To perceive is to suffer.
– Aristotle
Category: Archived Quotes
Understand that the right to choose your own path is a sacred privilege. Use it. Dwell in possibility.
– Oprah Winfrey
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
– Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere’s Fan
Hope is the companion of power and the mother of success, for those of us who hope strongest have within us the gift of miracles.
– Sydney Bremer
What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us. And when we bring what is within us out into the world, miracles happen.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
The essence of romance is uncertainty.
– Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Watch your thoughts, they become words;
Watch your words, they become actions;
Watch your actions, they become habits;
Watch your habits, they become character;
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.
– Frank Outlaw, 18 May 1977
Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
– Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Vol. 1: 1931-1934)
When I consider everything that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment;
That this huge stage presenteth naught but shows
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment.
– William Shakespeare, an excerpt from “Sonnet 15”
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
– William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”, The Pickering Manuscript
I have loved badly, loved the great
Too soon, withdrawn my words too late;
And eaten in an echoing hall
Alone and from a chipped plate
The words that I withdrew too late.
– Edna St. Vincent Millay, Poem from Huntsman, What Quarry? (1939)
To love is to risk not being loved in return. To hope is to risk pain. To try is to risk failure, but risks must be taken, because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.
– Leo Buscaglia, Living, Loving, and Learning (1982)
…but, friend, to me
He is all fault who hath no fault at all:
For who loves me must have a touch of earth.
– Alfred Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King, “Elaine”
I hold it true, whatever befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
– Alfred Lord Tennyson, “In Memoriam”, Part XXVII
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no, it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although highth be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
– William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 116”
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
– Martin Luther King Junior (1968 speech, where he reflects on the Civil Rights Movement)
A friend is one to whom one may pour out all the contents of one’s heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that the gentlest of hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping and, with the breath of kindness, blow the rest away.
– Arabian Proverb
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep;
The more I give to you, the more I have,
For both are infinite.
– William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Love does not conquer all, except in Bombay Talkies; rip tear crunch will not be defeated by a mere ceremony; and optimism is a disease.
– Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
Rainbow of Madness 