to anyone. Real diamonds belong to people who know how to spot a real diamond
—  they don’t belong to people who need to be convinced that they are real diamonds. It’s the idiots who need to be convinced of something that they cannot already see.
Sometimes I didn’t think the world was worth it.Saving.Sometimes I didn’t think I was worth it either.
— Kami Garcia, Beautiful Redemption
I felt the water rising enough to touch my Vans. She was worth ruing a pair of shoes over.
— Nyrae Dawn, What a Boy Wants
To save and maintain the beauty of nature
—  there will be a few people worth to be left alive.
Toni, I barely know you, but I canna see anything remotely unworthy about you. any man would be blessed and honored to receive yer love." (Ian MacPhie)
— Kerrelyn Sparks, All I Want for Christmas is a Vampire
I can't say when you'll get love or how you'll find it or even promise you that you will. I can only say you are worthy of it and that it's never too much to ask for it and that it's not crazy to fear you'll never have it again, even though your fears are probably wrong. Love is our essential nutrient. Without it, life has little meaning. It's the best thing we have to give and the most valuable thing we receive. It's worthy of all the hullabaloo.
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
I've learned, that not all worth is measured by price. I've found so many gems that didn't cost me much!
— C. JoyBell C.
Passion is passion. It's the excitement between the tedious spaces, and it doesn't matter where it's directed...It can be coins or sports or politics or horses or music or faith...the saddest people I've ever met in life are the ones who don't care deeply about anything at all.
— Nicholas Sparks, Dear John
I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., The Sirens of Titan
Women should be respected as well! Generally speaking, men are held in great esteem in all parts of the world, so why shouldn't women have their share? Soldiers and war heroes are honored and commemorated, explorers are granted immortal fame, martyrs are revered, but how many people look upon women too as soldiers?...Women, who struggle and suffer pain to ensure the continuation of the human race, make much tougher and more courageous soldiers than all those big-mouthed freedom-fighting heroes put together!
— Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
That's the big mistake a lot of people make when they wonder how soldiers can put their lives on the line day after day or how they can fight for something they may not believe in. Not everyone does. I've worked with soldiers on all sides of the political spectrum; I've met some who hated the army and others who wanted to make it a career. I've met geniuses and idiots, but when all is said and done,we do what we do for one another. For friendship. Not for country, not for patriotism, not because we're programmed killing machines, but because of the guy next to you. You fight for your friend, to keep him alive, and he fights for you, and everything about the army is built on this simple premise. 
— Nicholas Sparks, Dear John
He saw it in her eyes. The anguish, the frustration. The terrible nothing that clawed inside and sought to smother her. She knew. It was there, inside. She had been br
— Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance
A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.
— Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica
I just looked at the pattern of my life, decided I didn't like it, and changed.
— David Sedaris, Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays
The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!
— Larry Niven
I love children, especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away.
— Nancy Mitford
People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.
— Saul Bellow, Conversations with Saul Bellow
I'm not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare -- or, if not, it's some equally brainy lad -- who says that it's always just when a chappie is feeling particularly top-hole, and more than usually braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with a bit of lead piping.
— P.G. Wodehouse, My Man Jeeves
It's hard to be nice when the rest of the world is so mean.
— Sarah Dessen
A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark
History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.
— Alexis de Tocqueville
...just remember, darling, it is pain that changes our lives.
— Steve Martin, Shopgirl
At that moment, he was meaner and madder than he’d ever been, but mainly at himself, which is the worst kind of mean and mad to be, because the only thing to do about it is to take it out on someone else.
— Victoria Forester
Why'd you want to sing about sad things?" Candy had asked him."Because any fool can be happy," he'd said to her."It takes a man with real heart"—he'd made a fist and laid it against his chest—"to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.
— Clive Barker, Days of Magic, Nights of War
If you believe something will make the world better, then it's always worth a try, even if you fail.
— Sierra St. James, Masquerade
The world is not magic — and that’s the most magical thing about it.
— Sean Carroll
Louie found the raft offered an unlikely intellectual refuge. He had never recognized how noisy the civilized world was. Here, drifting in almost total silence, with no scents other than the singed odor of the raft, no flavors on his tongue, nothing moving but the slow porcession of shark fins, every vista empty save water and sky, his time unvaried and unbroken, his mind was freed of an encumbrance that civilization had imposed on it. In his head, he could roam anywhere, and he found that his mind was quick and clear, his imagination unfettered and supple. He could stay with a thought for hours, turning it about.
— Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption
Your pain made you strong. It made youpassionate and alive. It made us both who we are. -Cade
— Cora Carmack, Faking It
She was still there inside me now, just as she always was: a life put on hold, a memory I didn't know how to handle.
— Banana Yoshimoto, Hardboiled & Hard Luck
A bit of theory as we settle down for lunch: the waiter's treatment of Kitty is actually a kind of sandwich, with the bottom bread being the bored and slightly effete way he normally acts with customers, the middle being the crazed and abnormal way he feels around this famous nineteen-year-old girl, and the top bread being his attempt to contain and conceal this alien middle layer with some mode of behavior that at least approximates the bottom layer of boredom and effeteness that is his norm.
— Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
Power is a trick. It lies where we believe it lies.
— George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings
What is reason given me for, if I am not to use it to avoid bringing unhappy beings into the world!
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Sadly, schools deal in the sale and exchange of knowledge, not wisdom." ~ "The Hole
— Guy Burt
‎The stars are like the trees. Each one reminds us that we should still the greed in our heart. Each tree, each star, teaches us the ways of peace.
— Alfred A. Yuson
People lose sight of their dreams, only to hold tight their fears.
— Gustave Geyer
I care little for titles assigned to men, rather I care about the spirit of men.
— Paul erik Van Schaick
As an improviser, I always find it jarring when I meet someone in real life whose first answer is no. “No, we can’t do that.” “No, that’s not in the budget.” “No, I will not hold your hand for a dollar.” What kind of way is that to live?
— Tina Fey, Bossypants
from the beginning, through themiddle years and up to theend:too bad, too bad, too bad.
— Charles Bukowski, Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way
Considering how much we are all given to discuss the characters of others, and discuss them often not in the strictest spirit of charity, it is singular how little we are inclined to think that others can speak ill-naturedly of us, and how angry and hurt we are when proof reaches us that they have done so. It is hardly too much to say that we all of us occasionally speak of our dearest friends in a manner in which those dearest friends would very little like to hear themselves mentioned, and that we nevertheless expect that our dearest friends shall invariably speak of us as though they were blind to all our faults, but keenly alive to every shade of our virtues.
— Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers
...there occurred to me the simple epitaph which, when I am no more, I intend to have inscribed on my tombstone. It was this:"He was a man who acted from the best motives. There is one born every minute.
— P.G. Wodehouse, My Man Jeeves
I reckon if you care for someone and you can't have their love, you can either be a spiteful bastard about it or you can try your damnedest to make sure they're going to find some happiness in the world.
— Lindsay Buroker, Encrypted
An empty man is full of himself.
— Edward Abbey
The more a man judges, the less he loves
— Honoré de Balzac
Later in life, I learnt that many things one may require have to be weighed against one's dignity, which can be an insuperable barrier against advancement in almost any direction. However, in those days, choice between dignity and unsatisfied curiosity was less clear to me as a cruel decision that had to be made.
— Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement
The 19thc hatred of Realism is Caliban's enraged reaction to seeing his own face in the mirror. The 19thc rejection of Romanticism is Caliban's fury at not seeing his face reflected in the mirror.
— Oscar Wilde
To broaden one's prospective is to push back the swirling winds of ignorance.
— Joel T. McGrath
I don't write to be understood
—  I write to understand.
What are the years from twenty to forty? Fettered and bound by personal and emotional relationships. That's bound to be. That's living. But later there's a new stage. You can think, observe life, discover something about other people and the truth about yourself. Life becomes real--significant. You see it as a whole. Not just one scene--the scene you, as an actor, are playing. No man or woman is actually himself (or herself) till after forty-five. That's when individuality has a chance.
— Agatha Christie, The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories
Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.'That's some catch, that Catch-22,' he observed.'It's the best there is,' Doc Daneeka agreed.Yossarian saw it clearly in all its spinning reasonableness. There was an elliptical precision about its perfect pairs of parts that was graceful and shocking, like good modern art, and at times Yossarian wasn't quite sure he saw it at all, just the way he was never quite sure about good modern art or about the flies Orr saw in Appleby's eyes. he had Orr's word to take for Appleby's eyes.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
There is something cathartic about what has happened to me during this stay in hospital. I’ve heard others say that coming face to face with your own mortality can have this effect. You look with harsh, savage eyes at the life you are living and resolve to make the best of the time you have left, if you can be allowed the luxury of a few extra years to fulfill your plans. Around me, I see an urgency creep into the lives of friends once they have an AIDS diagnosis: they rush out and try to complete as many life projects as they can, before their health deteriorates.
— David Menadue, Positive: Living with HIV/AIDS
Adversity is only yet another means to remind us of 'How Truly Awsome We All Are'!
— W.O. Wainwright, The Adventures of Joey Zee
He realized that he agonized over everything all the time, and he admitted that part of the problem in the Carter game had been his own lack of belief in his abilities. He knew the reason why he was like this, that it was the price he paid for carefully watching out for himself ever since he had been a little boy. 'I've never taken a chance in life,' he said. 'I need to run in front of traffic bucknacked and get arrested.
— H.G. Bissinger
There ain't half been some clever bastards
— Ian Dury
Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, it is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy that we can scarcely mark their progress.
— Charles Dickens
...yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when once love comes to bend them.
— Herman Melville
A diamond is just a rock. A really expensive rock.
— C.V. Hunt, Legacy
Such is the lot of the narcissist's child, to inherit her parent's umbrage over the world's indifference.
— Ann Packer, Swim Back to Me
She herself had grown up without any one spot of earth being dearer than another: there was no center of earth pieties, of grave endearing traditions, to which her heart could revert and from which it could draw strength for itself and tenderness for others.
— Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
The actor playing Lee got really irritated. He tried to escape by turning, running, or twisting and talking or yelling above the voice of the illness, but the illness didn't sit quietly.
— Pete Earley, Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness
People don't usually think about the meaning of the words they say. It seems to them that words convey truth. That when someone hears the word "red" he will think of a ripe raspberry and not a pool of blood. That the word "love" will evoke Shakespeare's sonnets and not the erotic films of Playboy. And they find themselves baffled when the word they've spoken doesn't evoke the right response.
— Sergei Lukyanenko, Day Watch
The main thing we can learn from The Lord of the Rings is that we who are in a position to save the world (by which I mean all of us) do so primarily to save our friends.
— Mark Eddy Smith, Tolkien's Ordinary Virtues: Exploring the Spiritual Themes of the Lord of the Rings
When I venture to point out the unfairness of this, I am reminded of the second item on my list. Apparently the only acceptable destiny for a young female mem​b​er of the house of Windsor is to marry into another of the royal houses that still seem to litter Europe, even though there are precious few reigning monarchs these days. it seems that even a very minor Windsor like myself is a desirable commodity for those wishing a tenuous alliance with Britain at this unsettled time. I am constantly being reminded that is is my duty to make a good match with some half-lunatic, buck-toothed, chinless, spinele​s​s​​​, and utterly awful European royal, thus cementing ties with a potential enemy. My cousin Alex did this, poor thing. I have learned from her tragic example.
— Rhys Bowen, Her Royal Spyness
We are entrusting thousands of strangers with our innermost thoughts and feelings, and then we're expecting them to be careful with those feelings. As much as we want it to be, the Internet is not a safe space. It is not a place where we can lay our burdens down and heal. Why? Because there are too many people there who do not give an ounce of a shit about our well-being. They do not deserve our rawness, and they will not treat it with care.
— Luvvie Ajayi, I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual
I am not interested in what is pleasant. I'm interested in what's useful.
— Jessica Cluess, A Shadow Bright and Burning
The trouble with Lucious," he said, putting his feet up on the desk after this cousin has gone," is that he thinks politics is a fight for justice. Politics is a profession.
— Robert Harris, Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome
The most terrifying aspect of human health is our refusal to take steps to help ourselves and the fact that we are so often responsible for our own demise through lack of positive action,
— Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"
And now a hundred subjective years had passed in those hundred objective hours and he could no longer clearly visualize the university at all or the life of sad frustration he had been leading there toward the end.
— Isaac Asimov, Fantastic Voyage II:  Destination Brain
You dare quarrel with me Doerwyne?She wrinkled her nose. "It's not quarreling to express an opinion'""Women don't have opinions.""Then I must be a man, because I have plenty.
— Georgia Fox, The Virgin Proxy
The constant talking didn't bother her, for cats use their voices to say 'here I am, where are you?' and this seemed to be the primary intention of most human conversation.
— Kij Johnson, Fudoki
Friendship Quote of the Week:"Friendship is the only cement that will ever hold the world together"…Woodrow Wilson, U.S. President and World Leader
— Woodrow Wilson
Never place someone so high on a pedestal that if they should fall... you get crushed.
— Mark W. Boyer
I have a feeling that you're riding for some terrible, terrible fall. But I don't honestly know what kind. This fall I think you're riding for—it's a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit the bottom. He just keeps falling. The whole arrangement's designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn't supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn't supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started...
— J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
I fail to remember, the mind has fuses.
— B.S. Johnson, The Unfortunates
We live in a 'two-hundred-year present'.
— John Paul Lederach
Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young philosopher to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient "interest" in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so helplessly lost to all honourable ambition, as that in their secret souls they would rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain; those young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are short-sighted; what us, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have left their opera glasses at home.
— Herman Melville
She had married him in order to be safe from the chaos. He had married her, she now understood, for the same reason. They were the last two people on earth who could make anyone safe from anything.
— Kate Atkinson
You're not seeing what you're looking at.
— Brenda Bolieu
Everything's impossible until somebody does it.
— Bruce Wayne, Startup Quote
Strange... The more I befriend my solitude, the more people desire my company.
— Frank F. Gelat
The quest for power is strange in that, once the quest has begun, the destination always seems to shift ever further away. What power one has is never enough; whatever happiness one had turns to bitterness.
— Sonya Hartnett, The Children of the King
In the quest for power, truth is always the first thing left behind.
— Sonya Hartnett, The Children of the King
The north of peacebuilding is best articulated as finding our way toward becoming and being local and global human communities characterized by respect, dignity, fairness, cooperation, and the nonviolent resolution of conflict. To understand this north, to read such a compass, requires that we recognize and develop our moral imagination far more intentionally.
— John Paul Lederach, The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace
We need a politician who hates politics.
— Will Adolphy
We must endure, Alyosha." That was the only thing she could say in response to my accounts of the ugliness and dreariness of life, of the suffering of the people — of everything against which I protested so vehemently. I was not made for endurance, and if occasionally I exhibited this virtue of cattle, wood, and stone, I did so only to test myself, to try my strength and my stability. Sometimes young people, in the foolishness of immaturity, or in envy of the strength of their elders, strive, even successfully, to lift weights that overtax their bones and muscles; in their vanity they attempt to cross themselves with two-pood weights, like mature athletes. I too did this, in the literal and figurative sense, physically and spiritually, and only good fortune kept me from injuring myself fatally or crippling myself for life.For nothing cripples a person so dreadfully as endurance, as a humble submission to the forces of circumstance.
— Maxim Gorky
The map is not the territory," Snicket's chaperon advises him. "That's an expression which means the world does not match the picture in our heads.
— Lemony Snicket, Who Could That Be at This Hour?
Life itself is the most wonderful fairytale.
— Hans Christian Andersen
Change happens internally. That's where books go too. Therein lies the power.
— Nina Joshi Ramsey, Lifewalla
A final dirty joke.Another human punch line
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
Deep down I think I may be just like everyone else. And do you know what, Harry?""No sir.""That bothers me.
— Joe R. Lansdale, The Bottoms
There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil - a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome.
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
When you deserved it, even the mail could rape you.
— Wally Lamb, She's Come Undone
It’s funny, isn’t it?” he said, something odd in his voice. “It’s funny how some people show they love people with dramatic proclamations and huge displays and romantic gestures…but for some people, it’s in the small things. Like the small things you do for him.
— Cole McCade, Zero Day Exploit
Ugliness is in a way superior to beauty because it lasts.
— Serge Gainsbourg
The world will burn for a hundred years. Fire will consume the things we made from wood and plastic and rubber and cloth, then water and wind and time will chew the stone and steel into dust. How baffling it is that we imagined cities incinerated by alien bombs and death rays when all they needed was Mother Nature and time.
— Rick Yancey
Interest makes some people blind and others quick-sighted.
— Francis Beaumont
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions, their reasons are always different.
— George Santayana
In any honest analysis, change is the basis of fear, the idea of something new, of some paradigm that is unfamiliar, that is beyond our experiences so completely that we cannot even truly predict where is will lead us.
— R.A. Salvatore, The Orc King
He tried to be a good man, to do the right things, to make the world a little better than it had been before he had put his stamp upon it. You could be generous with the love you gave, with the care you took with others. You could follow all the command- ments that made sense to you and still the world could sideswipe you. There was no cause and effect. There was no karma. The truth was that he wasn't so sure he understood how the world worked anymore.
— Caroline Leavitt, Pictures of You
In any honest analysis, change is the basis of fear, the idea of something new, of some paradigm that is unfamiliar, that is beyond our experiences so competent that we cannot even truly predict where is will lead us.
— R.A. Salvatore
We are God's middle children, according to Tyler Durden, with no special place in history and no special attention.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
Remember: In poetry, each word is like a loaded gun; very heavy, and full of intent
— Amber Drappier
By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail".
— Various
He twirled a finger, the universal symbol for roll down your window -- universal despite the fact that no one had manually rolled down a window in twenty years.
— Daryl Gregory, Afterparty
Honor is kind of what you get when you weaponize manners ...
— Jasper Fforde
Silence is a chameleon that is colored by its surrounding circumstances
— Alien Cactus's Professor
Lowell’s best friend was the heroically moustached art director of a tobacco magazine that published in the same building where Lowell worked at plumbing. His name was Harry Balmer, and despite the evidence of his moustache he was nervous, compulsive, and wracked with small fears. He looked his best from across a wide room; the closer you got to him, the more he seemed to fall apart into a mass of twitches and gnawed finernails and the clearer it became that this big, smart-looking moustache was a kind of bush he was trying to hide behind.
— L.J. Davis
Experiences teaches us that to love is not to gaze at one another but to gaze together in the same direction.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars
sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in but what was worn and hackneyed out of all sense and meaning
— Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
Those who have never seen themselves surrounded on all sides by the sea can never possess an idea of the world, and of their relation to it.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Sometimes one is guided by what they say of themselves, and very frequently by what other people say of them, without giving oneself time to deliberate and judge
— Jane Austen
Shyness is only the effect of a sense of inferiority in some way or other. If I could persuade myself that my manners were perfectly easy and graceful, I should not be shy
— Jane Austen
It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all.
— Andrei Tarkovsky
A loner by nature and an introvert... i am a twinkling star, burning bright amidst a cloudless night. As such, i tend to fade in and out of people's lives. This aspect of me is often misunderstood as rejection or a lack of love and caring. In reality, the only way i can survive as an introvert, is to drop from the sky, from time-to-time, recharging within the energizing landscape of my inner-universe. To love me, is to let me me have the space i need to illuminate the sky. I can't be taken hostage or held captive. Inner-light is what gives my star its twinkle.
— Jaeda DeWalt
You want what you can’t have. Again, is it worth it? Does it hurt your heart or does it hurt your balls?”~ grandpa RayExcerpt From: Boheme, Kade. “Trouble & the Wallflower" Kade Boehme, 2014-03-03T20:38:08+00:00. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.
— Kade Boehme, Trouble & the Wallflower