c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
We're all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on. Not forever, perhaps, but for a time. It's a kind of immortality, I suppose, bounded by limits, it's true, but then so's everything.
— Charles de Lint
You need to spend time crawling alone through shadows to truly appreciate what it is to stand in the sun.
— Shaun Hick
A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.
— George Moore, The Brook Kerith
Free yourself from the complexities and drama of your life. Simplify. Look within. Within ourselves we all have the gifts and talents we need to fulfill the purpose we've been blessed with.
— Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
There’s a really stupid saying: When life hands you a lemon, make lemonade. Well, I have a better saying: When life hands you a lemon, shove that lemon up its stupid butt.
— Gena Showalter, Oh My Goth
Don't Worry Be Happy
— Meher Baba
The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.
— Samuel Beckett, Endgame
One of the things I love about books is being able to define and condense certain portions of a character's life into chapters. It's intriguing, because you can't do this with real life. You can't just end a chapter, then skip the things you don't want to live through, only to open it up to a chapter that better suits your mood. Life can't be divided into chapters... only minutes. The events of your life are all crammed together one minute right after the other without any time lapses or blank pages or chapter breaks because no matter what happens life just keeps going and moving forward and words keep flowing and truths keep spewing whether you like it or not and life never lets you pause and just catch your fucking breath.I need one of those chapter breaks. I just want to catch my breath, but I have no idea how.
— Colleen Hoover, Hopeless
There are five people you meet in heaven. Each of us was in your life for a reason. You may not have known the reason at the time, and that is what heaven is for. For understanding your life on earth. This is the greatest gift God can give you: to understand what happened in your life. To have it explained. It is the peace you have been searching for.
— Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven
Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Mary
You enter the forestat the darkest point,where there is no path.Where there is a way or path,it is someone else's path.You are not on your own path.If you follow someone else's way,you are not going to realizeyour potential.
— Joseph Campbell, The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life & Work
Realize deeply that the present moment is all you will ever have.
— Eckhart Tolle
Two wrongs don't make a right, but don't three lefts make a right? Two wrongs don't make a right, but don't two negatives make a positive?
— Andrew Clements, Things Not Seen
Life isn’t fair." I said. "It’s taken me a while to get that. It’s always going to disappoint you in some way or another. You’ll make plans, and it’ll push you in another direction. You will love people, and they’ll be taken away no matter how hard you fight to keep them. You’ll try for something and won’t get it. You don’t have to find meaning in it; you don’t have to try to change things. You just have to accept the things that are out of your hands and try to take care of yourself. That’s your job.
— Alexandra Bracken, Never Fade
Exactly!" said Deep Thought. "So once you do know what the question actually is, you'll know what the answer means.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Everything you do is triggered by an emotion of either desire or fear.
— Brian Tracy
It’s strange how things can change back as suddenly as they changed originally. When one thing happens and suddenly, things are back to normal.
— Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
See, the poor dream all their lives of getting enough to eat and looking like the rich. And what do the rich dream of?? Losing weight and looking like the poor.
— Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger
Single” is an opportunity to live life on your own terms and not apologize.
— Mandy Hale, The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass
If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.
— Fernando Pessoa, Poems of Fernando Pessoa
To know a species, look at its fears. To know yourself, look at your fears. Fear in itself is not important, but fear stands there and points you in the direction of things that are important. Don't be afraid of your fears, they're not there to scare you; they're there to let you know that something is worth it.
— C. JoyBell C.
I can’t really act the way I want to act, or say what I want to say all the time. And a lot of times, I cover that up with a smile.
— Hilary Duff
If you have kindness in your heart, you offer acts of kindness to touch the hearts of others wherever you go—whether they are random or planned. Kindness becomes a way of life.
— Roy T. Bennett
Make the most of what you have and keep your standards high. Never settle for anything less than you deserve or are capable of achieving.
— Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
Being happy doesn't mean that everything is perfect. It means that you've decided to look beyond the imperfections.
— Gerard Way
He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.
— Franz Kafka
I am afraid. Not of life, or death, or nothingness, but of wasting it as if I had never been.
— Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon
Life doesn't make any sense, and we all pretend it does. Comedy's job is to point out that it doesn't make sense, and that it doesn't make much difference anyway.
— Eric Idle
If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night & The Last Tycoon
In every way that counted, I was dead. Inside somewhere maybe I was screaming and weeping and howling like an animal, but that was another person deep inside, another person who had no access to the lips and face and mouth and head, so on the surface I just shrugged and smile and kept moving. If I could have physically passed away, just let it all go, like that, without doing anything, stepped out of life as easily as walking through a door I would have done. But I was going to sleep at night and waking in the morning, disappointed to be there and resigned to existence.
— Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders
I don’t want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.
— Carrie Fisher
That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.
— Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Normally, in anything I do, I'm fairly miserable. I do it, and I get grumpy because there is a huge, vast gulf, this aching disparity, between the platonic ideal of the project that was living in my head, and the small, sad, wizened, shaking, squeaking thing that I actually produce.
— Neil Gaiman
I simply regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world created therein has different rules than my regular human world.
— Mindy Kaling, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?
Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place... Nothing outside you can give you any place... In yourself right now is all the place you've got.
— Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
I do not love men: I love what devours them.
— André Gide, Prometheus Illbound
There's more to life than love.
— Ramon Bautista, Bakit Hindi Ka Crush ng Crush Mo?
Desire makes life happen. Makes it matter. Makes everything worth it. Desire is life. Hunger to see the next sunrise or sunset, to touch the one you love, to try again. 'Hell would be waking up and wanting nothing,' he agrees.
— Karen Marie Moning, Shadowfever
It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.
— Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.
— Emil M. Cioran
Sometimes you have to be a bitch to get things done.
— Madonna
This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief.
— Jalaluddin Rumi
Everybody know death is inevitably coming, but it never fails to catch everybody by surprise everytime one is going
— Hlovate, Contengan Jalanan
It's been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home -- only the millions of last moments . . . nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.
— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
You have come a long way and have won many battles. Whenever you’re faced with a difficult or challenging situation, you’ll overcome it. Yes, you can.
— Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
People," Geralt turned his head, "like to invent monsters and monstrosities. Then they seem less monstrous themselves. When they get blind-drunk, cheat, steal, beat their wives, starve an old woman, when they kill a trapped fox with an axe or riddle the last existing unicorn with arrows, they like to think that the Bane entering cottages at daybreak is more monstrous than they are. They feel better then. They find it easier to live.
— Andrzej Sapkowski, The Last Wish
Crap.It's all crap.Living is crap.Life has no meaning.None. Nowhere to be found.Crap.Why doesn't anybody realize this?
— K-Ske Hasegawa, Ballad of a Shinigami, Vol. 1
There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad in a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight.
— Jack London, The Call of the Wild
He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.
— Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
Rise and rise again until lambs become lions
— Robin Hood
Mathematics expresses values that reflect the cosmos, including orderliness, balance, harmony, logic, and abstract beauty.
— Deepak Chopra
But I can hardly sit still. I keep fidgeting, crossing one leg and then the other. I feel like I could throw off sparks, or break a window--maybe rearrange all the furniture.
— Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment
— Jim Rohn
I don't judge people. It blurs out the center of my attention,my focus, myself.
— Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza
Live free or die.
— Lauren Oliver, Requiem
Running isn't a sport for pretty boys...It's about the sweat in your hair and the blisters on your feet. Its the frozen spit on your chin and the nausea in your gut. It's about throbbing calves and cramps at midnight that are strong enough to wake the dead. It's about getting out the door and running when the rest of the world is only dreaming about having the passion that you need to live each and every day with. It's about being on a lonely road and running like a champion even when there's not a single soul in sight to cheer you on. Running is all about having the desire to train and persevere until every fiber in your legs, mind, and heart is turned to steel. And when you've finally forged hard enough, you will have become the best runner you can be. And that's all that you can ask for.
— Paul Maurer, The Gift - A Runner's Story
Let others lead small lives, but not you.. Let others argue over small things, but not you.. Let others cry over small hurts, but not you.. Let others leave their future in someone else's hands, but not you.
— Jim Rohn
You won't lag behind, because you'll have the speed. You'll pass the whole gang and you'll soon take the lead.Wherever you fly, you'll be best of the best.Wherever you go, you will top all the rest.Except when you don't.Because, sometimes, you won't.
— Dr. Seuss, Oh, The Places You'll Go!
Good memories are like charms...Each is special. You collect them, one by one, until one day you look back and discover they make a long, colorful bracelet.
— James Patterson, Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas
LearningTo believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.
— Czesław Miłosz
Totally without hope one cannot live. To live without hope is to cease to live. Hell is hopelessness. It is no accident that above the entrance to Dante's hell is the inscription: "Leave behind all hope, you who enter here.
— Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope
If you don’t like the road you’re walking, start paving another one.
— Dolly Parton
The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., The Sirens of Titan
I finally figured out the only reason to be alive is to enjoy it.
— Rita Mae Brown
Life is like an onion; you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.
— Carl Sandburg
The way I define happiness is being the creator of your experience, choosing to take pleasure in what you have, right now, regardless of the circumstances, while being the best you that you can be.
— Leo Babauta
There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
— Alain de Botton
Believe in your infinite potential. Your only limitations are those you set upon yourself. Believe in yourself, your abilities and your own potential. Never let self-doubt hold you captive. You are worthy of all that you dream of and hope for.
— Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
It is not so much the major events as the small day-to-day decisions that map the course of our living. . . Our lives are, in reality, the sum total of our seemingly unimportant decisions and of our capacity to live by those decisions.
— Gordon B. Hinckley
One of the best ways to influence people is to make them feel important. Most people enjoy those rare moments when others make them feel important. It is one of the deepest human desires.
— Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
Keep your promises and be consistent. Be the kind of person others can trust.
— Roy T. Bennett
Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.
— Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics
I will be stronger than my sadness.
— Jasmine Warga, My Heart and Other Black Holes
Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf.
— Rabindranath Tagore
I can't. You can't rewrite the past.
— Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why
The Young Man came to the Old Man seeking counsel.I broke something, Old Man.How badly is it broken?It's in a million little pieces.I'm afraid I can't help you.Why?There's nothing you can do.Why?It can't be fixed.Why?It's broken beyond repair. It's in a million little pieces.
— James Frey, A Million Little Pieces
She liked being reminded of butterflies. She remembered being six or seven and crying over the fates of the butterflies in her yard after learning that they lived for only a few days. Her mother had comforted her and told her not to be sad for the butterflies, that just because their lives were short didn't mean they were tragic. Watching them flying in the warm sun among the daisies in their garden, her mother had said to her, see, they have a beautiful life. Alice liked remembering that.
— Lisa Genova, Still Alice
Life is only precious because it ends, kid. Take it from a god. You mortals don't know how lucky you are
— Rick Riordan, The Son of Neptune
What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.
— Arthur Schopenhauer
I know I wrote letters to people with no address on this earth, I know that you are dead. But I hear you. I hear all of you. We were here. Our lives matter.
— Ava Dellaira, Love Letters to the Dead
If you believe you can, you might. If you know you can, you will.
— Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
Our most significant opportunities will be found in times of greatest difficulty.
— Thomas S. Monson, Pathways To Perfection: Discourses Of Thomas S. Monson
While there's life, there's hope.
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
— John Berger
People die all the time. Life is a lot more fragile than we think. So you should treat others in a way that leaves no regrets. Fairly, and if possible, sincerely. It's too easy not to make the effort, then weep and wring your hands after the person dies.
— Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons
Find someone who has a life that you want and figure out how they got it. Read books, pick your role models wisely. Find out what they did and do it.
— Lana Del Rey
The only real limitation on your abilities is the level of your desires. If you want it badly enough, there are no limits on what you can achieve. 
— Brian Tracy
People don't always want to be with people. It gets tiring.
— Emma Donoghue, Room
I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Anything can happen in life, especially nothing.
— Michel Houellebecq, Platform
I need you to be happy. I need one of us to be happy.
— Holly Black, Red Glove
Do nothing, and nothing happens. Life is about decisions. You either make them or they're made for you, but you can't avoid them.
— Mhairi McFarlane, You Had Me At Hello
Life is short. Focus on what really matters most
—  you should change your priorities over time.
Opening up to the wrong person is like putting ammo in their hands.
— Lisa Kleypas, Sugar Daddy
I do not forget any good deed done to me & I do not carry a grudge for a bad one.
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
We are all ordinary. We are all boring. We are all spectacular. We are all shy. We are all bold. We are all heroes. We are all helpless. It just depends on the day.
— Brad Meltzer
Don't blow off another's candle for it won't make yours shine brighter.
— Jaachynma N.E. Agu, The Prince and the Pauper
I want to see beauty. In the ugly, in the sink, in the suffering, in the daily, in all the days before I die, the moments before I sleep.
— Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are
If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.
— Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude
Life has but one true charm: the charm of the game. But what if we’re indifferent to whether we win or lose?
— Charles Baudelaire
Each time we don't say what we wanna say, we're dying.
— Yoko Ono
The act of taking the first step is what separates the winners from the losers.
— Brian Tracy
To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is."; NEH 2003 Jefferson Lecturer interview profile]
— David McCullough
I wonder if I'll ever have to decide which is worse, life as we're living or no life at all.
— Susan Beth Pfeffer, Life As We Knew It
I was lost yesterday, I am found today and I will be forgotten tomorrow.
— Santosh Kalwar
Instead of focusing on how much you can accomplish, focus on how much you can absolutely love what you’re doing.
— Leo Babauta
Never stop. Never stop fighting. Never stop dreaming. And don’t be afraid of wearing your heart on your sleeve - in declaring the films that you love, the films that you want to make, the life that you’ve had, and the lives you can help reflect in cinema. For myself, for a long time… maybe I felt inauthentic or something, I felt like my voice wasn’t worth hearing, and I think everyone’s voice is worth hearing. So if you’ve got something to say, say it from the rooftops.
— Tom Hiddleston
If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live
— Lin Yutang
Demasiada cordura puede ser la peor de las locuras, ver la vida como es y no como debería de ser.Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.
— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Here's a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way, you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth. If it hasn't happened to you yet, consider yourself lucky. When it does, when one day you look around and nothing is recognizable, when you find yourself alone in a dark wood having lost the way, you may find it easier to blame it on someone else -- an errant lover, a missing father, a bad childhood -- or it may be easier to blame the map you were given -- folded too many times, out-of-date, tiny print -- but mostly, if you are honest, you will only be able to blame yourself.One day I'll tell my daughter a story about a dark time, the dark days before she was born, and how her coming was a ray of light. We got lost for a while, the story will begin, but then we found our way.
— Nick Flynn, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009
You know, life fractures us all into little pieces. It harms us, but it's how we glue those fractures back together that make us stronger.
— Carrie Jones, Entice
I want to keep my dreams, even bad ones, because without them, I might have nothing all night long.
— Joseph Heller
I used to wonder if it was God's plan that I should be alone for so much of my life. But I found peace. I found happiness within people and the world.
— Lana Del Rey
Songs and smells will bring you back to a moment in time more than anything else. It's amazing how much can be conjured with a few notes of a song or a solitary whiff of a room. A song you didn't even pay attention to at the time, a place that you didn't even know had a particular smell. I wonder what will someday bring back Dex and our few months together. Maybe the sound of Dido's voice. Maybe the scent of the Aveda shampoo I've been using all summer.
— Emily Giffin, Something Borrowed
Having perfected our disguise, we spend our lives searching for someone we don’t fool.
— Robert Brault
Doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the mext moment
— Oprah Winfrey
I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice.
— Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping
I know there is no straight road No straight road in this world Only a giant labyrinth Of intersecting crossroads
— Federico García Lorca
Contrary to what you may assume, I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist- that is, I don't make the mistake of thinking that the... cosmos... gives a damn one way or the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitoes, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy.
— H.P. Lovecraft
There's no benchmark for how life's "supposed" to happen. There is no ideal world for you to wait around for. The world is always just what it is now, it's up to you how you respond to it.
— Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies
People don’t like to think, if one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.
— Helen Keller
Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it in, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
There's a race of men that don't fit in, A race that can't sit still;So they break the hearts of kith and kin, And they roam the world at will.They range the field and rove the flood, And they climb the mountain's crest; Their's is the curse of the gypsy blood, And they don't know how to rest.
— Robert W. Service
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.
— Albert Camus
Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.
— Ray Bradbury
Because I'm selfish. I'm a coward. I'm the kind of girl who, when she might actually be of use, would run to stay alive and leave those who couldn't follow to suffer and die.
— Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire
There are two things we should always be 1. raw and 2. ready. When you are raw, you are always ready and when you are ready you usually realize that you are raw. Waiting for perfection is not an answer, one cannot say "I will be ready when I am perfect" because then you will never be ready, rather one must say "I am raw and I am ready just like this right now, how and who I am.
— C. JoyBell C.
Because if you've found meaning in your life, you don't want to go back. You want to go forward.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
To leave, after all, was not the same as being left.
— Anita Shreve, The Pilot's Wife
Real life is only ever just real life. Messy. What it means depends on how you look at it. The only thing you’ve got to do is find a way to live there.
— Patrick Ness, More Than This
I am afraid to show you who I really am, because if I show you who I really am, you might not like it--and that's all I got.
— Sabrina Ward Harrison, Spilling Open: The Art of Becoming Yourself
When all else fails, there's always delusion.
— Conan O'Brien
CALVIN:When I grow up I want to be an inventor. First I will invent a time machine. Then I'll come back to yesterday and take myself to tomorrow and skip this dumb assignment.
— Bill Watterson
Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there. 
— Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project
And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.
— Martin Amis, London Fields
Freedom is the only worthy goal in life. It is won by disregarding things that lie beyond our control.
— Epictetus
If you don't learn to laugh at life it'll surely kill you, that I know.
— Brom, The Child Thief
Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.
— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living
CALVIN:As usual goodness hardly puts up a fight.
— Bill Watterson
All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.
— Franz Kafka
Hate is nothing when weighed against survival. (Valentine)
— Cassandra Clare, City of Ashes
Dance above the surface of the world. Let your thoughts lift you into creativity that is not hampered by opinion.
— Red Haircrow
Distance sometimes lets you know who is worth keeping, and who is worth letting go.
— Lana Del Rey
A complete stranger has the capacity to alter the life of another irrevocably. This domino effect has the capacity to change the course of an entire world. That is what life is; a chain reaction of individuals colliding with others and influencing their lives without realizing it. A decision that seems miniscule to you, may be monumental to the fate of the world.
— J.D. Stroube, Caged by Damnation
You rely too much on brain. The brain is the most overrated organ.
— Woody Allen
You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.
— Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader
The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad" but "good vs. good.
— Leo Tolstoy
She should have done science, not spent all her time with her head in novels. Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on.
— Kate Atkinson, Case Histories
People are the most difficult thing in the world to change
— Gena Showalter, Oh My Goth
I've found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more chances, Be more active, Show up more often.
— Brian Tracy
If you cannot find peace within yourself, you will never find it anywhere else.
— Marvin Gaye
Those born to wealth, and who have the means of gratifying every wish, know not what is the real happiness of life, just as those who have been tossed on the stormy waters of the ocean on a few frail planks can alone realize the blessings of fair weather.
— Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.
— Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being
And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of treesand changing leaves.
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.
— Søren Kierkegaard
My hope still is to leave the world a bit better than when I got here.
— Jim Henson
We all make choices, but in the end our choices make us.
— Ken Levine
How easy it was to capitalize on a person’s own bent for self-destruction; how simple to nudge them into non-being, then to stand back and shrug and agree that it had been the inevitable result of a chaotic, catastrophic life.
— Robert Galbraith, The Cuckoo's Calling
Perhaps it would be simpler if you just did what you're told and didn't try to understand things.
— Terry Pratchett, Sourcery
Life keeps throwing me lemons because I make the best lemonade...
— King James Gadsden
We have to lie to ourselves to live. Otherwise, we'd go crazy.
— Patrick Ness, More Than This
So now you must choose... Are you a child who has not yet become world-weary? Or are you a philosopher who will vow never to become so? To children, the world and everything in it is new, something that gives rise to astonishment. It is not like that for adults. Most adults accept the world as a matter of course. This is precisely where philosophers are a notable exception. A philosopher never gets quite used to the world. To him or her, the world continues to seem a bit unreasonable - bewildering, even enigmatic. Philosophers and small children thus have an important faculty in common. The only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder…
— Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World
Love yourself. Forgive yourself. Be true to yourself. How you treat yourself sets the standard for how others will treat you.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!
— Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program
Whatever you believe with feeling becomes your reality.
— Brian Tracy
All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished.
— Anaïs Nin
Everyday is a bank account, and time is our currency. No one is rich, no one is poor, we've got 24 hours each.
— Christopher    Rice
The world is 3 days: As for yesterday, it has vanished along with all that was in it. As for tomorrow, you may never see it. As for today, it is yours, so work on it.
— al-Hasan al-Basri
Life is at its best when everything has fallen out of place, and you decide that you're going to fight to get them right, not when everything is going your way and everyone is praising you.
— Thisuri Wanniarachchi
Create your own miracles
—  do what you think you cannot do.
Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;Thy fate is the common fate of all,Into each life some rain must fall
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ballads and Other Poems
I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you, and that you will work with these stories... water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
It’s probably my job to tell you life isn’t fair, but I figure you already know that. So instead, I’ll tell you that hope is precious, and you’re right not to give up.
— C.J. Redwine, Defiance
What a waste my life would be without all the beautiful mistakes I've made.
— Alice Bag, Violence Girl: East L.A. Rage to Hollywood Stage, a Chicana Punk Story
Sometimes I go to God and say, "God, if Thou dost never answer another prayer while I live on this earth, I will still worship Thee as long as I live and in the ages to come for what Thou hast done already. God’s already put me so far in debt that if I were to live one million millenniums I couldn’t pay Him for what He’s done for me.
— A.W. Tozer
The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.
— Christopher McCandless
Being hurt inevitably breeds feelings of hatred towards your attacker. But when we hurt others, we have to deal with their hatred for us, and our own feelings of guilt. Knowing what it feels like to be hurt is exactly why we try to be kind to others. That’s what makes us humans.
— Masashi Kishimoto
If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.
— John von Neumann
All paths are present, always... and we can but choose among them.
— Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Chosen
I think, that if the world were a bit more like ComicCon, it would be a better place.
— Matt Smith
I believe that I am not responsible for the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of life, but that I am responsible for what I do with the life I've got.
— Hermann Hesse, Verliebt in die verrückte Welt: Betrachtungen, Gedichte, Erzählungen, Briefe
She supposed they were imperfections, those marks, but they didn't feel that way to her; they were a history, cut into his body: the map of a life of endless war.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Glass
Don't forget, a person's greatest emotional need is to feel appreciated.
— H. Jackson Brown Jr., Life's Little Instruction Book: 511 Suggestions, Observations, and Reminders on How to Live a Happy and Rewarding Life
In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.
— Ansel Adams
There are several ways to react to being lost. One is to panic: this was usually Valentina's first impulse. Another is to abandon yourself to lostness, to allow the fact that you've misplaced yourself to change the way you experience the world.
— Audrey Niffenegger, Her Fearful Symmetry
The connections we make in the course of a life--maybe that's what heaven is.
— Fred Rogers
The life you have left is a gift. Cherish it. Enjoy it now, to the fullest. Do what matters, now.
— Leo Babauta
Life takes a bit of time and a lot of relationship.
— William Paul Young, The Shack
Whatever happens to your body, your soul will survive, untouched...
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Those who have failed to work toward the truth have missed the purpose of living.
— Gautama Buddha
Sometimes you need a little crisis to get your adrenaline flowing and help you realize your potential.
— Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle
Muscles aching to work, minds aching to create - this is man.
— John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
If you fuel your journey on the opinions of others, you are going to run out of gas.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
Sometimes letting go is simply changing the labels you place on an event. Looking at the same event with fresh eyes.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
People who say that yesterday was better than today are ultimately devaluing their own existence.
— Karl Lagerfeld
A stumble may prevent a fall.
— Thomas Fuller
Keep your mind open. The meaning of things lies in how people perceive them. The same thing could mean different meanings to the same people at different times.
— Roy T. Bennett
Strange, I thought, how you can be living your dreams and your nightmares at the very same time.
— Ransom Riggs, Hollow City
In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak.
— Tom Robbins
To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.
— Bill Watterson
You’ll be fine. You’re 25. Feeling [unsure] and lost is part of your path. Don’t avoid it. See what those feelings are showing you and use it. Take a breath. You’ll be okay. Even if you don’t feel okay all the time.
— Louis C.K., Untitled 1
Try patting them on the back or shoulder and telling them everything is going to be fine. Lots of times when girls cry, they don't want you to fix the problem, they just want to be consoled.
— Kiera Cass, The Selection
It frightens me, the awful truth, of how sweet life can be...
— Bob Dylan
In fact no one recognizes the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it. It may well be that, in a moment of joy, one might sincerely believe that they are living that golden instant "now," even having lived such a moment before, but whatever they say, in one part of their hearts they still believe in the certainty of a happier moment to come. Because how could anyone, and particularly anyone who is still young, carry on with the belief that everything could only get worse: If a person is happy enough to think he has reached the happiest moment of his life, he will be hopeful enough to believe his future will be just as beautiful, more so.
— Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence
What kind of life can you have in a house without books?
— Sherman Alexie, Flight
Isn't it strange that I know you'd risk your life to save mine, but I don't even know what your favorite color is?
— Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire
It's paradoxical that the idea of living a long life appeals to everyone, but the idea of getting old doesn't appeal to anyone.
— Andy Rooney
The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.
— Sigmund Freud, Sexuality and the Psychology of Love
The past can teach us, nurture us, but it cannot sustain us. The essence of life is change, and we must move ever forward or the soul will wither and die.
— Susanna Kearsley, Mariana
I've been embarrassing myself since about birth.
— Phil Lester
I don't know how I look, but I know how I feel: Young. Goofy. Infinite.
— John Green, Paper Towns
Life's a freaking mess. In fact, I'm going to tell Sarah we need to start a new philosophical movement: messessentialism instead of existentialism: For those who revel in the essential mess that is life. Because Gram's right, there's not one truth ever, just a bunch of stories, all going on at once, in our heads, in our hearts, all getting in the way of each other. It's all a beautiful calamitous mess. It's like the day Mr. James took us into the woods and cried triumphantly, "That's it! That's it!" to the dizzying cacophony of soloing instruments trying to make music together. That is it.
— Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere
That is the hardest thing of all. It is much harder to judge yourself than to judge others. If you succeed in judging yourself, it's because you're truly a wise man.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Each new day is a blank page in the diary of your life. The secret of success is in turning that diary into the best story you possibly can.
— Douglas Pagels
If you haven't confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence, you have won even before you have started. 
— Marcus Garvey
One of the tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon - instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.
— Dale Carnegie
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (George Santayana)I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
A man must find time for himself. Time is what we spend our lives with. If we are not careful we find others spending it for us. . . . It is necessary now and then for a man to go away by himself and experience loneliness; to sit on a rock in the forest and to ask of himself, 'Who am I, and where have I been, and where am I going?' . . . If one is not careful, one allows diversions to take up one's time—the stuff of life.
— Carl Sandburg
I always knew, on some level, that I wouldn't live long. It's simply not written in my stars.
— Marie Lu, Champion
You see I kept asking myself then: why am I so stupid that if others are stupid—and I know they are—yet I won't be wiser?
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
There are a lot of things I wish I would have done, instead of just sitting around and complaining about having a boring life.
— Kurt Cobain
In dwelling, live close to the ground. In thinking, keep to the simple. In conflict, be fair and generous. In governing, don't try to control. In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely present.
— Lao Tzu
Life is full of grief, to exactly the degree we allow ourselves to love other people.
— Orson Scott Card, Shadow of the Giant
I knew that in the silence that followed, that anything could happen here. It might be too late again. I might have missed my chance. But I would at least know I tried, that I took my heart and extended my hand, whatever the outcome.
— Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever
Everyone thinks that courage is about facing death without flinching. But almost anyone can do that. Almost anyone can hold their breath and not scream for as long as it takes to die. True courage is about facing life without flinching. I don't mean the times when the right path is hard, but glorious at the end. I'm talking about enduring the boredom, the messiness, and the inconvenience of doing what is right.
— Robin Hobb, The Mad Ship
Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
— John Updike, A Month Of Sundays
It was a comet. The boy saw the comet and he felt as though his life had meaning. And when it went away, he waited his entire life for it to come back to him. It was more than just a comet because of what it brought to his life: direction, beauty, meaning. There are many who couldn't understand, and sometimes he walked among them. But even in his darkest hours, he knew in his heart that someday it would return to him, and his world would be whole again... And his belief in God and love and art would be re-awakened in his heart. The boy saw the comet and suddenly his life had meaning.
— Lucas Scott
If fate doesn't make you laugh, you just don't get the joke.
— Gregory David Roberts
To succeed in life, you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone and a funnybone.
— Reba McEntire
If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?
— Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism: The Essays
I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us.
— Hermann Hesse, Peter Camenzind
Dead people can be our heroes because they cant disappoint us later; they only improve over time, as we forget more and more about them.
— Veronica Roth, Four: A Divergent Story Collection
Whether we like it or not, the one justification for the existence of all religions is death, they need death as much as we need bread to eat.
— José Saramago, Death with Interruptions
Life is an adventure of passion, risk, danger, laughter, beauty, love; a burning curiosity to go with the action to see what it is all about, to go search for a pattern of meaning, to burn one's bridges because you're never going to go back anyway, and to live to the end.
— Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals
Life is a winking light in the darkness.
— Hayao Miyazaki
Don't wish it was easier wish you were better. Don't wish for less problems wish for more skills. Don't wish for less challenge wish for more wisdom
— Jim Rohn
When we fail to set boundaries and hold people accountable, we feel used and mistreated. This is why we sometimes attack who they are, which is far more hurtful than addressing a behavior or a choice.
— Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress.
— Peter Stone
It’s always about timing. If it’s too soon, no one understands. If it’s too late, everyone’s forgotten.
— Anna Wintour