I’ve been collecting quotes over at my personal blog for a long, long time now (about three years)! We’re all quote-nerds in the age of the internet. I love the way we have access to so many of them now, and the other night, I was scrolling through every quote I’d collected and was able to remember exactly what I was feeling when I’d decided it was a quote worth remembering.
Sometimes, reading the just-right quote allows for a sudden change of perspective, like an acorn bopping you on the head. Thunk! Oh, I get it now! I can remember so many times a quote did something like that for me, and it was really a joy to read through them all, even the sad ones.
I thought it might be good to compile them into a small (or, what I thought would be small) collection for you guys – and then it took me days! There are so many beautiful words out there, and I hope a few of these are able to help you in a time of need.
1. “Wisdom from the Hokey Pokey: Put your whole self in.” A FRIEND’S STATUS UPDATE
2. “The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. That is why so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask. I have shed my mask.” GIFT FROM THE SEA BY ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH
3. “There are moments when one has to choose between living one’s own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.” OSCAR WILDE
4. “I believe ardently that you should drop everything and run toward your true self.” KYRAN PITTMAN
5. “Until you make peace with who you are, you’ll never be content with what you have.” DORIS MORTMAN
6. “Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.” RUMI
7. “Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” FRANZ KAFKA
8. “Don’t settle. Don’t finish crappy books. If you don’t like the menu, leave the restaurant. If you’re not on the right path, get off it.” CHRIS BROGAN
9. “The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And along the way, lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.” NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
10. “What you seek is seeking you.” PAULO COELHO
11. “You have to do stuff that average people don’t understand, because those are the only good things.” ANDY WARHOL
12. “Ever since I was a child I have had this instinctive urge for expansion and growth. To me, the function and duty of a quality human being is the sincere and honest development of one’s potential.” BRUCE LEE
13. “Loneliness is not lack of company, loneliness is lack of purpose.” GUILLERMO MALDONADO
14. “Some women choose to follow men, and some women choose to follow their dreams. If you’re wondering which way to go, remember that your career will never wake up and tell you that it doesn’t love you anymore.” LADY GAGA
15. “It’s worth remembering that you probably have something the world really needs. Trying to discover what that might be is one of the challenges of life. But one way you will not discover it is by trying to be what you’re not.” BONO
16. “Go be that starving artist you’re afraid to be. Open up that journal and get poetic finally. Volunteer. Suck it up and travel. You were not born here to work and pay taxes. You were put here to be part of a vast organism to explore and create. Stop putting it off. The world has much more to offer than what’s on 15 televisions at TGI Fridays. Take pictures. Scare people. Shake up the scene. Be the change you want to see in the world. You’ll thank yourself for it.” JASON MRAZ
17. “The planet does not need more ‘successful people.’ The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers and lovers of all kinds. It needs people to live well in their places. It needs people with moral courage willing to join the struggle to make the world habitable and humane and these qualities have little to do with success as our culture is the set.” TENZIN GYATSO, THE 14TH DALAI LAMA
18. Nothing
in the world
is usual today.
This is
the first morning.
IZUMI SHIKIBU
19. “What wonderful thing didn’t start out scary?” WARM BODIES
20. “Those things your heart really wants are not going to lead you down a dangerous, unrealistic, or selfish path. Nor are they arbitrary. They speak to the life that wants to emerge from you. They point you toward the important contributions you have to make to the world. They nudge you towards the life that is going to feel like a huge, ecstatic pile of fun. So let your goals be, and let them run free.” TARA MOHR
21. “The best day of your life is the one on which you decide your life is your own. No apologies or excuses. No one to lean on, rely on, or blame. The gift is yours – it is an amazing journey – and you alone are responsible for the quality of it. This is the day your life really begins.” BOB MOAWAD
22. “It is always with excitement that I wake up in the morning wondering what my intuition will toss up to me, like gifts from the sea. I work with it and rely on it. It’s my partner.” DR. JONAS SALK
23. “Where we’re standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything.” CHUCK PALAHNIUK
24. “Believe it can be done. When you believe something can be done, really believe, your mind will find the ways to do it. Believing a solution paves the way to solution.” DAVID SCHWARTZ, PH.D.
25. “I am prepared to go anywhere, provided it be forward.” DAVID LIVINGSTONE
26. “Ninety to ninety-five percent of people will withdraw to the comfort zone when what they try doesn’t work. Only that small percentage, 5 or 10 percent, will continually improve themselves; they will continually push themselves out into the zone of discomfort, and these are always the highest performers in every field.” BRIAN TRACY
27. “Anyone in a state of seeking can never be happy. Only those who are constantly finding are fulfilled. And finding is not something that happens to us – it is something we do.” ALAN COHEN
28. “When we get comfortable with being imperfect and making mistakes, we get into the habit of starting. When we embrace our ability to create, and to fail repeatedly, that’s when we find our flow.” AMBER RAE
29. Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.
MARY OLIVER
30. “Your life is yours and yours alone. Rise up and live it.” TERRY GOODKIND
31. “Faith in yourself isn’t a result of success. It’s the cause of it.” STEVE PAVLINA
32. “Death twitches my ear. Live, he says, I am coming.” VIRGIL
33. “The trick of it, she told herself, is to be courageous and bold and make a difference. Not change the world exactly, just the bit around you.” DAVID NICHOLLS
34. “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” ANNE FRANK
35. “Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.” JOSEPH CONRAD
36. “We cannot lose what really belongs to us, even if we throw it away. Therefore we need have no anxiety.” THE I CHING
37. “Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.” WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
38. “Take an interest in your pain and your fear. Move closer, lean in, get curious; even for a moment experience the feelings beyond labels, beyond being good or bad. Welcome them. Invite them. Do anything that helps melt the resistance.” PEMA CHODRON
39. “Run from what’s comfortable. Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious.” RUMI
40. “Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.” JIM MORRISON
41. “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.” MARK TWAIN
42. “So it can be a lovely, merciful thing to think, ‘Actually, there is no path I can take without having my heart broken, so why not get on with it and stop wanting these extra-special circumstances which stop me from doing something courageous?'” DAVID WHYTE
43. “In order to learn the most important lessons of life, one must each day surmount a fear.” RALPH WALDO EMERSON
44. “Your body told me in a dream it’s never been afraid of anything.” RICHARD SIKEN
45. “You’ve got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.” RAY BRADBURY
46. “In my body and in my soul I realized that I greatly need sin, I needed lust, vanity, the striving for goods, and I needed the most shameful despair to learn how to give up resistance, to learn how to love the world, to stop comparing the world with any world that I wish for, that I imagine, with any perfection that I think up; I learned to let the world be as it is, and to love it and to belong to it gladly.” HERMANN HESSE
47. “Believe it is possible to solve your problem. Tremendous things happen to the believer. So believe the answer will come. It will.” NORMAN VINCENT PEALE
48. “When you can’t go forward, and you can’t go backward, and you can’t stay where you are without killing off something deep and vital in yourself, you are on the edge of creation.” SUE MONK KIDD
49. “Next time, ask: ‘What’s the worst that will happen?’ Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it’s personal. And the world won’t end. And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don’t miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, ‘If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.’ And at last you’ll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.” NAOMI WOLF
50. “There comes a time when you have to stand up and shout: This is me damn it! I look the way I look, think the way I think, feel the way I feel, love the way I love! I am a whole complex package. Take me; or leave me. Accept me – or walk away! Do not try to make me feel like less of a person, just because I don’t fit your idea of who I should be and don’t try to change me to fit your mold. If I need to change, I alone will make that decision.” STACEY CHARTER
51. “It’s not the load that breaks you down. It’s the way you carry it.” C.S. LEWIS
52. “This is an important lesson to remember when you’re having a bad day, a bad month, or a shitty year. Things will change: you won’t feel this way forever. And anyway, sometimes the hardest lessons to learn are the ones your soul needs most. I believe you can’t feel real joy unless you’ve felt heartache. You can’t have a sense of victory unless you know what it means to fail. You can’t know what it’s like to feel holy until you know what it’s like to feel really fucking evil. And you can’t be birthed again until you’ve died.” KELLY CUTRONE
53. “There are two kinds of suffering. There is the suffering you run away from, which follows you everywhere. And there is the suffering you face directly, and so become free.” AJAHN CHAH
54. “But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.” RAINER MARIA RILKE
55. “Solitude is painful when one is young, but delightful when one is more mature.” ALBERT EINSTEIN
56. “For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of — to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.” VIRGINIA WOOLF
57. “Within you, there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself.” HERMANN HESSE
58. “I disconnect the telephone to keep the outside world in its correct place.” CHUCK PALAHNIUK
59. “Solitude, if rightly used, becomes not only a privilege but a necessity. Only a superficial soul fears to fraternize with itself.” ALICE H. RICE
60. “He was not doing penance or wating for some supernatural inspiration. He had withdrawn solely for his own pleasure, only to be near to himself. No longer distracted by anything external, he basked in his own existence and found it splendid.” PATRICK SÜSKIND
61. “I also believe that introversion is my greatest strength. I have such a strong inner life that I’m never bored and only occasionally lonely. No matter what mayhem is happening around me, I know I can always turn inward. SUSAN CAIN
62. “I have to be alone very often. I’d be quite happy if I spent from Saturday night until Monday morning alone in my apartment. That’s how I refuel.” AUDREY HEPBURN
63. “I am a lover without a lover. I am lovely and lonely and I belong deeply to myself.” WARSAN SHIRE
64. “I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.” HENRY DAVID THOREAU
65. “And anyway, even when I like a person there is a weariness that comes. I can be with someone and everything is fine and then all of a sudden it can wash over me like a sickness, that I need the quiet of my own self. I need to unload my head and look at what I’ve got in there so far.” ELIZABETH BERG
66. “People think being alone makes you lonely, but I don’t think that’s true. Being surrounded by the wrong people is the loneliest thing in the world.” KIM CULBERTSON
67. “When the karma of a relationship is done, only love remains. It’s safe. Let go.” ELIZABETH GILBERT
68. “Leaving is not enough. You must stay gone. Train your heart like a dog. Change the locks even on the house he’s never visited. You lucky, lucky girl. You have an apartment just your size. A bathtub full of tea. A heart the size of Arizona, but not nearly so arid. Don’t wish away your cracked past, your crooked toes, your problems are papier mache puppets you made or bought because the vendor at the market was so compelling you just had to have them. You had to have him. And you did. And now you pull down the bridge between your houses, you make him call before he visits, you take a lover for granted, you take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic. Make the first bottle you consume in this place a relic. Place it on whatever altar you fashion with a knife and five cranberries. Don’t lose too much weight. Stupid girls are always trying to disappear as revenge. And you are not stupid. You loved a man with more hands than a parade of beggars, and here you stand. Heart like a four-poster bed. Heart like a canvas. Heart leaking something so strong they can smell it in the street.” FRIDA KAHLO TO MARTY MCCONNELL
69. Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
JOHN DONNE
70. “Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.” LOUISE ERDRICH
71. “Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn: Anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.” DAVID WHYTE
72. “Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.” MARK TWAIN
73. “After a while you learn the subtle difference between holding a hand and chaining a soul and you learn love doesn’t mean leaning and company doesn’t always mean security. And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts and presents aren’t always promises and you begin to accept your defeats with your head up and and your eyes ahead with the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child. And you learn to build all your roads on today because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans and futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight. After a while you learn that even sunshine burns if you get too much. So you plant your own garden and decorate your own soul instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers. And you learn that you really can endure, that you really are strong and you really do have worth and you learn and you learn…with every good-bye you learn.” VERONICA A. SHOFFSTALL
74. “I am nothing. I’m like someone who’s been thrown into the ocean at night, floating all alone. I reach out, but no one is there. I call out, but no one answers. I have no connection to anything.” HARUKI MURAKAMI
75. “There are certain people who come into your life, and leave a mark. Their place in your heart is tender; a bruise of longing, a pulse of unfinished business. Just hearing their names pushes and pulls at you in a hundred ways, and when you try to define those hundred ways, describe them even to yourself, words are useless.” SARA ZARR
76. “Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.” RUMI
77. “Right now I want a word that describes the feeling that you get—a cold sick feeling, deep down inside—when you know something is happening that will change you, and you don’t want it to, but you cant stop it. And you know, for the first time, for the very first time, that there will now be a before and an after, a was and a will be. And that you will never again quite be the same person you were.” JENNIFER DONNELLY
78. “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.” HELEN KELLER
79. “Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.” PEMA CHODRON
80. “Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel, as a reminder of your strength.” AUGUST WILSON
81. “The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.” DJUNA BARNES
82. “Sorrow comes in great waves…but rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us, it leaves us. And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain.” HENRY JAMES
83. “People melt, break beneath the fire of an intolerable pain in which they, at the same time, are also regenerated.” ALBERT CAMUS
84. “Within every adversity is the seed of an equal or greater benefit.” NAPOLEON HILL
85. “And at some point the struggle becomes too much. Too tiring. And you consider letting go. Allowing tragedy or whatever to happen.” HANNAH BAKER
86. “Our suffering and our wounds have a remarkable way of unlocking the door to authenticity.” JOHN CHRYSSAVGIS
87. “And you would accept the seasons of your heart just as you have always accepted that seasons pass over your fields and you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.” KAHLIL GIBRAN
88. “You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.” CORMAC MCCARTHY
89. “Be proud of your pain, for you are stronger than those with none.” LOIS LOWRY
90. “It’s the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.” FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
91. “To gain that which is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else.” BERNADETTE DEVLIN
92. “That is why it is so important to let certain things go. To release them. To cut loose. People need to understand that no one is playing with marked cards; sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. Don’t expect to get anything back, don’t expect recognition for your efforts, don’t expect your genius to be discovered or your love to be understood. Complete the circle. Not out of pride, inability or arrogance, but simply because whatever it is no longer fits in your life. Close the door, change the record, clean the house, get rid of the dust. Stop being who you were and become who you are.” PAULO COEHLO
93. let my hidden weeping arise
and blossom.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
94. “Dealing with your rage and grief will give you life. That is both the good news and the bad news: The solution is at hand. Wherever the great dilemma exists is where the great growth is, too.” ANNE LAMOTT
95. “A crisis is a gift, an opportunity, and perhaps a manifestation that life loves us, by beckoning us to go beyond the dance we presently perform.” LESLIE LEBEAU
96. “It is because I dove into the abyss that I am beginning to love the abyss I am made of.” CLARICE LISPECTOR
97. “Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.” ERICA JONG
98. We need in love to practice only this: letting each other go.
For holding on comes easily—we do not need to learn it.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
99. “When Love itself comes to kiss you, dont hold back.” RUMI
100. The sun never says to the earth,
“You owe me.”
Look what happens with a love like that.
It lights up the whole sky.
HAFIZ
101. “I want us to be together without bothering about ourselves – to be really together because we ARE together, as if it were a phenomenon, not a thing we have to maintain by our own effort.” D.H. LAWRENCE
102. “Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.” OG MANDINO
103. “Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.” ANAÏS NIN
104. Not sheep coming down the hills,
not cracks on the ceiling—
count the ones you loved,
the former tenants of dreams
who would keep you awake,
once meant the world to you,
rocked you in their arms,
those who loved you …
You will fall asleep, by dawn, in tears.
A REMEDY FOR INSOMNIA BY VERA PAVLOVA
105. “A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.” MAHATMA GANDHI
106. “Love comes when manipulation stops; when you think more about the other person than about his or her reactions to you. When you dare to reveal yourself fully. When you dare to be vulnerable.” JOYCE BROTHERS
107. “How easy and natural love is if you are well! And how gruesomely difficult – and what a philosophically daunting contraption of self-interest and self-delusion love appears to be – if you are not!” JONATHAN FRANZEN
108. I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people:
that each protects the solitude of the other.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
109. “Doesn’t every love express itself this way, with the seeds of both its flowering and its ruin in the very first words, the first breath, the first thought?” ELIZABETH KOSTOV
110. I cannot promise very much.
I give you the images I know.
Lie still with me and watch.
We laugh and we touch.
I promise you love.
Time will not take that away.
ANNE SEXTON
111. “Unless it’s mad, passionate, extraordinary love, it’s a waste of your time. There are too many mediocre things in life. Love shouldn’t be one of them.” DREAM FOR AN INSOMNIAC
112. “It’s strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.” T. S. ELIOT
113. “If I am honest I will admit that I have always wanted to avoid love. Yes give me romance, give me sex, give me fights, give me all the parts of love but not the simple single word which is so complex and demands the best of me this hour this minute this forever.” JEANETTE WINTERSON
114. “He loved her, he loved her, and until he’d loved her she had never minded being alone.” TRUMAN CAPOTE
115. “It is only when we no longer compulsively need someone that we can have a real relationship with them.” ANTHONY STOR
116. “A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.” KURT VONNEGUT
117. “Once you decide not to worry about that stuff anymore, dating and relationships and love and all that, it’s like you’re free to get on with real life.” DAVID NICHOLLS
118. “Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It’s like the tide going out, revealing whatever’s been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future.” MARGARET ATWOOD
119. “The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only.” VICTOR HUGO
120. “If there is such a thing as marriage, it takes place long before the ceremony: in a car on the way to the airport; or as a gray bedroom fills with dawn, one lover watching the other; or as two strangers stand together in the rain with no bus in sight, arms weighed down with shopping bags. You don’t know then. But later you realize — that was the moment.
And always without words.” SIMON VAN BOOY
121. “Love is distinct from desire… Because its aim is not satisfaction, but being.” JACQUES LACA
122. “There is nothing sweeter in this sad world than the sound of someone you love calling your name.” KATE DICAMILLO
123. “The stories we sit up late to hear are love stories. It seems that we cannot know enough about this riddle of our lives. We go back and back to the same scenes, the same words, trying to scrape out the meaning. Nothing else could be more familiar than love. Nothing could elude us so completely.” JEANETTE WINTERSON
124. “Mindful time spent with the person we love is the fullest expression of true love and real generosity.” THICH NHAT HANH
125. in this world
love has no color—
yet how deeply
my body
is stained by yours
IZUMI SHIKIBU
126. “You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free.” THICH NHAT HANH
127. “Love wins. Love always wins.” TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE – MITCH ALBOM
128. “Ever since happiness heard your name, it’s been running through the streets trying to find you.” HAFIZ
129. “I am still determined to be cheerful and happy, in whatever situation I may be; for I have also learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions, and not upon our circumstances.” MARTHA WASHINGTON
130. “The Joy of Life comes from our encounters with new experiences and hence there is no greater joy than to have and endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.” JON KRAKAUER
131. “The way to find out about happiness is to keep your mind on those moments when you feel most happy, when you are really happy — not excited, not just thrilled, but deeply happy. This requires a little bit of self-analysis. What is it that makes you happy? Stay with it, no matter what people tell you. This is what is called following your bliss.” JOSEPH CAMPBELL
132. “I have decided to be happy because it’s good for my health.” VOLTAIRE
133. “I remember one morning getting up at dawn, there was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling? And I remember thinking to myself: So, this is the beginning of happiness. This is where it starts. And of course there will always be more. It never occurred to me it wasn’t the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment. Right then.” MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM
134. “Dare to be happy. Most people don’t allow themselves the luxury of being enthusiastic, light-hearted, inspired, relaxed, or happy…It seems that a great number of people are frightened at what a happy demeanor would look like to other people…This is a very unfortunate form of self-denial.” RICHARD CARLSON
135. “Each day we wake in the morning with a thought in our minds. This thought, whatever it may be, sets the tone for the rest of the day. This is not always a good thing as we may wake up in a rush for work or school, with a hangover, feeling depressed or generally in a state of confusion. Therefore it is a good idea to learn how to create an original thought to begin each day, and to make the day a perfect expression of your original thought.” THE TIBETAN ART OF POSITIVE THINKING
136. “A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.” HERM ALBRIGHT
137. “You want to kiss all kinds of different people, you want to wake up in a stranger’s bed maybe once or twice just to see if it feels good to feel nothing, you want to have a group of friends that feels like a tribe, a bonafide family. You want to go from one place to the next constantly and have your weekends feel like one long epic day. You want to dance to stupid music in your stupid room and have a nice job that doesn’t get in the way of living your life too much. You want to be less scared, less anxious, and more willing. Because if you’re closed off now, you can only imagine what you’ll be like later.” RYAN O’CONNELL
138. “That’s the best revenge of all: HAPPINESS. Nothing drives people crazier than seeing someone have a good fucking life.” CHUCK PALAHNUIK
139. “I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. If you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good. Hot is no good, either. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be.” ROALD DAHL
140. “You make a life out of what you have, not what you’re missing.” KATE MORTON
141. “Don’t settle because you’re afraid you won’t find something better. Don’t compromise because you don’t want to be alone. Give your perfect life, lover and job time and space to grow into our life. Don’t rush, don’t hurry. Take your time, be easy, have patience. Allow everything to come to you with your subtle guiding and intending. Your days of constant chasing with little reward are over. Everything you’ve ever wanted and more coming to you, you just have to let it in with love, receptivity and non-judgment. Letting it in is how you become it.” JACKSON KIDDARD
142. “It is a blessing to get old. It is a blessing to find the time to do the things, to read the books, to listen to the music. I have nothing now but praise for my life.” MAURICE SENDAK
143. “Going back to a simpler life based on living by sufficiency rather than excess is not a step backward. Rather, returning to a simpler way allows us to regain our dignity, puts us in touch with the land, and makes us value human contact again.” YVON CHOUINARD
145. “The only way to gain power in a world that is moving too fast is to learn to slow down. And the only way to spread one’s influence wide to learn how to go deep.” MARIANNE WILLIAMSON
146. “Do me a favor… Stand up, walk to wherever the nearest window is, and just look outside. You may not know this, but there’s an entire planet’s-worth of summers, friends, sunsets, street lamps, songs, late nights, great films, and night skies waiting for you. Your life is as amazing as you want it to be, but first, you have to let it be that way.” CHAD SUGG
small life, slow life 
Thanks so much for sharing these – what a wonderful collection!
Awww, you’re most welcome, Miss Kelly! I’d been saving them for no good reason – was definitely time to share. ❤
“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” …One of the best quotes ever, by one of the biggest brains in history! (Great article btw.)
Ooooh that’s a great one!
Dedicated to you Jen and to all your readers, because you keep telling us: “Get YOURSELF Back!” 😉 !
“Love After Love” by Derek Walcott
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
I love Walcott. This is perfect. ❤️ Thank you for sharing it!