c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Relationships grounded in mutual love, trust, caring and forgiveness. In all the ups and all the downs of life. Look closely, - who is really your family, and who in truth are just strangers in for the ride?
— Dancolin Flamiano
She's a people-mechanic and always knows when I'm malfunctioning.
— Jandy Nelson, I'll Give You the Sun
They had laughed. They had leaned on each other and laughed until the tears had come, while everything else--the cold, and where he'd go in it--was outside, for a while anyway.
— Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
When you divorce someone, you divorce their whole family.
— Liane Moriarty
She hesitated, wiping her hands off on her apron. “I’m not sure if I’ll be here when you get back. This place is a little—it’s a little much for me.”She didn’t have to tell him how it was. He had lived here for years, in a house that wanted to be silent until the silence was broken by a certain step and a certain voice, in a house holding its breath for someone’s return. If anyone held their breath long enough, they were dead.
— Sarah Rees Brennan, The Turn of the Story
...But would that be enough? Because at the moment it felt like it could never be enough. People needed more than a place to stay, more than a porch to sleep on. They needed a home, right? They needed love.
— Jennifer Brown, Torn Away
She had been to her Great-Aunt Willoughby’s before, and she knew exactly what to expect. She would be asked about her lessons, and how many marks she had, and whether she had been a good girl. I can’t think why grownup people don’t see how impertinent these questions are. Suppose you were to answer:“I’m the top of my class, auntie, thank you, and I am very good. And now let us have a little talk about you, aunt, dear. How much money have you got, and have you been scolding the servants again, or have you tried to be good and patient, as a properly brought up aunt should be, eh, dear?”Try this method with one of your aunts next time she begins asking you questions, and write and tell me what she says.
— E. Nesbit
The Canis Lupus, both wolf and man, were meant to be a family with one another. We gain strength through our bond with each other.
— Quinn Loftis, Out of the Dark
His eyes went again to the crucifix above his head, reflected in the mirror. The strained arms, the arched spine. All that effort to open the gates of heaven for us and we (he thought) probably spend out first hours among the heavenly hosts settling old scores with relatives.
— Alice McDermott, After This
Those who care about me will forget me but, those who love me will never let go of me.
— Oceangirlie14
...we spend more time gazing at luminous screens than into the eyes of our loved ones.
— Charlie Brooker
Now I know not anything that will contribute more to the furtherance of this good work than the bringing of family religion more into practice and reputation. Here the reformation must begin.
— Joel R. Beeke, A Puritan Theology: Doctrine for Life
Family quarrels have a total bitterness unmatched by others. Yet it sometimes happens that they also have a kind of tang, a pleasantness beneath the unpleasantness, based on the tacit understanding that this is not for keeps; that any limb you climb out on will still be there later for you to climb back.
— Mignon McLaughlin, The Complete Neurotic's Notebook
They had been Vince's brothers in a way, and Race was his son, and you couldn't drive a man's family to the earth and expect to live.
— Joe Hill, Throttle
Contentment isn’t something that just happens to you, Regan Lee, it’s a choice. You have to want exactly what you have.
— A.P. Jensen, Hell on Heels Christmas
It wasn't until the 1920s that a bare majority of children grew up in families where the father's labor purchased the family's provisions, while their mother did unpaid child care, elder care, and housework.The Great Depression and World War II disrupted this family form, but it roared back in the 1950s, when the percentage of wives and mothers who were supported entirely by their husbands' wages reached a high that has never been equaled, before or since.
— Stephanie Coontz
Is that what love is all about? Needing them to come back to you when they're away? To come home and keep you safe?
— Wally Lamb
Why one enjoys maternal grandparents more than the paternal ones, i have never understood, but it was like that for me.
— Aporva Kala, Life... Love... Kumbh...
It’s really hard to deny a kid who’s father has passed away. We all just wanted you to be happy so we messed that up. Your career wasn’t about the money. Not at first. It gave you both something big to do so you could stay busy and forget how much you missed your dad.” His heart twisted, and he whispered, “When I think of him...I don’t remember his face, but I do remember how much it hurt to have him simply there one day and gone the next...just gone.” Nan nodded. “Imagine how your mom felt. Your dad was the love of her life.
— Anne Eliot, Unmaking Hunter Kennedy
Most people like it when the pastor says, "family is priority." What they don't like very much is when the pastor actually chooses his own family as the priority over them.
— Carlos A.  Rodriguez, Designed For Inheritance: A Discovery of Sonship
I've seen enough family photos in enough homes to know that the term 'suitable for framing' should have a stricter definition.
— Alex Bosworth
Going to church is a beautiful act of humility. You are saying to the world, "I need God and His family.
— Carlos A.  Rodriguez, Designed For Inheritance: A Discovery of Sonship
How did Ixtel become real for me? The world is full of Ixtels who I can help without hurting my father. Why this one? How was it her suffering that touched me? Father. I feel connected to her through my father's actions. I feel an obligation to right my father's wrong. But why? Shouldn't my father's welfare come first? His welfare is my welfare. How does one weigh love for a parent against the urge to help someone in need? I feel like what is right should be done no matter what. This lack of doubt makes me feel inhuman. But it is not a question of my head for once. I hear the right note. I recognize the wrong note. Maybe the right action is a lake like this one, green and quiet and deep.
— Francisco X. Stork, Marcelo in the Real World
It was as if his fingers knew things, but they couldn't show him unless they were moving, touching. He had to think it was similar for carpenters and writers, and he knew it was the same for chefs.
— Laura Lippman, After I'm Gone
Was there anything quite so painful, so fraught with the possibilities of hurt, as gift giving within a family?
— Paul Russell, The Coming Storm
Anyone hurts my family, I slap them down. A man does for family. That's one of the rules I got from my pa. His rules for being a man.
— Allan Dare Pearce, Hitler Burns Detroit
Maybe this is a second doctoral program: advanced learning about life, death, marriage, mothering, family, faith, patience, prayer. My degree will be 'Doctor of Life,' and I will be in good company. So many of us earn our 'Doctor of Life' degrees.
— Christina G. Hibbert Psy.D.
Sometimes we take our love ones for granted that we forget to show them how much they meant to us until they’re gone. Sometimes we allow the negative energy from a few disputes we had with each other to conceal the many joys we had with one another and allow it to dictate our behaviors. But always remember that true love comes with no condition so show your love those who have always been there for you while they’re still alive because crying next to their caskets is meaningless if you never show them how much you love them.
— John Yang aka Private83
In any East Asian culture, you will find that women have a very tangible power within the household. This is often rejcted by non-Asian feminists who argue that it is not real power, but.. Japanese women look at the low status attributed to the domestic labor of housewives in North America and feel that this amounts to a denigration of a fundamental social role - whether it is performed by a man or a woman.
— Sandra Buckley, Broken Silence: Voices of Japanese Feminism
He believed a man should never be sober but never be drunk. And he believed in watching out for family, even if you had to stay sober for a few hours; it was that important.
— Allan Dare Pearce, Paris in April
Often, to keep the family together, the woman will accept repeated beatings and rapes, emotional battering and verbal degredation; she will be debased and ashamed but she will stick it out, or when she runs he will kill her. Ask the politicians who exude delight when they advocate for the so-called traditional family how many women are beaten and children raped when there is no man in the family. Zero is such a perfect and encouraging number, but who, among politicians in male-supremacist cultures, can count that high?
— Andrea Dworkin, Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation
Shame is a powerful feeling. There is a tremendous difference between making a mistake and believing you are a mistake...If I don’t see myself as being a mistake then it is I who must take responsibility and I am not ready to accept that.
— David W. Earle
Others hide from being real by filling the air with words; the more words they throw out, the less actual communication happens and they are left with only an illusion of connection. This is the intimacy they so ardently seek but with these coping skills find so elusive.
— David W. Earle
Mature adults gravitate toward new values and understandings, not just rehashing and blind acceptance of past patterns and previous learning. This is an ongoing process and maturity demands lifelong learners.
— David W. Earle
The more severe the dysfunction you experienced growing up, the more difficult boundaries are for you.
— David W. Earle
The greater the pain associated with love, the more likely a person is to be attracted to others who will inflict this pain…for isn’t this what love is? Hurt people tend to hurt other people.
— David W. Earle
It is one thing to know about your dysfunctional habits but quite another to change them.
— David W. Earle
I am releasing my own demons of times gone by and seizing the opportunity to find my own corner, my own fortress, my own calm and peace. Life is not unfair... Life is good. In the end, you only have yourself to search for and find…
— Trish Kaye Lleone, Finding Anna: A Memoir: The True Story of Child Sexual Abuse
I am releasing my own demons of times gone by and seizing the opportunity to find my own corner, my own fortress, my own calm and peace. Life is not unfair.
— Trish Kaye Lleone, Finding Anna: A Memoir: The True Story of Child Sexual Abuse
TV families and your own are hard to tell apart, except your isn't interrupted every six minutes by commercials and theirs don't get bogged down into nothingness, a state where nothing happens, no skit, no zany visitors, no outburst on the laugh track, nothing at all but boredom and a lost feeling, especially when you get up in the morning and the moon is still shining and men are making noisy bets on the first tee.
— John Updike, Rabbit at Rest
Perhaps you'd like, you gentle fellow, To hear what I'm prepared to sayOn "kinfolk" and their implications?Well, here's my view of close relations:They're people whom we're bound to prize, To honor, love, and idolize,And following the old tradition,To visit come the Christmas feast, Or send a wish by mail at least;All other days they've our permission,To quite forget us if they please-So grant them, God, long life and ease!
— Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin
If you are looking for love under rocks or bringing home water moccasins, you might be confusing love and pain.
— David W. Earle
And now at the airport, after shaking hands with everybody, waving good-bye, I think about all the different ways we leave people in this world. Cheerily waving good-bye to some at airports, knowing we'll never see each other again. Leaving others on the side of the road, hoping that we will. Finding my mother in my father's story and saying good-bye before before I have a chance to know her better.
— Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
As a parent who raised his children in dysfunction, I know the parental wounds my children received were not intentional; often they were my best expression of love, sometimes coming out sideways, not as I intended.
— David W. Earle
Sitting on the hot seat of change requires much courage, patience, and persistence.
— David W. Earle
If we want to improve, first we have to recognize our own maladaptive coping skills, called codependency, then change.
— David W. Earle
Change will not successfully happen unless the emotional component is solved.
— David W. Earle
The simplest way to enjoy lasting success in life is to strike a balance between your career and family. If one must suffer, never it be your family.
— Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
Putting labels on others creates a black hole of disregard where judgment thrives and schisms deepen.
— David W. Earle
Amid the joy of raising children will be some of the hardest work you’ll ever do.
— Elizabeth George, One-Minute Inspirations for Women
Change is hard, difficult, painful, and often messy
— David W. Earle
Being real is being true to you.
— David W. Earle
We ardently desire to take down our masks and say to the world, “This is who I am…and I am okay.” This is simple…not easy.
— David W. Earle
REAL people do not have to lie, exaggerate, or brag for they are self-contained in self-understanding and acceptance of themselves. REAL people can make a mistake knowing that even when they do, it is only a mistake and just because the outcome was not to their liking, they know…THEY are not a mistake. REAL have the attitude this is who I am…and I am good enough, right now…just as I am. People who have chosen REAL have already clicked their heals together and returned home.
— David W. Earle
She will always be etched in my being, like thread sewn through the fibers of my very soul.
— Trish Kaye Lleone, Finding Anna: A Memoir: The True Story of Child Sexual Abuse
With so much trauma and drama in everyday life, the beauty of peace and solitude beckons like an oasis in a barren wasteland.
— Jo Ann V. Glim, Begotten with Love: Every Family Has Its Story
It was the bitterest irony; I came to Washington to fight for "the family" and destroyed mine in the process.
— David Kuo, Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction
And now at the airport, after shaking hands with everybody, waving good-bye, I think about all the different ways we leave people in this world. Cheerily waving good-bye to some at airports, knowing we'll never see each other again. Leaving others on the side of the road, hoping that we will. Finding my mother in my father's story and saying good-bye before I have a chance to know her better.
— Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
Home is where I built my life.- Henry Morbower
— Lauren Oliver
When you journey inwardly exploring yourself, a sense of personal trust begins.
— David W. Earle
Tate lays her head on my arm, and we both watch her.Our daughter.I love you so much, Sam.I’m looking down at the perfection we created when it hits me.It’s all worth it.It’s the beautiful moments like these that make up for the uglylove.
— Colleen Hoover, Ugly Love
Families living in dysfunction seldom have healthy boundaries. Dysfunctional families have trouble knowing where they stop and others begin.
— David W. Earle
Boundaries represent awareness, knowing what the limits are and then respecting those limits.
— David W. Earle
who knows you better than your own brother?
— Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
The more dysfunctional, the more some family members seek to control the behavior of others.
— David W. Earle
It is not by blood, anyhow, that man's true continuity is established: Alexander's direct heir is Caesar, and not the frail infant born of a Persian princess in an Asiatic citadel; Epaminondas, dying without issue, was right to boast that he had Victories for daughters.
— Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian
When we were together before, the world was small to us, but as you grew bigger to life and the world became desirous to living, we became smaller to each other.
— Anthony Liccione
How do you look at your best friend the same way again when you know the flavor of his mouth?
— J.M. Stewart, Risking It All
To increase the odds of being thanked, some people compliment some people; some make kids.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana, N for Nigger: Aphorisms for Grown Children and Childish Grown-ups
Under this aura of perfection he knows how flawed he really is but his intact denial system keeps this awareness suppressed in the far recesses of his mind.
— David W. Earle
I'm going to be a person who writes stories.I never told mom and dad how much I loved them.I wanna be someone who can tell a lot of people how much I love them.
— Kimama Aoboshi, Kinoko Inu - Mushroom Pup, Vol. 1
The crux of our conflict lay in the fact that we each couldn't be who we wanted the other to be.
— Janet Mock, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love  So Much More
Technology has transformed the world into a global village. And communities, families, friends, etc., into local islands.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana, N for Nigger: Aphorisms for Grown Children and Childish Grown-ups
I was so done with looking at life through the eyes of beer-drinking cheese-heads. I wanted to go on that mission trip and look through the eyes of someone from a different culture and see what they saw. I wanted to meet people who didn’t crush the can of what they just drank on their forehead.-Rebecca Meyer, Crooked Lines
— Holly Michael
Teenagers can spot hypocrisy a mile away and here I was telling them how to cope when they witnessed the shambles of my own life and how I was living.
— David W. Earle
For God’s sake, man!” Frederick Carlyle bellowed across the room. “At least wait until you’re alone before you kiss her, if you please! Remember, her family is watching you, and we haven’t had our dinner yet!
— Stephanie Burgis, Courting Magic
Ask very little but ask of everyone.
— Michael Lerman
Frankly, accepting the family's unique qualities has done wonders to help my own sanity.
— Carly Philips, Summer Lovin'
The two families really don't like each other, except for all us younger cousins because we don't know any better.
— Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
In Hawaii, family showed itself in the way that my siblings never dared to call one another "half" anything. We were fully brothers and sisters. Family appeared in the pile of rubber slippers and sandals that crowded the entrance to everyone's home; in the kisses we gave when we greeted one another and said good-bye; in the graceful choreography of Grandma hanging the laundry on the clothesline; in the inclusiveness of calling anyone older auntie or uncle whether or not they were relatives.
— Janet Mock, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love  So Much More
Chaos limits the free-flow of love and becomes a roadblock to what family members want most and sadly, it becomes the normal for the family.
— David W. Earle
When someone obtains peace and serenity, this shines a bright spotlight on others’ own unhappiness making their discomfort even more apparent.
— David W. Earle
If no one has boundaries…how can there be any transgression?
— David W. Earle
Winner: Getting up more times than life knocks you down
— Kat Kaelin, LONE WALK FROM PANTHER CREEK: BASED ON A TRUE STORY - Dirty Little Secrets - Reader Discretion Advised
Englishmen who came here had the spirit of close kinsmen in all they did
—  often were blood related and moved from place to place in clans strengthened by civic and ecclesiastical covenants.
And as Rhonda told the story, she thought: this is how the past gets passed down. This is how memories are made. Half-invented, embellished, given a touch of whimsy. Daniel would be a saint now that he was dead. A beautiful man who made his child wings.
— Jennifer McMahon, Island of Lost Girls
The trouble with cousins, Lizabeth thought, was that they knew all about you, even your allergies.
— Erika Tamar, Lizabeth's Story
Swirling in a squirrel cage of perpetual motion, the head-committee meets, argues, votes out the guidance available from emotions, and successfully keeps serenity at bay and chaos close at hand.
— David W. Earle
Children naturally believe without question and absorb knowledge at an incredible rate; since there is no other frame of reference; they believe their parental reality, true or false.
— David W. Earle
He reasoned, even as a young man, that traditions may linger as he walked though the oracles of time. In later years he thought his mind may one day blur, should he survive to an old age, but as he spread ink on paper, transmitted and shared with those who came after him his experiences, his own great adventures, he believed perhaps they, like he, would give way to pause to reflect on how...hard it always was to open his eyes to begin a new day...
— Andrew Coster, TRUE DAWN FALSE DAWN: GLOBAL COLLAPSE OF THE DO-RE-MI
More often than not, people who are obsessed with their desires and feelings are generally unhappier in life vs. people that refocus their attention on service to others or a righteous cause. Have you ever heard someone say their life sucked because they fed the homeless? Made their children laugh? Or, bought a toy for a needy child at Christmas time?
— Shannon L. Alder
All roads out of hell lead home.
— Shannon L. Alder
People pleasing doesn't allow you to receive.
— Abiola Abrams, The Sacred Bombshell Handbook of Self-Love
I've misplaced it all, but I can't seem to lose my brother. It's a priceless gift--to have his love at a time when I've done nothing to earn it.
— Emm Cole, Keeping Merminia
Animals are precious gifts offering unconditional love.
— Kat Kaelin, GEORGIA'S ORCHARD:: Love of a Lopeared Dog
Those who choose differently must suffer the consequences. They must take the pain their decisions bring.
— Sachin Kundalkar, Cobalt Blue
We were an imperfect family. I knew that. But at last we were on each other's side, dug in with a new and more profound commitment. Our happiness was hard won, it was ours and I was determined to keep us whole.
— Dorothea Benton Frank, The Hurricane Sisters
He could hardly breathe at the though of his son and Quintana in Sorel with no one to protect them.
— Melina Marchetta, Froi of the Exiles
Appeasers will always try to get the least dangerous person to bend to the most dangerous person. This is one of the main problems in dysfunctional relationships. The more mature and rational you are the more you are victimized because, they are aware that you're not going to be as aggressive, destructive, or possibly as abusive and so you are the one who has to bend. You're the one who has to change and this constant rapping of rational people's souls around the prickly irrationalities of other people are what appeasers are constantly doing.
— Stefan Molyneux
Whatever happens, happens for the best.' That's how any domestic counselling starts in a Marathi family. Everyone in every family has an inner psychiatrist who rises to the occasion with some home-made mottos, a few lines from Jagjit Singh ghazal. An older generation may quote Tukaram but underlying all this is the bedrock phase: Whatever happens, happens for the best.
— Sachin Kundalkar, Cobalt Blue
A family is not decided by blood but by bonds.
— Cammy
After a certain age, and even if we develop in quite different ways, the more we become ourselves, the more our family traits are accentuated.
— Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah
Suspense, murder, revenge, scandal; a delicious cocktail party.
— Kat Kaelin, LONE WALK FROM PANTHER CREEK: BASED ON A TRUE STORY - Dirty Little Secrets - Reader Discretion Advised
And when he got home he started on Mumma. He hated her then, because in her fatness and untidiness and drabness she reminded him of what he himself was when he was sober.
— Ruth Park, The Harp in the South
People don’t break up because someone’s family is a little . . . messy. If that were the case, no one would ever get married.
— Laura Dave, The Divorce Party
All I can tell you is that every family on the planet is dysfunctional and we celebrate occasions as generously as we know how to do. We are all doing our best to appear grateful to have one another. Weren't appearances worth something?
— Dorothea Benton Frank, The Hurricane Sisters
Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been." _Mark Twain (Author)
— Kat Kaelin, LONE WALK FROM PANTHER CREEK: BASED ON A TRUE STORY - Dirty Little Secrets - Reader Discretion Advised
Leave your mark on the world by leaving behind a child who grows up to love and serve the Lord.
— Elizabeth George
I felt like a trophy child, someone he had around to show off. It felt like it was more important that his daughter was perfect—but, I was his daughter and I was neither of those things. I worked hard to get my grades, and I tried so hard to meet his expectations, but I failed. Over and over again, I fell short. I didn't measure up. That feeling never faded.
— H.M. Ward, Backdraft
I just wished they'd see Mari, their daughter. I wished they saw how much I liked art and how much I didn't want to dedicate my life to something I wasn't passionate about.
— H.M. Ward, Backdraft
I no longer want to see others as humans. I want to learn to see others as brothers, sisters, mothers, & fathers.
— Rabbi Shaul David Judelman
The two of us sat back down in the swing and continued sitting side-by-side the first Day of June; moving to-and-fro in the swing on the front porch. A soothing summer breeze caught a ride on the south wind and blew across our faces. I enjoyed endless days and nights sitting, sighing, lying, walking, and talking alongside my best friend..." Lone Walk From Panther Creek
— Kat Kaelin
I replayed the moment I first saw him at the picnic throughout our years together. As corny as it may sound, from the first glance we shared near the cake stand at the picnic, the two of us remained connected like the icing on one of those made from scratch cakes...
— Kat Kaelin
You think if you don’t talk about it, you can just pretend everything is all right? Everything is not all right. Not with us, not with your parents, not with anything today. And if you let yourself go anywhere real with it, you have to acknowledge it.
— Laura Dave, The Divorce Party
The goal of priestly ministry is to do good to the souls of men.
— Samuel E. Waldron, A Man as Priest in His Home
God’s beautiful woman spares no effort to provide the best she can for her beloved family.
— Elizabeth George, Beautiful in God's Eyes: The Treasures of the Proverbs 31 Woman
Spoil all the walls with sellotape marks.
— Sachin Kundalkar, Cobalt Blue
June is gazing at Michael with a glow about her face, a well of feeling for her husband. Leo and Stephen are also looking at their father, Leo's expression sympathetic, nearly teary. The three of them as they look at Michael are like magnets, the ties drawing each one to him nearly visible. This is what family means, Nora thinks.
— Maya Lang, The Sixteenth of June
He reasoned, even as a young man, that traditions may linger as he walked though the oracles of time. In later years he thought his mind may one day blur, should he survive to an old age, but as he spread ink on paper, transmitted and shared with those who came after him his experiences, his own grHe reasoned, even as a young man, that traditions may linger as he walked though the oracles of time. In later years he thought his mind may one day blur, should he survive to an old age, but as he spread ink on paper, transmitted and shared with those who came after him his experiences, his own great adventures, he believed perhaps they, like he, would give way to pause to reflect on how...hard it always was to open his eyes to begin a new day. eat adventures, he believed perhaps they, like he, would give way to pause to reflect on how goddamned hard it always was to open his eyes to begin a new day.
— Andrew Coster, TRUE DAWN FALSE DAWN: GLOBAL COLLAPSE OF THE DO-RE-MI
... a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.
— George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet.
— Mahatma Gandhi
I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.
— Terry Pratchett
A man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Autocrat of the Breakfast Table
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
— George Orwell, 1984
My mind," he said, "rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four
It's all in the mind.
— George Harrison
The boldness of his mind was sheathed in a scabbard of politeness.
— Dumas Malone, Jefferson the Virginian
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
The mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart knows what the heart knows
— Stephen King
Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.
— James Joyce
At that moment I had no mind to change, or not change, or throw against the nearest wall.
— James Patterson
It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable.
— Seneca, The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca: Essays and Letters
I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.
— Vladimir Nabokov
The mind of man is capable of anything.
— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
All problems are illusions of the mind.
— Eckhart Tolle, Practicing the Power of Now: Essential Teachings, Meditations, and Exercises from the Power of Now
The face is a picture of the mind with the eyes as its interpreter.
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
There never can be a man so lost as one who is lost in the vast and intricate corridors of his own lonely mind, where none may reach and none may save.
— Isaac Asimov, Pebble in the Sky
Most people believe the mind to be a mirror, more or less accurately reflecting the world outside them, not realizing on the contrary that the mind is itself the principal element of creation.
— Rabindranath Tagore
Where to look if you've lost your mind?
— Bernard Malamud, The Fixer
You must read, you must persevere, you must sit up nights, you must inquire, and exert the utmost power of your mind. If one way does not lead to the desired meaning, take another; if obstacles arise, then still another; until, if your strength holds out, you will find that clear which at first looked dark.
— Giovanni Boccaccio
Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
— Albert Einstein
Open your eyes, train your ears, use your head. If a mind you have, then use it while you can.
— Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Autocrat of the Breakfast Table
I'm an insomniac, my mind works the night shift.
— Pete Wentz, Gray
Not thinking about anything is Zen. Once you know this, walking, sitting, or lying down, everything you do is Zen.
— Bodhidharma, The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma
The mind is just like a muscle - the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets and the more it can expand.
— Idowu Koyenikan, Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability
When the mind is exhausted of images, it invents its own.
— Gary Snyder, Earth House Hold
The very idea of making shoes by hand boggled her mind.
— Scott Westerfeld, Uglies
...grief can derange even the strongest and most disciplined of minds.
— George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
The only way for you to keep your mind straight is to run from those who would confuse you.
— Kristin Cashore, Graceling
You're wrong. The mind is not like raindrops. It does not fall from the skies, it does not lose itself among other things. If you believe in me at all, then believe this: I promise you I will find it. Everything depends on this." "I believe you," she whispers after a moment. "Please find my mind.
— Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
There are some things your mind has been hiding from you.
— Obert Skye, Leven Thumps and the Gateway to Foo
Sorry... my mind was wandering... one time it went all the way to Venus and ordered a meal I couldn’t pay for.
— Steven Wright
As every divided kingdom falls, so every mind divided between many studies confounds and saps itself.
— Leonardo da Vinci
Rise above the deceptions and temptations of the mind. This is your duty. You are born for this only
—  all other duties are self-created and self-imposed owing to ignorance.
To preserve the silence within--amid all the noise. To remain open and quiet, a moist humus in the fertile darkness where the rain falls and the grain ripens--no matter how many tramp across the parade ground in whirling dust under an arid sky.
— Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings
Passion can transform the mind, body and spirit...Passion can align you with the wisdom of nature and the power of what is in your heart.
— JoLynne Valerie
Unfathomable mind: now beacon, now sea.
— Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
Seemingly minor yet persistent things penetrate the mind over time making it difficult to ever realize the impact; hence, though quite unfortunate, the most dangerous forms of corruption are those that are subtle and below the radar.
— Criss Jami, Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile
Nonsense is that which does not fit into the prearranged patterns which we have superimposed on reality...Nonsense is nonsense only when we have not yet found that point of view from which it makes sense.
— Gary Zukav
Live to learn to love. Learn to love to live. Love to live to learn so that you may live the life that you yearn.
— Rico Dasheem
Your mind can be either your prison or your palace. What you make it is yours to decide
— Bernard Kelvin Clive, Your Dreams Will Not Die
Books open your mind, broaden your mind, and strengthen you as nothing else can.
— William Feather
Use them with care, and use them with respect as to the transformations they can achieve, and you have an extraordinary research tool. Go banging about with a psychedelic drug for a Saturday night turn-on, and you can get into a really bad place, psychologically. Know what you're using, decide just why you're using it, and you can have a rich experience. They're not addictive, and they're certainly not escapist, either, but they're exceptionally valuable tools for understanding the human mind, and how it works.
— Alexander Shulgin, Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story
Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
— G.K. Chesterton
It is more than probable that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the merely general reader, an adequate idea of that nervous intensity of interest with which, in my case, the powers of meditation (not to speak technically) busied and buried themselves, in the contemplation of even the most ordinary objects of the universe.
— Edgar Allan Poe
You have to wait for your mind to catch up with whatever it is it’s working on
—  then you can write a novel.
Most of us go through each day looking for what we saw yesterday And, not surprisingly, that is what we find.
— James A. Kitchens
The mind picks some very bad times to take a walk doesn't it?
— Jeff Lindsay, Darkly Dreaming Dexter
I thought about the relentless thought-processing, soul-devouring machine that is my brain, and wondered how on earth I was ever going to master it. Then I remembered that line from Jaws and couldn't help smiling: 'We're gonna need a bigger boat.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
Mirrors are perpetually deceitful. They lie and steal your true self. They reveal only what your mind believes it sees
— Dee Remy, There Once Was A Boy
The mind can never be satisfied.
— Wallace Stevens
Anyone who is considered funny will tell you, sometimes without even your asking, that deep inside they are very serious, neurotic, introspective people.
— Wendy Wasserstein
God has mercifully ordered that the human brain works slowly; first the blow, hours afterwards the bruise.
— Walter de la Mare, The Return
True Christian fortitude consists in strength of mind, through grace, exerted in two things; in ruling and suppressing the evil and unruly passions and affections of the mind; and in steadfastly and freely exerting and following good affections and dispositions, without being hindered by sinful fear or the opposition of enemies... Though Christian fortitude appears in withstanding and counteracting the enemies that are without us; yet it much more appears in resisting and suppressing the enemies that are within us; because they are our worst and strongest enemies and have greatest advantage against us. The strength of the good soldier of Jesus Christ appears in nothing more than in steadfastly maintaining the holy calm, meekness, sweetness, and benevolence of his mind, amidst all the storms, injuries, strange behaviour, and surprising acts and events of this evil and unreasonable world.
— Jonathan Edwards, The Religious Affections
It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.
— René Descartes, Discourse on Method
The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage--who can tell?--buttruth--truth stripped of its cloak of time.
— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Because memory and sensations are so uncertain, so biased, we always rely on a certain reality-call it an alternate reality-to prove the reality of events. To what extent facts we recognize as such really are as they seem, and to what extent these are facts merely because we label them as such, is an impossible distinction to draw. Therefore, in order to pin down reality as reality, we need another reality to relativize the first. Yet that other reality requires a third reality to serve as its grounding. An endless chain is created within our consciousness, and it is the very maintenance of this chain that produces the sensation that we are actually here, that we ourselves exist.
— Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun
Lose your mind and come to your senses.
— Frederick Salomon Perls
The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.
— Michel de Montaigne, The Essays: A Selection
In the age of technology there is constant access to vast amounts of information. The basket overflows; people get overwhelmed; the eye of the storm is not so much what goes on in the world, it is the confusion of how to think, feel, digest, and react to what goes on.
— Criss Jami, Venus in Arms
It is of great importance, when we begin to practise prayer, not to let ourselves be frightened by our own thoughts.
— Teresa of Ávila, The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila by Herself
Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin.
— Hermann Hesse
Joy blooms where minds and hearts are open.
— Jonathan Lockwood Huie
That's the way the mind works: the brain is genetically disposed towards organization, yet if not controlled, will link even the most imagerial fragment to another on the flimsiest pretense and in the most freewheeling manner, as if it takes a kind of organic pleasure in creative association, without regards to logic or chronological sequence.
— Tom Robbins, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates
I thought about having a proper room,breathing life into it, and nobody minding.
— Jenny Valentine, Broken Soup
An active mind cannot exist in an inactive body.
— George S. Patton Jr.
Part of me wanted this more than anything else in the world—to have someone to hang out with, be like everyone else for a while. The rest of me screamed to get the hell out of there, not to get sucked in.
— Rachel Ward, Numbers
Effort within the mind further limits the mind, because effort implies struggle towards a goal and when you have a goal, a purpose, an end in view, you have placed a limit on the mind.
— Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do
The word 'innocence' means a mind that is incapable of being hurt.
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
Always, the eye sees more than the mind can comprehend, and we go through life self-blinded to much that lies before us. We want a simple world, but we live in a magnificently complex one, and rather than open ourselves to it, we perceive the world through filters that make it less daunting.
— Dean Koontz, Relentless
The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.
— Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
I would not bend.They could not make me Pliable.My mind was strong.My mind was mine.
— Janice Hardy, Blue Fire
My mind may be sober, but my confidence is high!
— Habeeb Akande
Having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind... The body encloses the mind in a fortress; before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up.
— Marcel Proust
If the mind falls asleep, awaken it. Then if it starts wandering, make it quiet. If you reach the state where there is neither sleep nor movement of mind, stay still in that, the natural (real) state.
— Ramana Maharshi, The Collected Works of Ramana Maharshi
Man's mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild.
— James Allen, As a Man Thinketh
O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet is nothing at all - what is it?And where did it come from?And why?
— Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
Leaving out appraisal also would render the biological description of the phenomena of emotion vulnerable to the caricature that emotions without an appraisal phase are meaningless events. It would be more difficult to see how beautiful and amazingly intelligent emotions can be, and how powerfully they can solve problems for us.
— António R. Damásio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain
The trouble with men is that they have limited minds. That's the troublewith women, 
— Joanna Russ
Your future is only as bright as your mind is open.
— Rich Wilkins
If you are ready for the secret, you already possess one half of it,therefore, you will readily recognize the other half the moment it reaches your mind.
— Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich: The Landmark Bestseller - Now Revised and Updated for the 21st Century
Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Since the beginning of time, people have been trying to change the world so that they can be happy. This hasn’t ever worked, because it approaches the problem backward. What The Work gives us is a way to change the projector—mind—rather than the projected. It’s like when there’s a piece of lint on a projector’s lens. We think there’s a flaw on the screen, and we try to change this person and that person, whomever the flaw appears on next. But it’s futile to try to change the projected images. Once we realize where the lint is, we can clear the lens itself. This is the end of suffering, and the beginning of a little joy in paradise.
— Byron Katie
. . . in seclusion, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that, her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and must and will that reverse the appointed order of their Maker . . .
— Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
A brain was only capable of what it could conceive, and it couldn't conceive what it had never experienced
— Graham Greene, Brighton Rock
We move between two darknesses.
— E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature.
— John Henry Newman
Thoughts do more. Words to much. Actions do much more.
— Israelmore Ayivor
remembering is a great invention of the mind, and if you try hard enough you can remember anything, whether it really happened or not.
— Rodman Philbrick, Freak the Mighty
As Lucretius says: 'Thus ever from himself doth each man flee.' But what does he gain if he does not escape from himself? He ever follows himself and weighs upon himself as his own most burdensome companion. And so we ought to understand that what we struggle with is the fault, not of the places, but of ourselves
— Seneca, The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca: Essays and Letters
Mattie sat at the table, obsessing, orbiting around herself. She was sick of her worried, hostile mind. It would have killed her long before, she felt, if it hadn't needed the transportation.
— Anne Lamott, Blue Shoe
Normally we divide the external world into that which we consider to be good or valuable, bad or worthless, or neither. Most of the time these discriminations are incorrect or have little meaning. For example, our habitual way of categorizing people as friends, enemies, and strangers depending on how they make us feel is both incorrect and a great obstacle to developing impartial love for all living beings. Rather than holding so tightly to our discriminations of the external world, it would be much more beneficial if we learned to discriminate between valuable and worthless states of mind.
— Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, Transform Your Life: A Blissful Journey
I have set off and found that there is no end to even the simplest journey of the mind. I begin, and straight away a hundred alternative routes present themselves. I choose one, no sooner begin, than a hundred more appear. Every time I try to narrow down my intent I expand it, and yet those straits and canals still lead me to the open sea, and then I realize how vast it all is, this matter of the mind. I am confounded by the shining water and the size of the world.
— Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry
Keep your innocence and ignorance aside, and expose yourself to dangerous situations, and understand the deeper secrets of life.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
Moods are not to be confused with emotions. Moods will dispose you to having an emotion. Certain moods you're more likely to get angry than others, as we all know, but emotion is not the same as mood. Emotions, I think, always have to do with agitated forms of desire. Whenever you're in an emotional state, you have some sort of agitated desire. So, emotions are fairly special -- I am not always in some sort of emotional state or other, but I think I am always in some mood or other.
— John Rogers Searle
In that little pocket-size world of his, he was the absolute master.
— Eileen Chang
Thinking of the stars night after night I begin to realize 'The stars are words' and all the innumerable worlds in the Milky Way are words, and so is this world too. And I realize that no matter where I am, whether in a little room full of thought, or in this endless universe of stars and mountains, it’s all in my mind.
— Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveler