c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Then the dwarves forgot their joy and their confident boasts of a moment before and cowered down in fright. Smaug was still to be reckoned with. It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
I’m not sure how old I was when I first tried looking in the mirror and telling myself, with a shiver of pride and a warning prickle of something like fear, ‘I am the most powerful person in the world.’ In a way, it was true. My hands and mind could do things no one else’s could, but I was too young then to understand that some power—the kind that really matters—comes from other people. And what good is being faster, or stronger, or smarter than everyone else when it leaves you all alone?
— M.L. Wang, Theonite: Planet Adyn
She got up and he saw the skin of her thigh for a moment above the artificial silk, and a prick of sexual desire disturbed him like a sickness. That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape––anywhere––for anyone? It was worth murdering a world.
— Graham Greene, Brighton Rock
Don’t trust your fears. They’re unfounded.
— Josh Langley, Turning Inside Out - what if everything we've been taught about life is wrong?
A fear is a reaction to a specific danger, to which the individual can make a specific adjustment. But what characterizes anxiety is the feeling of diffuseness and uncertainty and the experience of helplessness toward the threat.
— Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety
The Christian who loves his Master needs not fear any longer for himself. For it is then completely irrational, as it is written thus: 'Perfect love casts out fear.' However, it is very much rational for one to instead fear for the enemies of God.
— Criss Jami
Without risk I have no fear, without any fear - what's the point, because I have no opportunity for success.(Gavin Kaysen)
— Chris Hill
Fear is like an illusion of a dangerous wall between you and your goal.
— Miao Potirutch
Sir Edward Grey echoed this: More than one true thing may be said about the causes of the war, but the statement that comprises most truth is that militarism and the armaments inseparable from it made war inevitable. Armaments were intended to produce a sense of security in each nation – that was the justification put forward in defence of them. What they really did was to produce fear in everybody.
— Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
Everything started to move in slow motion. A vehicle was coming up the hill in the opposite direction, facing us but in its own lane. With vehicles parked on both sides of the road, this meant that there was just a narrow passage area for both vehicles to pass through. However, he had yet to reduce his speed, and now I knew which car he was going to hit. I was frozen stiff with fear in the front passenger seat, as I helplessly watched him slam into the back of a parked car. I was not wearing a seat belt, so upon impact my head crashed into the windshield. I was then slammed back into my seat, but with such force that everything went black.
— Drexel Deal, The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father
You face an audience and prepare to speak. Fear will be there, if you're alive. There is, of course, no shortage of feeling up there. It is an extreme act, unusual, testing you in unparalleled ways. It speaks to the core of who you are, and why you do what you do. These challenges, they exist in life and become acute on stage.
— Richard Maxwell, Theater for Beginners
And then things would be fine. Then I'd be fine.
— Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury
Destroy thefear in youbefore thefear destroysthe lifebefore you.
— Robert M. Drake, Black Butterfly
Being one’s true and honest self can often be dangerous; and poetry should always be a place where, if only between the pages, that danger and energy and fear and excitement and love can fizz and spark without ever threatening to burn something down.
— Andrew McMillan
Some people are still alive only because they find being dead more boring than being alive.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
In the beginning the queen had been a courageous and fair-minded princess very much liked by all, but unfortunately she grew up and became a frightened adult, as adults tend to be. She started loving efficiency and avoiding conflict. As adults do.
— Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
I don't know any homophobic people. That suggests fear.The people I know who hate gay folks are:illiterate, nescient, uneducated, uninstructed, unlearned, unschooled, untaught, backward, benighted, primitive, unenlightened, blockheaded, dense, doltish, hebetudinous, obtuse, stupid, thickheaded, thick-wittedBut not homophobic.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
He screams like a girl if he has to watch a horror movie." Caleb"Hey!" Nick"Well, you do. I Tried to watch Child's Play and you ran off to hide during the opening credits. And then he had to go sleep with his mom in her bed for three days because he was so scared." Caleb"Dude! You promised me you weren't going to tell anyone about that." Nick
— Sherrilyn Kenyon, Invision
Disappointment gives you Fear.Credence gives you Strength.
— Mohith Agadi
And so we continued to live in fear, hoping that we would not get caught. Fear had become our constant companion at this dreadful Lashkar-e-Taiba camp.
— Vivek Pereira, Indians in Pakistan
Was it possible that the emotion of love had somehow made me more susceptible to fear? Does the noble emotion of love make us start valuing our own lives and the lives of our loved ones more so that the feeling of fear creeps into our mindset?
— Vivek Pereira, Indians in Pakistan
And that someone would pay. Revenge is a cold bedfellow, Diana had said, but Emma didn't believe that. Revenge would let her think about her parents without a cold knot forming in her stomach. She would be able to dream without seeing their drowned faces and hearing their voices cry out for her help.
— Cassandra Clare, Lady Midnight
Our personal fears and emotions are at times stronger than public danger. By keeping them secret, we allow them to remain malignant. You need to be able to articulate something if you want it to go away, and to do that, you must acknowledge that it exists.
— Azar Nafisi, Things I've Been Silent About: Memories
There was no wind which could have swept my thoughts away from my bositerous heart; not that day, not this day and not any other day
— Pushpa Rana, Just the Way I Feel
What you seem to forget is that I'm not one of the embodiments of evil. I'm one of the embodiments of fear. That means I know what makes evil quake in the light of the sun.
— Emily Kirby, The Silver Codex
not all feeling of butterflies in the tummy means love, it might sometimes mean lust, fear, hunger e.t.c
— Jesustibab
Fear walks through the City, fear without name, without shape. All men feel it and none dare to speak.
— Ayn Rand
Perhaps living in fear can drive all devils out of a person.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
Fear in the absence of certainty can inspire men to do unimaginable things.
— James Morris Robinson, Genesis: A New World Order
Be fearless. Be bold. Be Magic.
— Eric  Smith
What is fear?" she breathed. 'Fear is nothing. Fear is illusion. Pass through its fire. Truth lies at its core. What it Truth?" She stood up, feeling calmer and glared up at the sinking sun. "I am Truth," she whispered fiercely.
— J.D. Lakey, Black Bead
People were always ready to yield theirwills, to worship the hero, because they were not given a chancefor developing initiative, stability, and independence, said the greatnineteenth-century Russian sociologist Nikolai Mikhailovsky
— Ernest Becker
The thing stank of unnamed yearnings, unfulfilled wishes, and a hunger so deep it make her feel hollow inside.
— J.D. Lakey, Black Bead
She got a sense that their time together was valuable, as though she needed to hold on to every minute as if it were their last. He was too good to be true, every moment spent with him magical, so much so that she presumed this couldn’t last forever. None of her good feelings had lasted forever, none of the people who lightened her life managed to stay. Going by her previous luck, from pure fear of not wanting to lose something so special, she was just waiting for the day he would leave. Whoever he was, he was healing her, he was teaching her to smile, teaching her to laugh, and she wondered what she could teach him.
— Cecelia Ahern
To fear man's judgment more than God's judgment is to fear man more than God.
— Criss Jami
On the one hand you had people constantly fighting Hell; on the other, you had people constantly fighting Hell on earth.
— Criss Jami
When you get shy, you’re simply thinking of yourself. Stop it. Step out of yourself.
— Kamand Kojouri
I didn't need his criticism. I carried enough guilt on my own. I had done everything wrong. I had the highest marks in school but couldn't master common sense.
— Ruta Sepetys, Salt to the Sea
Do not be afraid of that which should be afraid of you
— Constance Friday
I stood in bars, clothed but naked, looking from their eyes to my feet and back again. Still there was the longing to contend with: the heavy, bloody, chemical urge to consume another body and spit out its bones in a new child. How do you make a stranger so intimate when they could so easily destroy you?
— Nadifa Mohamed, Reader, I Married Him: Stories Inspired by Jane Eyre
A few generations living and dying without a sky, and enclosed spaces lost the atavistic terror of premature burial.
— James S.A. Corey, Cibola Burn
Fear least have power! The power of fear lies in the power of our fears. Without the power of our fears, fear is least empowered!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
I watched the sky as it turned from silver to grey to the colour of rain. Even the clouds tried to look the other way.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
In the beginning of a movie, they don't tell you what's going to happen. You just have to wait and go on the adventure with them
— Katie Douglas
They found records and video-cassettes at their place, a deck of cards, a chess set. In other words, everything that's banned.
— Marjane Satrapi, The Complete Persepolis
If school is about postponing the day you have to stand up in front of the world and put yourself at risk, the resistance would like to stay there forever.
— Seth Godin, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
The fear of losing anything is the inability to prepare for the best.
— Michael Bassey Johnson, Master of Maxims
Because fear called her by her name. (Her own name, not fear’s name. Fear doesn’t have a name; it’s just the steady beat underneath a smile.)
— Luisa Valenzuela, Dark Desires and the Others
He began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark. In the Creation of Ea, which is the oldest song, it is said, 'Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
Do not be afraid of what should be afraid of you
— Constance Friday
There, an engaging tour guide told jokes and made witty quips in between sensationalized and brutal stories of inmates "getting what they deserved" because, as she put it, "if you gonna act like an animal, you gonna get treated like one." (We know, thanks to Goffman and pretty much every behavior study out there, that it often works the other way around.)
— Margee Kerr
In the artifacts that are conscious, memories of vanished lives still flicker. Tissues that were changed without dying hold the moment that a boy heard his sister was leaving home. They hold multiplication tables. They hold images of sexuality and violence and beauty. They hold the memories of flesh that no longer exists. They hold metaphors: mitochondria, starfish, Hitler’s-brain-in-a-jar, hell realm. They dream. Structures that were neurons twitch and loop and burn and dream. Images and words and pain and fear, endless.
— James S.A. Corey, Cibola Burn
Hanging conversations,uncertain observations,incomplete imaginations.Unsent text messages,unreplied mails,undecided calls,unattended places.Unsettled pledges,distant searches.Some underutilized wages,some unseen dreams,sitting on dried leaves,believing the unbelieved…bidding adieu,to the accepted,how much she wanted todo,what was,detested!
— Jasleen Kaur Gumber, Ginger and Honey: An unusual free verse poetry collection
Do what you will. I do not fear death.
— Elizabeth Carlton, The Royal Rogue
Mum was determinate to crush my spirit and put a stop to my behavior once and for all and she beat me up so violently, so often, that I finally understood I must never question her or so much as look at her directly again.
— Joe Peters
When you're little you believe whatever your mother tells you, so I assumed it must be true, that I must be inferior to the others in some way.
— Joe Peters, Cry Silent Tears: The Heartbreaking Survival Story of a Small Mute Boy Who Overcame Unbearable Suffering and Found His Voice Again
No matter how crazy or hard a man acts sometimes he has a soft side.
— Auliq-Ice
Change happens, when we replace fear with hope.
— Sukant Ratnakar, Open the Windows
Because of self-doubt, the fear of failure, or laziness, most people usually bite off way less than they can chew.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The continuation of man’s life is more attributable to his fear of death than it is to his desire to live. As a matter of fact, in countless cases, it is attributable to only the former.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Laws of silence don’t work…. When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don’t work, it’s just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn’t put it out.
— Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
The thing is--fear can't hurt you any more than a dream.
— William Golding, Lord of the Flies
Fear triggers need, need powers sincerity. Sincerity is the required element.
— Terry Goodkind, The First Confessor
Am I doomed? Flashing darkness is pretty much the same as flashing light really. Fear isn’t at all the same as courage but after a certain point perhaps being afraid of everything is the same as being afraid of nothing.
— Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary
instead of venting my anger, which is really just hurt dressed up for a night on the town, I ask if anyone needs a drink.
— Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!
Fear is more pain than is the pain it fears
— L.M. Montgomery
They are very good odds. And I know that my scientific brain believes them, if not my panic-ridden, maternal one. Those odds should have made a difference to my reaction. I should have been able to take the diagnosis calmly, intelligently, reflectively. But that would be to assign rationality to this phenomenon. The trouble with abject fear - with searing, lurid metaphor - is that it is not rational. And the myths that spring out of fear that deep are certainly not. They are the stuff of nightmares. They are tenacious.
— Alanna Mitchell, Malignant Metaphor: Confronting Cancer Myths
Our brains resist change, they rail against it, our amygdala will always want the safe bet. But are the obstacles truly insurmountable? Is it a brick wall? Or is it a sliding door, which, once you decide to approach it, begins to swish open? Because even though our brains prefer safety in the short run, in the long run they crave meaning, challenge, and novelty.
— Barbara Bradley Hagerty, Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife
Freedom from fear's consuming control over us hinges upon our honestly dealing with what our overwhelming fears are specifically about and then coming to terms with those tedious, often emotionally driven details.
— Connie Kerbs, Paths of Fear: An Anthology of Overcoming Through Courage, Inspiration, and the Miracle of Love
The best antidote to the furtive poison of anger, fear, anxiety, or any of our destructive, unwieldy passions, is just gratitude. And not the grandiose, boisterous or especially obvious kind. It is not necessarily the verbose or expressive kind. It's often the full immersion, a kind of deep submersion even, into a pool of awareness. This penitent affect distills within us surreal realizations; it is a focus, tinged with layers of deep remorse and the profound beauty of newfound appreciation that washes over us about the simplest things we have slipped into, or suddenly become aware of our own complacency over. This cooling antidote instantly soothes any veins swollen with the heat of pride, or stopped up with pearls of finely polished self-pity. This all comes about with a balm of humility that is simultaneously soothing and jolting to all of our senses at the same time. It is a cocktail both sedative and stimulant in the same, finite instant. It often occurs as we are halted dead in our tracks by a thing so extraordinary and breathtakingly natural, even luscious in its simplicity and unusually ordinary existence; often something we have been blatantly negligent of noticing as we routinely trudge past it in our self-absorbed haze. These are akin to the emotions one might feel as they finally notice the well-established antique rose garden, in full bloom; the same one they have walked by for years on their way to somewhere - but never noticed before. This is the feeling we get when our aging parent suddenly, in one moment, is 87 in our mind's eye - and not the steady 57, or eternal 37 we have determinedly seen our so loved one to be, out of purely wishful thinking born of the denial that only the truest love and devotion can begin to nurture - for the better of many decades.
— Connie Kerbs, Paths of Fear: An Anthology of Overcoming Through Courage, Inspiration, and the Miracle of Love
Common sense best dictates when balancing our needless and negative fear-driven worries with appropriate preparation and responsible readiness.
— Connie Kerbs, Paths of Fear: An Anthology of Overcoming Through Courage, Inspiration, and the Miracle of Love
When the whispers of fear and doubt start screaming inside of you, turn up the volume of your courage by focusing on your faith, energizing through example, living to learn, and learning to love and be loved better.
— Connie Kerbs, Paths of Fear: An Anthology of Overcoming Through Courage, Inspiration, and the Miracle of Love
The jolt of fear had burned all the red out of my blood.
— Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son
At the bottom of every dilemma, he says, is fear, and the brain always prefers the bird in the hand to venturing into the bush, even if you are clutching a scrawny black crow.
— Barbara Bradley Hagerty, Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife
The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.And God said, "Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done." And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close to mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. "What is the purpose of all this?" he asked politely."Everything must have a purpose?" asked God."Certainly," said man."Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this," said God.And He went away.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat's Cradle
Your purpose in life is to find your purpose and give your whole heart and soul to it
— Gautama Buddha
What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage
Nothing is more creative... nor destructive... than a brilliant mind with a purpose.
— Dan Brown, Inferno
Cat: Where are you going?Alice: Which way should I go?Cat: That depends on where you are going.Alice: I don’t know.Cat: Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.
— Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.
— Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood
The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
My value as a woman is not measured by the size of my waist or the number of men who like me. My worth as a human being is measured on a higher scale: a scale of righteousness and piety. And my purpose in life-despite what fashion magazines say-is something more sublime than just looking good for men.
— Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart: Personal Insights on Breaking Free from Life's Shackles
A simple life is not seeing how little we can get by with—that’s poverty—but how efficiently we can put first things first. . . . When you’re clear about your purpose and your priorities, you can painlessly discard whatever does not support these, whether it’s clutter in your cabinets or commitments on your calendar. (148)
— Victoria Moran, Lit From Within: Tending Your Soul For Lifelong Beauty
Great minds have purpose, others have wishes. Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortunes; but great minds rise above them.
— Washington Irving
You can have anything you want if you want it badly enough. You can be anything you want to be, do anything you set out to accomplish if you hold to that desire with singleness of purpose.
— Abraham Lincoln
It is not true that everyone is special. It is true that everyone was once special and still possesses the ability to recover it.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
You were not meant for a mundane or mediocre life!
— Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.
— Robert M. Pirsig
Here is a test to find out whether your mission in life is complete. If you’re alive, it isn’t.
— Lauren Bacall
There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.
— Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.
— Warren Buffett
Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
The purpose of life is a life of purpose.
— Robert Bryne
This is why I'm here on this planet, at this time, Francesca. Not to travel or make pictures, but to love you. I know that now. I have been falling from the rim of a great, high place, somewhere back in time, for many more years than I have lived in this life. And through all of those years, I have been falling toward you.
— Robert James Waller
The purpose of influence is to "speak up for those who have no influence." (Pr.31:8) It's not about you.
— Rick Warren
Find the thing you want to do most intensely, make sure that’s it, and do it with all your might. If you live, well and good. If you die, well and good. Your purpose is done
— H.G. Wells
He does have surprising, secret purposes. I open a Bible, and His plans, startling, lie there barefaced. It’s hard to believe it, when I read it, and I have to come back to it many times, feel long across those words, make sure they are real. His love letter forever silences any doubts: “His secret purpose framed from the very beginning [is] to bring us to our full glory” (1 Corinthians 2:7 NEB).
— Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are
Pride makes us long for a solution to things – a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear.
— Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot
In Maycomb, if one went for a walk with no definite purpose in mind, it was correct to believe one's mind incapable of definite purpose.
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
A man may plant a tree for a number of reasons. Perhaps he likes trees. Perhaps he wants shelter. Or perhaps he knows that someday he may need the firewood.
— Joanne Harris, Runemarks
I'm not unhappy," he said. "Only people with no purpose are unhappy. I've got a purpose.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Bones
Your emotions make you human. Even the unpleasant ones have a purpose. Don't lock them away. If you ignore them, they just get louder and angrier.
— Sabaa Tahir, A Torch Against the Night
God created us for this: to live our lives in a way that makes him look more like the greatness and the beauty and the infinite worth that he really is. This is what it means to be created in the image of God.
— John Piper
A soul needs a purpose to live and so I concluded that my purpose was to kill everyone besides myself. I felt alive.--Gaara
— Masashi Kishimoto
Intelligence minus purpose equals stupidity.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men. ... One person with indigenous inner strength exercises a great calming effect on panic among people around him. This is what our society needs — not new ideas and inventions; important as these are, and not geniuses and supermen, but persons who can "be", that is, persons who have a center of strength within themselves.
— Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself
Be above it! Make the world serve your purpose, but do not serve it!
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Wasn’t hitting bottom the thing you had to do to knock some sense into yourself? Wasn’t hitting bottom the thing that showed you which way was up?
— Rainbow Rowell, Attachments
Never question the power of one! Throughout history it has been the actions of only one person who has in inspired the movement of change.
— Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
Time is too swift for those who fear, too long for those who wait, too short for those who finally find peace, but for those who love, time is eternal. For nothing is ever lost that God wants you to find.
— Shannon L. Alder
The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.
— Pablo Picasso
Those who look behind will never see beyond.
— Sherry K. White, Walking in the Father's Riches: The Prosperity of Sonship
Whenever we want to combat our enemies, first and foremost we must start by understanding them rather than exaggerating their motives.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
In spite of where we were, how we had gotten here and why we had come, I felt that at this moment of our lives, this place was exactly where we belonged. We were not drifting but rising, rising toward something right and of significance.
— Dean Koontz
But there was a special kind of gift that came with embracing the chaos, even if I cursed most of the way. I'm convinced that, when everything is wiped blank, it's life 's way of forcing you to become acquainted with and aware of who you are now, who you can become. What is the fulfillment of your soul?
— Jennifer DeLucy
Real women fight for something, other than their own emotions.
— Shannon L. Alder
You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world.
— Woodrow Wilson
Following all the rules leaves a completed checklist. Following your heart achieves a completed you.
— Ray A. Davis
But we are strong, each in our purpose, and we are all more strong together.
— Bram Stoker, Dracula
By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
— Emil M. Cioran
Rough as life can be, I know in my bones we are supposed to stick around and play our part. Even if that part is coughing to death from cigarettes, or being blown up young in a house with your mother watching. And even if it's to be that mother. Someone down the line might need to know you got through it. Or maybe someone you won't see coming will need you. Like a kid who asks you to help him clean motel rooms. Or some ghost who drifts your way, hungry. And good people might even ask you to marry them. And it might be you never know the part you played, what it meant to someone to watch you make your way each day. Maybe someone or something is watching us all make our way. I don't think we get to know why. It is, as Ben would say about most of what I used to worry about, none of my business.
— Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family
The only purpose of our lives consists in waking each other up and being there for each other.
— Johanna Paungger, Moon Time: The Art of Harmony with Nature and Lunar Cycles
The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living.
— Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
. . . in no instance has a system in regard to religion been ever established, but for the purpose, as well as with the effect of its being made an instrument of intimidation, corruption, and delusion, for the support of depredation and oppression in the hands of governments.
— Jeremy Bentham, Constitutional Code; For the Use All Nations and All Governments Professing Liberal Opinions Volume 1
Garion,' she said very calmly, 'the universe knew your name before that moon up there was spun out of the emptiness. Whole constellations have been waiting for you since the beginning of time.'I didn't want them to, Aunt Pol.'There are those of us who aren't given that option, Garion. There are things that gave to be done and certain people who have to do them. It's as simple as that.'He smiled rather sadly at her flawless face and gently touched the snowy white lock at her brow. Then, for the last time in his life, he asked the question that had been on his lips since he was a tiny boy. 'Why me, Aunt Pol? Why me?'Can you possibly think of anyone else you'd trust to deal with these matters, Garion?'He had not really been prepared for that question. It came at him in stark simplicity. Now at last he fully understood. 'No,' he sighed, 'I suppose not. Somehow it seems a little unfair, though. I wasn't even consulted.'Neither was I, Garion,' she answered. 'But we didn't have to be consulted, did we? The knowledge of what we have to do is born into us.
— David Eddings, Sorceress of Darshiva
to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind’s full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay - that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live - that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road - that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up - that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction.
— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Then she understood that what she needed was the motion to a purpose, no matter how small or in what form, the sense of an activity going step by step to some chosen end across a span of time. The work of cooking a meal was like a closed circle, completed and gone, leading nowhere. But the work of building a path was a living sum, so that no day was left to die behind her, but each day contained all those that preceded it, each day acquired its immortality on every succeeding tomorrow. A circle, she thought, is the movement proper to physical nature, they say that there's nothing but circular motion in the inanimate universe around us, but the straight line is the badge of man, the straight line of a geometrical abstraction that makes roads, rails and bridges, the straight line that cuts the curving aimlessness of nature by a purposeful motion from a start to an end. The cooking of meals, she thought, is like the feeding of coal to an engine for the sake of a great run, but what would be the imbecile torture of coaling an engine that had no run to make? It is not proper for man's life to be a circle, she thought, or a string of circles dropping off like zeros behind him--man's life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum, like a journey down the track of a railroad, from station to station to--oh, stop it!
— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Art has always been the raft onto which we climb to save our sanity. I don't see a different purpose for it now.
— Dorothea Tanning
[I]n science we have to be particularly cautious about 'why' questions. When we ask, 'Why?' we usually mean 'How?' If we can answer the latter, that generally suffices for our purposes. For example, we might ask: 'Why is the Earth 93 million miles from the Sun?' but what we really probably mean is, 'How is the Earth 93 million miles from the Sun?' That is, we are interested in what physical processes led to the Earth ending up in its present position. 'Why' implicitly suggests purpose, and when we try to understand the solar system in scientific terms, we do not generally ascribe purpose to it.
— Lawrence M. Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing
The great thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are going.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The key is for you to discover what you love to do, what you were created to do, and then do it for the people around you with love. That is the abundant life, dear girl, no matter where in the world you live.
— Robin Jones Gunn, Finally and Forever
It was after I first began to uplift my thoughts a bit that my cravings for junk food started to dissipate. I did not connect the two at that time. First, I simply noticed that I didn’t need to sleep so much. It took a while before I realized that in addition to my improved energy level, there was a direct correlation between chewing on mental garbage and putting garbage in my mouth.
— Holly Mosier
Dreamers like your wife are limited, little Helldiver.” She makes sure I don’t speak.“Understand that. The only power they have is in death. The harder they die, the loudertheir voice, the deeper the echoes. But your wife served her purpose.
— Pierce Brown, Red Rising
To ask, 'How do you do it?' is already starting off on the wrong foot. When reaching for the stars, there does not have to be a 'how' if there is a big enough 'why'.
— Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality
At the core of her senseless actions, she vaguely perceived that she yearned for something. A something that would provide her with a sure sense of fulfillment. But she could not fathom what that something might be.
— Shūsaku Endō, Deep River
What did he have to mope about, really? What more did he want?...Love. Purpose. Those are the things that you can't plan for. Those are the things that just happen. And what if they don't happen? Do you spend your whole life pining for them? Waiting to be happy?
— Rainbow Rowell, Attachments
I like trains. I like their rhythm, and I like the freedom of being suspended between two places, all anxieties of purpose taken care of: for this moment I know where I am going.
— Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall
I may be going nowhere, but what a ride.
— Shaun Hick
The artist lives to have stories to tell and to learn to tell them well.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
And if I'm guilty of having gratuitous sex, then I'm also guilty of having gratuitous violence, and gratuitous feasting, and gratuitous description of clothes, and gratuitous heraldry, because very little of this is necessary to advance the plot. But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes.A novel for me is an immersive experience where I feel as if I have lived it and that I've tasted the food and experienced the sex and experienced the terror of battle. So I want all of the detail, all of the sensory things—whether it's a good experience, or a bad experience, I want to put the reader through it. To that mind, detail is necessary, showing not telling is necessary, and nothing is gratuitous.
— George R.R. Martin
We make our purpose.
— Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God
To think what is true, to sense what is beautiful and to want what is good, hereby the spirit finds purpose of a life in reason.
— Johann Gottfried Herder
Are you desperate or determined? With desperation comes frustration. With determination comes purpose, achievement, and peace….
— James A. Murphy, The Waves of Life Quotes and Daily Meditations
They who reach down into the depths of life where, in the stillness, the voice of God is heard, have the stabilizing power which carries them poised and serene through the hurricane of difficulties.
— Spencer W. Kimball
Our privileges are not for our pleasure but rather for our purpose.
— Chris Brady
Why miss out on what God has in store for you while you’re trying to get in on his plan for somebody else? Your plans are the best—for YOU—and so is your personality. You’re so worth it
— Nancy N. Rue, That Is SO Me: 365 Days of Devotions: Flip-Flops, Faith, and Friends
Self-discipline is the ability to organize your behavior over time in the service of specific goals.
— Nathaniel Branden
The New Dimension is peaceful, and all work here just as they do on Earth. It’s a place where learning, knowledge and wisdom are essential to that work.It is not corrupt like the Earth Plane, and there they are free from all of the corruption that exists on Earth today.We created this New Dimension for growing and learning, as we did Earth.Minds here are advanced, as the knowledge that was acquired on Earth is now attuned to the minds of New Dimension souls.It is a slow process for all souls’ minds to learn and absorb knowledge and wisdom.Love is the answer for all kinds of souls to advance in the Universe. Through love, knowledge and wisdom are well earned.Critical thinking, the Earth Plane has gotten off track, forgetting or ignoring this most important key to progress.We all here in the Universe is working so hard with Earth souls to remind them that their purpose on Earth is to advance.First, they must love themselves if they are going to love all of those around them, if they are going to love other souls, if they are going to help less fortunate souls with love and kindness. All of this is part of Earth lessons they must learn.Once this is understood, we will attain peace of soul and mind…Progress is all that matters in the Universe!
— Solon
Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now.
— Jack Kerouac, The Portable Jack Kerouac
There is a season for everything under the sun—even when we can’t see the sun.
— Jared Brock, A Year of Living Prayerfully: How a Curious Traveler Met the Pope, Walked on Coals, Danced with Rabbis, and Revived His Prayer Life
Our mission as humans is not only to discover our fullest selves in the technium, and to find full contentment, but to expand the possibilities for others. Greater technology will selfishly unleash our talents, but it will also unselfishly unleash others: our children, and all children to come.
— Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants
Law without reason is criminal.
— Criss Jami, Healology
Unlike wealth, there is an infinite value in legacy.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
The church is not a theological classroom. It is a conversion, confession, repentance, reconciliation, forgiveness and sanctification center, where flawed people place their faith in Christ, gather to know and love him better, and learn to love others as he designed.
— Paul David Tripp, Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands: People in Need of Change Helping People in Need of Change
I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.
— Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
No! I don't want to speak of that! But I'm going to. I want you to hear. I want you to know what's in store for you. There will be days when you'll look at your hands and you'll want to take something and smash every bone in them, because they'll be taunting you with what they could do, if you found a chance for them to do it, and you can't find that chance, and you can't bear your living body because it has failed those hands somewhere. There will be days when a bus driver will snap at you as you enter a bus, and he'll be only asking for a dime, but that won't be what you hear; you'll hear that you're nothing, that he's laughing at you, that it's written on your forehead, that thing they hate you for. There will be days when you'll stand in the corner of a hall and listen to a creature on a platform talking about buildings, about the work you love, and the things he'll say will make you wait for somebody to rise and crack him open between two thumbnails; and then you'll hear people applauding him, and you'll want to scream, because you won't know whether they're real or you are, whether you're in a room full of gored skulls, or whether someone has just emptied your own head, and you'll say nothing, because the sounds you could make - they're not a language in that room any longer; but you'd want to speak, you won't anyway, because you'll be brushed aside, you who have nothing to tell them about buildings! Is that what you want?
— Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
Women show men beauty in things beyond their ambitions. Women tell men to stop and smell the roses.
— Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality
When your drive is moving your purpose, focus must hold the wheels else your might miss the way. And do you know what that means? Avoid Crash!!!. Stay focused!
— Israelmore Ayivor
At the end of time I want my art to stand up and my soul to bow down.
— Rob Ryser, Great Desires for Absent Things
The journey of the sun and moon is predictable, but yours is your ultimate art.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
But in the depths of his heart, the older he became, and the more intimately he knew his brother, the more and more frequently the thought struck him that this faculty of working for the public good, of which he felt himself utterly devoid, was possibly not so much a quality as a lack of something --not a lack of good, honest, noble desires and tastes, but a lack of vital force, of what is called heart, of that impulse which drives a man to choose someone out of the innumerable paths of life, and to care only for that one. The better he knew his brother, the more he noticed that Sergey Ivanovitch, and many other people who worked for the public welfare, were not led by an impulse of the heart to care for the public good, but reasoned from intellectual considerations that it was a right thing to take interest in public affairs, and consequently took interest in them. Levin was confirmed in this generalization by observing that his brother did not take questions affecting the public welfare or the question of the immortality of the soul a bit more to heart than he did chess problems, or the ingenious construction of a new machine.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Maybe the trying is the thing. Maybe it doesn't get better than that. Maybe you never quite get there. And maybe that's okay.
— Keith Ablow, Murder Suicide
The Clayr saw me, the Wallmaker made me, the King quenched me, the Abhorsen wields me so that no Dead shall walk in Life. For this is not their path.
— Garth Nix, Sabriel
Our sole purpose on this earth is to add value to others. It doesn’t make sense to just exist in people's lives or to be a drain on them, does it?
— Rob Liano
Don't put your purpose in one place and expect to see progress made somewhere else.
— Epictetus, Discourses and Selected Writings
It’s not enough to have lived. We should be determined to live for something.
— Winston S. Churchill
From the moment of my birth, I lived with pain at the center of my life. My only purpose in life was to find a way to coexist with intense pain.
— Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
The key to a happy life is to have accomplishments to be proud of and purpose to look forward to, and at the moment I had both. How wonderful it was to be me.
— Jeff Lindsay, Dearly Devoted Dexter
If you are unclear about what attitudes you adhere to, you will have a difficult time evaluation which ones are not serving your highest good.
— Deborah Day
...But we also believe that part of our mission in life is to find our bliss and follow it. Life is a precious and delicate gift. How much of that gift do we squander out of fear?
— Dianne Sylvan, The Body Sacred
She says it’s wrong to be frittering away my hours asking questions when there’s work to be done. But I don’t see how a question can be wrong. Can you, Pa? Ma says the Bible sets out what’s right and wrong so we don’t have to bother ourselves with it none but it seems to me that it ain’t so matter-of-fact. Like when you kilt that old cow last week and I didn’t want to eat it ’cause he was my favorite and so gentle besides. Ma said I was sinful to waste food. But I said that maybe we shouldn’t go about killing and eating cows when they was so peaceful-like. Ma said that was foolishness and that God put the cows here just so as we can eat ’em. But that don’t seem like such a good deal for the cows to me. Preacher told us not more than four Sundays ago that God loves all his creatures, but it ain’t loving to my way of thinking to create a thing just for it to be food. Them cows ain’t never done nothing to us. Which got me to thinking that maybe we got it wrong and they got a purpose we don’t know nothing about.
— Victoria Forester, The Girl Who Could Fly
My help had been needed and claimed; I had given it: I was pleased to have done something: trivial, transitory though the deed was, it was yet an active thing, and I was weary of an existence all passive.
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Part of him wanted to weep... but his purpose was rigid within him. He felt he could not bend to gentleness without breaking.
— Stephen R. Donaldson, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever
Figure out your passion. What floats your boat, rings your bell, lights your tree? A life without passion is possible, but not desirable. Have you really lived at all if you have not lived with passion? Without it would a masterpiece be possible? I don’t think so. With purpose, cause and passion, there is no way the end you envision will not become the reality you live.
— Toni Sorenson
Thus, you see, he arrived at the same end, via supposed duty, that he was previously pledged to via interest. I fancy a good number of us, when any line of action will promote our own interest, can make ourselves believe that reasons exist which compel us to it as a duty.
— Elizabeth Gaskell, My Lady Ludlow and Other Stories