c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Everyone has his own reality in which, if one is not too cautious, timid or frightened, one swims. This is the only reality there is.
— Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
Going back to something is harder than you think.
— Mitch Albom, For One More Day
What makes earth feel like hell is our expectation that it should feel like heaven.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Damned
We never live
—  we are always in the expectation of living.
I think computer viruses should count as life ... I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
— Stephen Hawking
That's the thing about life. A lot of the time, it isn't easy at all. We just have to try to make the best of it.
— Nicholas Sparks, Safe Haven
Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.
— Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi
Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun
—  it cannot be contained.
I have noticed that even those who assert that everything is predestined and that we can change nothing about it still look both ways before they cross the street
— Stephen Hawking
You can go your whole life collecting days, and none will outweigh the one you wish you had back.
— Mitch Albom, For One More Day
Who would have guessed that four minutes could change everything?
— Jennifer E. Smith, The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight
We have nothing to lose, nothing to gain, nothing we desired anymore- except to make our lives into a work of art.
— Lana Del Rey
A craven can be as brave as any man, when there is nothing to fear. And we all do our duty, when there is no cost to it. How easy it seems then, to walk the path of honor. Yet soon or late in every man's life comes a day when it is not easy, a day when he must choose. (Maester Aemon)
— George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
Take wrong turns. Talk to strangers. Open unmarked doors. And if you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they are doing. Do things without always knowing how they'll turn out. You're curious and smart and bored, and all you see is the choice between working hard and slacking off. There are so many adventures that you miss because you're waiting to think of a plan. To find them, look for tiny interesting choices. And remember that you are always making up the future as you go.
— Randall Munroe, xkcd: volume 0
Do not let your difficulties fill you with anxiety, after all it is only in the darkest nights that stars shine more brightly.
— Hazrat Ali Ibn Abu-Talib A.S
In order to move on, you must understand why you felt what you did and why you no longer need to feel it.
— Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven
My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a bonus.", December 12, 2004)]
— Stephen Hawking
For a day, just for one day,Talk about that which disturbs no oneAnd bring some peace into yourBeautiful eyes.
— The Subject Tonight Is Love: 60 Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz
I used to spend so much time reacting and responding to everyone else that my life had no direction. Other people's lives, problems, and wants set the course for my life. Once I realized it was okay for me to think about and identify what I wanted, remarkable things began to take place in my life.
— Melody Beattie, The Language of Letting Go: Daily Meditations on Codependency
When she is happy, she can't stop talking, when she is sad she doesn't say a word.
— Ann Brashares, Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
— Arundhati Roy
The greatest step towards a life of simplicity is to learn to let go.
— Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
— Thornton Wilder
But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
The Lord prefers common-looking people. That is why he made so many of them.
— Abraham Lincoln
Life is a long lesson in humility.
— J.M. Barrie, The Little Minister
Those with a grateful mindset tend to see the message in the mess. And even though life may knock them down, the grateful find reasons, if even small ones, to get up.
— Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
It is life, I think, to watch the water. A man can learn so many things.
— Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook
When you're socially awkward, you're isolated more than usual, and when you're isolated more than usual, your creativity is less compromised by what has already been said and done. All your hope in life starts to depend on your craft, so you try to perfect it. One reason I stay isolated more than the average person is to keep my creativity as fierce as possible. Being the odd one out may have its temporary disadvantages, but more importantly, it has its permanent advantages.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
Look for the good in every person and every situation. You'll almost always find it.
— Brian Tracy
So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, All the Sad Young Men
Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man's soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it.
— Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption
Beauty is a whore, I like money better.
— Michael Cunningham, The Hours
We should live our lives as though Christ was coming this afternoon.
— Jimmy Carter
You know how both life and porno movies end. The only difference is life starts with the orgasm.
— Chuck Palahniuk
Today is a new day. Don't let your history interfere with your destiny! Let today be the day you stop being a victim of your circumstances and start taking action towards the life you want. You have the power and the time to shape your life. Break free from the poisonous victim mentality and embrace the truth of your greatness. You were not meant for a mundane or mediocre life!
— Steve Maraboli
Forget injuries, never forget kindnesses.
— Confucius
When you lose your smile, you lose your way in the chaos of life.
— Roy T. Bennett
People can have their opinions about everything in the world, but people's opinions end where the tip of my nose begins. Your opinions of others can only go so far as to where their own shoreline is. The world is for your taking, but other people are not. One is only allowed to have an opinion of me, if that person is done educating him/herself on everything about me. Before people educate themselves on everything about you, they're not allowed to open their venomous mouthes and have an opinion about you.
— C. JoyBell C.
Man surprised me most about humanity. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money.Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.
— James J. Lachard
Be an Encourager: When you encourage others, you boost their self-esteem, enhance their self-confidence, make them work harder, lift their spirits and make them successful in their endeavors. Encouragement goes straight to the heart and is always available. Be an encourager. Always.
— Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
To overcome fear is the quickest way to gain your self-confidence.
— Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
Your Life Is Happening Right Now: Don't let procrastination take over your life. Be brave and take risks. Your life is happening right now.
— Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
Be careful the stories you're telling yourself about your current circumstances
—  a head full of negative thoughts has no space for positive ones.
Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Carve your name on hearts, not tombstones. A legacy is etched into the minds of others and the stories they share about you.
— Shannon L. Alder
I've come to believe that in everyone's life, there's one undeniable moment of change, a set of circumstances that suddenly alters everything.
— Nicholas Sparks, Safe Haven
I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.
— John Burroughs
... And these childrenthat you spit onas they try to change their worldsare immune to your consultations.They're quite awareof what they're going through...
— David Bowie
Pain or love or danger makes you real again....
— Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Here’s to freedom, cheers to art. Here’s to having an excellent adventure and may the stopping never start.
— Jason Mraz
Can a person steal happiness? Or is just another internal, infernal human trick?
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.
— George Orwell
L'éternité, c'est long ... surtout vers la fin.
— Franz Kafka
You don't ask people with knives in their stomachs what would make them happy
—  happiness is no longer the point. It's all about survival
The moment a little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing.
— Eric Berne
While we try to teach our children all about life, our children teach us what life is all about.
— Angela Schwindt
Life is a drama full of tragedy and comedy. You should learn to enjoy the comic episodes a little more.
— Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle
A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
— Albert Camus
And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.
— Ian McEwan, Atonement
That’s how stories happen — with a turning point, an unexpected twist. There’s only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
I'd found out that if you pushed people away hard enough, they tended to go.
— Morgan Matson, Amy & Roger's Epic Detour
It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
— John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire
The life where nothing was ever unexpected. Or inconvenient. Or unusual. The life without colour, pain or past.
— Lois Lowry, The Giver
As we go through life we gradually discover who we are, but the more we discover, the more we lose ourselves.
— Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
I don’t chase after anyone, If you wanna walk out of my life, then I’ll hold the fucking door open for you.
— Wiz Khalifa
Let go of something old that no longer serves you to make room for something new.
— Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
Dreams are necessary to life.
— Anaïs Nin
One of the greatest journeys in life is overcoming insecurity and learning to truly not give a shit.
— J.A. Konrath
Live or die, but don't poison everything.
— Anne Sexton
[F]or just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there's nothing else. It's here, and you'd better decide to enjoy it or you're going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.
— Lev Grossman, The Magicians
I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.
— Eric Roth, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Screenplay
It's funny: I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools - friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty - and said 'do the best you can with these, they will have to do'. And mostly, against all odds, they do.
— Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
This is the key to life: To expect everything to be given to you from above, yet to be genuinely surprised and forever grateful, when they are. Expecting all good things to be yours, while not knowing how to take anything for granted. If there may be a key in life, this is the key.
— C. JoyBell C.
She had been given a wonderful gift: life. Sometimes it was cruelly taken away too soon, but it's what you did with it that counted, not how long it lasted.
— Cecelia Ahern, P.S. I Love You
Never lose faith in yourself, and never lose hope; remember, even when this world throws its worst and then turns its back, there is still always hope.
— Pittacus Lore, The Power of Six
What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.
— Charles Baudelaire
I don't want to do anything. I don't even want to start this day because then I'll just be expected to finish it.
— Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl
It is not worth the while to let our imperfections disturb us always.
— Henry David Thoreau
This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.
— George Orwell, Animal Farm
It's such a shame to waste time. We always think we have so much of it.
— Mitch Albom, For One More Day
It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action
—  and they will make it if they cannot find it.
After you're gone, people will forget your name, no matter how important it was, and your face, no matter how pretty it was, and what you said, no matter how clever any of it sounded.The things you've done will crumble and fade and the places you once loved, will change and be given new names.You are only here for one moment and it lasts exactly one lifetime.
— pleasefindthis, I Wrote This For You
It is not that we have so little time but that we lose so much. ... The life we receive is not short but we make it so
—  we are not ill provided but use what we have wastefully.
Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of inextinguishable regrets.
— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
There is great change to be experienced once you learn the power of letting go. Stop allowing anyone or anything to control, limit, repress, or discourage you from being your true self! Today is YOURS to shape - own it - break free from people and things that poison or dilute your spirit.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
Girls get screwed.Not that kind of screwed, what I mean is, they're always on the short end of things.The way things work, how guys feel great, but make girls feelcheap for doingexactly what they beg for.The way they get to play you, all the while claiming they love you and making you believe it's true.The way it's okay to gift their heart one day, a backhand the next, to move on to the apricotwhen the peach blushes and bruises.These things make me believe God's a man after all.
— Ellen Hopkins, Crank
That's the problem with life. You never get enough time to stare at your ceiling and try to figure out what's going on.
— Leila Sales, This Song Will Save Your Life
If you care about something enough, you'll find a way to make it happen.
— Roy T. Bennett
Destiny is real. And she's not mild-mannered. She will come around and hit you in the face and knock you over and before you know what hit you, you're naked- stripped of everything you thought you knew and everything you thought you didn't know- and there you are! A bloody nose, bruises all over you, and naked. And it's the most beautiful thing.
— C. JoyBell C.
I came here looking for a Great Perhaps, for real friends and a more-than-minor life..
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
What if I mess up?""Oh, you will. You'll mess up, you'll make mistakes, you'll break things. Some you'll be able to piece together, and others you'll lose. That's all a given. But there's only one thing you have to do for me.""What's that?""Stay alive long enough to mess up again.
— Victoria Schwab, The Archived
The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.
— André Gide
It is wise to direct your anger towards problems -- not people
—  to focus your energies on answers -- not excuses.
Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.
— John Steinbeck
Give a bowl of rice to a man and you will feed him for a day. Teach him how to grow his own rice and you will save his life.
— Confucius
You often meet your fate on the road you take to avoid it.
— Goldie Hawn
Creo que todos tenemos un poco de esa bella locura que nos mantiene andando cuando todo alrededor es tan insanamente cuerdo.
— Julio Cortázar
It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us...on the inside, looking out.
— Jonathan Safran Foer
It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. And it's true, or true as far as it goes. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It's not even coincidence. It's just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or for propriety.
— Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys
Some beautiful paths can't be discovered without getting lost.
— Erol Ozan
What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness.
— Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
If I had to tell you how humans made their way to Earth, it would go like this: In the beginning, there was nothing at all but the moon and the sun. And the moon wanted to come out during the day, but there was something so much brighter that seemed to fill up all those hours. The moon grew hungry, thinner and thinner, until she was just a slice of herself, and her tips were as sharp as a knife. By accident, because that is the way most things happen, she poked a hole in the night and out spilled a million stars, like a fountain of tears.Horrified, the moon tried to swallow them up. And sometimes this worked, because she got fatter and rounder.. But mostly it didn't, because there were just so many. The stars kept coming, until they made the sky so bright that the sun got jealous. He invited the stars to his side of the world, where it was always bright. What he didn't tell them, though, was that in the daytime, they'd never be seen. So the stupid ones leaped from the sky to the ground, and they froze under the weight of their own foolishness.The moon did her best. She carved each of these blocks of sorrow into a man or a woman. She spent the rest of her time watching out so that her other stars wouldn't fall. She spent the rest of her time holding onto whatever scraps she had left.
— Jodi Picoult
you might want to decide fast. We live in a dangerous world. If you see a chance to be happy, you have to fight for it, so later you have no regrets.
— Ilona Andrews, Magic Bleeds
Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.
— George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
Understanding the difference between healthy striving and perfectionism is critical to laying down the shield and picking up your life. Research shows that perfectionism hampers success. In fact, it's often the path to depression, anxiety, addiction, and life paralysis.
— Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
Fate loves the fearless.
— James Russell Lowell
Never do a single thing in the anticipation to prove something to someone who has hurt you. If someone has hurt or offended you (whoever that person may be), never perform anything or strive for anything in your life with the mind of proving something to that someone/ to those people. May nothing that you do be done with any thought of them in mind. There is nothing that needs to be proven.
— C. JoyBell C.
I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect.
— Tana French, In the Woods
Sorrow looks back, Worry looks around, Faith looks up
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do you ever wonder whether people would like you more or less if they could see inside you? But I always wonder about that. If people could see me the way I see myself—if they could live in my memories—would anyone, anyone, love me?
— John Green, An Abundance of Katherines
Rise to the occassion which is life!
— Virginia Euwer Wolff
You will suffer, son of Hades!’ What else is new? Nico thought.
— Rick Riordan, The Blood of Olympus
I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams.
— H.P. Lovecraft
Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.
— Ellen Goodman
The trick is to enjoy life. Don't wish away your days, waiting for better ones ahead.
— Marjorie Pay Hinckley
To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.
— Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
Did you ever, when you were little, endure your parents’ warnings, then wait for them to leave the room, pry loose protective covers and consider inserting some metal object into an electrical outlet? Did you wonder if for once you might light up the room? When you were big enough to cross the street on your own, did you ever wait for a signal, hear the frenzied approach of a fire truck and feel like stepping out in front of it? Did you wonder just how far that rocket ride might take you? When you were almost grown, did you ever sit in a bubble bath, perspiration pooling, notice a blow dryer plugged in within easy reach, and think about dropping it into the water? Did you wonder if the expected rush might somehow fail you? And now, do you ever dangle your toes over the precipice, dare the cliff to crumble, defy the frozen deity to suffer the sun, thaw feather and bone, take wing to fly you home?
— Ellen Hopkins, Burned
There are some values that you should never compromise on to stay true to yourself
—  you should be brave to stand up for what you truly believe in even if you stand alone.
Truth is not something outside to be discovered, it is something inside to be realized.
— Osho, The Buddha Said...: Meeting the Challenge of Life's Difficulties
Art is the reason I get up in the morning, but the definition ends there. It doesn't seem fair that I'm living for something I can't even define.
— Ani DiFranco
When I was a little girl, everything in the world fell into either of these two categories: wrong or right. Black or white. Now that I am an adult, I have put childish things aside and now I know that some things fall into wrong and some things fall into right. Some things are categorized as black and some things are categorized as white. But most things in the world aren't either! Most things in the world aren't black, aren't white, aren't wrong, aren't right, but most of everything is just different. And now I know that there's nothing wrong with different, and that we can let things be different, we don't have to try and make them black or white, we can just let them be grey. And when I was a child, I thought that God was the God who only saw black and white. Now that I am no longer a child, I can see, that God is the God who can see the black and the white and the grey, too, and He dances on the grey! Grey is okay.
— C. JoyBell C.
I believe when life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade...and try to find someone whose life has given them vodka, and have a party.
— Ron White
Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.
— Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse
— Joseph Brodsky
Be so good they can't ignore you.
— Steve Martin
Never compete with someone who has nothing to lose.
— Baltasar Gracián
All the world's a stage,And all the men and women merely players;They have their exits and their entrances,And one man in his time plays many parts,His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchelAnd shining morning face, creeping like snailUnwillingly to school. And then the lover,Sighing like furnace, with a woeful balladMade to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,Seeking the bubble reputationEven in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,In fair round belly with good capon lined,With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,Full of wise saws and modern instances;And so he plays his part. The sixth age shiftsInto the lean and slippered pantaloon,With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wideFor his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,Turning again toward childish treble, pipesAnd whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,That ends this strange eventful history,Is second childishness and mere oblivion,Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
— William Shakespeare, As You Like It
When you are measuring life, you are not living it.
— Mitch Albom, The Time Keeper
But the only way never to do the wrong thing is never to do anything.
— Jim Butcher, White Night
I don't pray really, because I don't want to bore God.
— Orson Welles
That’s life for you. All the happiness you gather to yourself, it will sweep away like it’s nothing. If you ask me I don’t think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That’s enough.
— Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content
— Helen Keller
The knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on earth - the atoms that make up the human body, are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures. These stars- the high mass ones among them- went unstable in their later years- they collapsed and then exploded- scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy- guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself. These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems- stars with orbiting planets. And those planets now have the ingredients for life itself. So that when I look up at the night sky, and I know that yes we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up- many people feel small, cause their small and the universe is big. But I feel big because my atoms came from those stars.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson
If you can't control your peanut butter, you can't expect to control your life.
— Bill Watterson, The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes: A Calvin and Hobbes Treasury
I made the choice to be vegan because I will not eat (or wear, or use) anything that could have an emotional response to its death or captivity. I can well imagine what that must feel like for our non-human friends - the fear, the terror, the pain - and I will not cause such suffering to a fellow living being.
— Rai Aren
You don't know me. You know one me, just like I know one you. And you can't know every me, and I can't know every you.
— David Levithan, Every You, Every Me
To live is to be musical, starting with the blood dancing in your veins. Everything living has a rhythm. Do you feel your music?
— Michael  Jackson
Life has a way of going in circles. Ideally, it would be a straight path forward––we'd always know where we were going, we'd always be able to move on and leave everything else behind. There would be nothing but the present and the future. Instead, we always find ourselves where we started. When we try to move ahead, we end up taking a step back. We carry everything with us, the weight exhausting us until we want to collapse and give up. We forget things we try to remember. We remember things we'd rather forget. The most frightening thing about memory is that it leaves no choice. It has mastered an incomprehensible art of forgetting. It erases, it smudges, it fills in blank spaces with details that don't exist. But however we remember it––or choose to remember it––the past is the foundation that holds our lives in place. Without its support, we'd have nothing for guidance. We spend so much time focused on what lies ahead, when what has fallen behind is just as important. What defines us isn't where we're going, but where we've been. Although there are places and people we will never see again, and although we move on and let them go, they remain a part of who we are. There are things that will never change, things we will carry along with us always. But as we venture into the murky future, we must find our strength by learning to leave things behind.
— Brigid Gorry-Hines
Life... is like a grapefruit. Well, it's sort of orangey-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It's got pips inside, too. Oh, and some people have half a one for breakfast.
— Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
No matter where you are, you're always a bit on your own, always an outsider.
— Banana Yoshimoto, Goodbye Tsugumi
Disappointment came to me,and booted me,and bruised and hurt me,but that's how people grow up.
— Morrissey
Instead of worrying about what could go wrong, change your thoughts to what could go right. When you change the negative thought into a positive one, it eliminates the negative one.
— Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
Real change is difficult at the beginning. Without the familiar to rely upon, you may not in as much command as you had once been. When things are not going your way, you will start doubting yourself. Stay positive, keep the faith, and keep moving forward – your breakthrough may be just around the corner.
— Roy T. Bennett
Love and friendship. They are what make us who we are, and what can change us, if we let them.
— Emily Giffin, Something Blue
Life is like a beautiful melody, only the lyrics are messed up.
— Hans Christian Andersen
For beautiful eyes, look for the good in others; for beautiful lips, speak only words of kindness; and for poise, walk with the knowledge that you are never alone.
— Sam Levenson
Positive expectations are the mark of the superior personality.
— Brian Tracy, Maximum Achievement: Strategies and Skills that Will Unlock Your Hidden Powers to Succeed
It can take years to mold a dream. It takes only a fraction of a second for it to be shattered.
— Mary E. Pearson, The Kiss of Deception
The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.
— Michel Houellebecq
Your time may come. Do not be too sad, Sam. You cannot be always torn in two. You will have to be one and whole, for many years. You have so much to enjoy and to be, and to do.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
Go for it, while you can. I know you have it in you. And I can't promise you'll get everything you want, but I can promise nothing will change if you don't try.
— J.M. Darhower, Sempre
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.
— Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
When it was over, she gathered him in her arms. And told him the terrible irony of her life.That she had wanted to be dead all those years while her brother had been alive. That had been her sin.And this was her penance.Wanting to live when everyone else seemed dead.
— Melina Marchetta, On the Jellicoe Road
The most important relationship in your life is the relationship you have with yourself. Because no matter what happens, you will always be with yourself.
— Diane Von Furstenberg
Do every act of your life as though it were the very last act of your life.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Life’s greatest gift is the freedom it leaves you to step out of it whenever you choose.
— André Breton, Anthology of Black Humor
all of us have a place in history. mine is clouds.
— Richard Brautigan
Single is no longer a lack of options – but a choice. A choice to refuse to let your life be defined by your relationship status but to live every day Happily and let your Ever After work itself out.
— Mandy Hale, The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass
The deepest wounds aren't the ones we get from other people hurting us. They are the wounds we give ourselves when we hurt other people.
— Isobelle Carmody, Alyzon Whitestarr
To live is to war with trolls.
— Henrik Ibsen
And were an epitaph to be my story I'd have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world.
— Robert Frost
Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.
— Tehyi Hsieh
People are going to say what they want to say and think what they want to think, and I can't change their minds.
— Hilary Duff
You make the world a better place by making daily improvements to become the best version of yourself.
— Roy T. Bennett
What helps you persevere is your resilience and commitment.
— Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
I don't know why people are afraid of lust. Then I can imagine that they are very afraid of me, for I have a great lust for everything. A lust for life, a lust for how the summer-heated street feels beneath my feet, a lust for the touch of another's skin on my skin...a lust for everything. I even lust after cake. Yes, I am very lusty and very scary.
— C. JoyBell C.
Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
— William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Never forget:we walk on hell,gazing at flowers.
— Kobayashi Issa
There is no escape—we pay for the violence of our ancestors.
— Frank Herbert, Dune
The world will give you that once in awhile, a brief timeout; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life.
— Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees
Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
— Emil M. Cioran
Because," explained Mary Rommely simply, "the child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out by believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination. I, myself, even in this day and at my age, have great need of recalling the miraculous lives of the Saints and the great miracles that have come to pass on earth. Only by having these things in my mind can I live beyond what I have to live for.
— Betty  Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
You look ridiculous if you danceYou look ridiculous if you don't danceSo you might as welldance.
— Gertrude Stein, Three Lives
No matter how hard life is, don't lose hope
— Zayn Malik
Sometimes life happens.
— Katie McGarry, Pushing the Limits
Sometimes things happen to people and they're not equipped to deal with them.
— Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire
I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any. 
— Jean Rhys, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography
When all is said and done, the life of faith is nothing if not an unending struggle of the spirit with every available weapon against the flesh.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship
Focus on making yourself better, not on thinking that you are better.
— Bohdi Sanders, The Secrets of Worldly Wisdom: Your Key to Unlocking Success
You can be young without money, but you can't be old without it.
— Tennessee Williams
A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.
— Margaret Atwood, The Tent
Sometimes fate or life or whatever you want to call it, leaves a door a little open and you walk through it. But sometimes it locks the door and you have to find the key, or pick the lock, or knock the damn thing down. And sometimes, it doesn't even show you the door, and you have to build it yourself. But if you keep waiting for the doors to be opened for you... I think you'll have a hard time finding single happiness, let alone that double portion.
— Gayle Forman, Just One Year
Because I don’t care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. Because, here’s the truth: life is a catastrophe. The basic fact of existence – of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do – is a catastrophe. Forget all this ridiculous ‘Our Town’ nonsense everyone talks: the miracle of a newborn babe, the joy of one simple blossom, Life You Are Too Wonderful To Grasp, &c. For me – and I’ll keep repeating it doggedly till I die, till I fall over on my ungrateful nihilistic face and am too weak to say it: better never born, than born into this cesspool. Sinkhole of hospital beds, coffins, and broken hearts. No release, no appeal, no “do-overs” to employ a favored phrase of Xandra’s, no way forward but age and loss, and no way out but death.
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
Good works is giving to the poor and the helpless, but divine works is showing them their worth to the One who matters.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language.
— Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
Being vegan is easy. Are there social pressures that encourage you to continue to eat, wear, and use animal products? Of course there are. But in a patriarchal, racist, homophobic, and ableist society, there are social pressures to participate and engage in sexism, racism, homophobia, and ableism. At some point, you have to decide who you are and what matters morally to you. And once you decide that you regard victimizing vulnerable nonhumans is not morally acceptable, it is easy to go and stay vegan
— Gary L. Francione
Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?
— Charles Bukowski, Post Office
Everyone wanted to believe that endless love was possible. She'd believed in it once too, back when she was eighteen. But she knew that love was messy, just like life. It took turns that people couldn't foresee or even understand, leaving a long trail of regret in its wake. And almost always, those regrets led to the kinds of what if questions that could never be answered.
— Nicholas Sparks, The Best of Me
Have you ever hoped for something? And held out for it against all the odds? Until everything you did was ridiculous? 
— Ali Shaw, The Girl With Glass Feet
Do not look back and grieve over the past, for it is gone; and do not be troubled about the future, for it has yet to come. Live in the present, and make it so beautiful that it will be worth remembering
— Ida Scott Taylor McKinney
My life isn’t theories and formulae. It’s part instinct, part common sense. Logic is as good a word as any, and I’ve absorbed what logic I have from everything and everyone… from my mother, from training as a ballet dancer, from Vogue magazine, from the laws of life and health and nature.
— Audrey Hepburn
I had a dream about you. We installed Dr. Robert Jarvik’s artificial heart in a mannequin and brought it to life, only to later kill it because a creature that’s all fake heart and no brain is what’s commonly called a “politician,” and must be destroyed. 
— Dark Jar Tin Zoo, I Had a Dream About You
Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.
— Tennessee Williams
Our lives can't be measured by our final years, of this I am sure.
— Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook
If something doesn't work exactly right, or maybe needs some special treatment, you don't just throw it away. Everything can't be fully operational all the time. Sometimes, we need to have the patience to give something the little nudge it needs.
— Sarah Dessen, Keeping the Moon
I run after her, not really giving chase. I’m running because I can, because I must.Because I want to see how far I can go before I have to stop.
— Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty
It's in the morning, for most of us. It's that time, those few seconds when we're coming out of sleep but we're not really awake yet. For those few seconds we're something more primitive than what we are about to become. We have just slept the sleep of our most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world still clings to us. For those few moments we are unformed, uncivilized. We are not the people we know as ourselves, but creatures more in tune with a tree than a keyboard. We are untitled, unnamed, natural, suspended between was and will be, the tadpole before the frog, the worm before the butterfly. We are for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be. And then...and then -- ah -- we open our eyes and the day is before us and ... we become ourselves.
— Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl
An ability to look into the confusing mess of life and see things for what they are.
— Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom." (first published 1937)]
— Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years: The Scientist, Philosopher, and Man Portrayed Through His Own Words
I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.
— G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America
There's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Whatever is going to happen will happen, whether we worry or not.
— Ana Monnar
The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us -- there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Life is full of luck, like getting dealt a good hand, or simply by being in the right place at the right time. Some people get luck handed to them, a second chance, a save. It can happen heroically, or by a simple coincidence , but there are those who don’t get luck on a shiny platter, who end up in the wrong place at the wrong time, who don’t get saved.
— Jessica Sorensen, The Coincidence of Callie & Kayden
YOU FEAR TO DIE?"It's not that I don't want... I mean, I've always...it's just that life is a habit that's hard to break...
— Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man
I am old enough to know only too well my good and bad qualities, which were often one in the same.
— Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
My only regrets are the moments when i doubted myself and took the safe route. Life is too short to waste time being unhappy.
— Dan Howell
Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy.
— Douglas Coupland, Life After God
I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind-of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough) any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware even that they are deceiving one another.
— Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human
One who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him.
— Immanuel Kant
It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.
— Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us
A feeling is no longer the same when it comes the second time. It dies through the awareness of its return. We become tired and weary of our feelings when they come too often and last too long.
— Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon
We can't become what we need to be by remaining what we are.
— Oprah Winfrey
Love is just another dirty lie. Love is ergoapiol pills to make me come around because you were afraid to have a baby. Love is quinine and quinine and quinine until I'm deaf with it. Love is that dirty aborting horror that you took me to. Love is my insides all messed up. It's half catheters and half whirling douches. I know about love. Love always hangs up behind the bathroom door. It smells like lysol. To hell with love. Love is making me happy and then going off to sleep with your mouth open while I lie awake all night afraid to say my prayers even because I know I have no right to anymore. Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book. All right. I'm through with you and I'm through with love.
— Ernest Hemingway
... millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
— Susan Ertz
You don't dwell on what you've lost, you just move on."-Allison
— Julie Kagawa, The Immortal Rules
If people make fun of you, that probably means you're doing something right.
— Evanescence
You attract who you are being. When you work at being the type of person that you want to attract, you attract those kinds of people into your life.
— Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
I had a dream about you. You were an escalator, and I was a flight of stairs. You thought I was a Luddite, and I thought I was as ostrich, because I hadn’t figured out how to put the fly in flight. One day you broke down, and then you saw that you and I weren’t so different after all.
— Dora J. Arod, I Had a Dream About You
These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.
— Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones