Kata Mutiara

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Jangan menolak kebaikan seseorang, karena mungkin saja itu hal baik terakhir yang dilakukannya. -@arievrahman

Ketika berselisih dengan seseorang, mengalahlah. Karena solusi akan diperoleh jika salah satu pihak mau mengalah dan mendengarkan.

Hebat itu bukan hanya pengakuan orang dan media masa, hebat itu perlu juga pengakuan dari keluargamu. -@jamilazzaini

Kejujuran mungkin menyakitkan, tp tdk mematikan. Kebohongan mungkin menyenangkan, tp tdk menyembuhkan. -@AmandaAdriani

Seseorang bahagia bukan karena ia memiliki banyak hal, tetapi karena ia tidak membandingkan miliknya dengan milik orang lain.

Jangan pernah ragu bahwa Tuhan selalu bersamamu. Penderitaan hanya sementara. Percayalah, semuanya akan indah pada waktunya.

Musuh Utama manusia adalah dirinya sendiri. Kegagalan terutama manusia adalah kesombongan.

Doaku pagi ini: Tuhan, berkati dan lindungilah segala aktivitasku hari ini. Semoga yang kulakukan selalu mendapat berkah dariMu.

Cintai dan sayangi ibumu, karena meski terkadang kamu tak menyukai keputusannya, pada akhirnya hanya dia yg selalu ada untukmu.

Cinta bukan sesuatu yg datang dengan mudah, namun jika kamu mau memperjuangkannya, kamu seseorang yg pantas mendapatkannya. -@AidiMs

Kebohongan terbesar wanita: "Tidak apa-apa", "Aku baik-baik saja" & "Tinggalkan aku sendiri". -@AmandaAdriani

Jangan sampai kebahagiaanmu bergantung pd orang lain. Kebahagiaan sebaiknya dari dalam dirimu sendiri. -@WilzKanadi

Sahabat yang baik tidak akan mencelakai, tetapi sahabat yang baik akan menasehati, melindungi, dan tulus mengasihi.

Ketika masalah datang menghampiri, itu artinya Tuhan menyayangi, bukan membenci. Tuhan hanya menguji keimanan dan kesabaran.

Cinta tak hanya berawal dari tatapan mata. Cinta hadir dari tulusnya hati ketika diri tak mampu berpikir jernih. Percaya Hati. ?

Jika seseorang memutuskan untuk pergi dari hidupmu, biarkan dia pergi. Kamu mungkin merindukannya, tapi kamu pasti bisa hidup tanpanya.

Jika seseorang berbohong akan hal kecil, maka dia pasti akan berbohong untuk hal yang lebih besar.

Berbicara tentang hubungan masa lalu bukan berarti masih terjebak didalamnya. Terkadang itu diingat agar tak mengulangi kesalahan lagi.

Sudahkah anda #tersenyum hari ini? Jangan biarkan masalah membuatmu lupa bahwa sebuah senyuman mampu meringankannya.

Kesulitan-kesulitan yang kamu alami adalah pelajaran yang paling kamu butuhkan!

Dalam senang, jangan lupa berterima kasih pd Tuhan. Dalam susah, jangan lupa tetap bersyukur padaNya. -@christanatasha

Bersiap untuk mendengar jawaban dari setiap pertanyaan. Karena terkadang jawaban yang didengar bukanlah yang diharapkan.

Jika sesuatu terasa indah pd awalnya, itu disebut janji. Jika hal itu indah hingga akhirnya, itu disebut bukti. -@AmandaAdriani

Tak perlu bersusah payah untuk membalas dendam, cukup maafkan setiap kesalahan. Karena memaafkan adalah pembalasan yang terbaik.

Ketika kau yakin, segera laksanakan! karena "Keraguan akan datang ketika keyakinan tidak sesegera mungkin dilaksanakan".

Keyakinan dan kesungguhan dalam berupaya adalah sebuah gerbang untuk menapaki tangga keberhasilan.

Doaku hari ini: Tuhan, dekatkan aku dengan orang-orang baik, agar aku bisa mengikuti jejak kebaikan mereka.

Semua orang punya kelebihan pun kekurangan, tapi jika kamu tak bisa menghargai kekuranganmu, kamu tak menghargai dirimu sendiri.

Kadang meski sangat merindukan senyum seseorang, kamu terus menyakinkan dirimu, bahwa senyummu adalah hal yg harus diutamakan.

Jangan paksakan diri tuk jatuh cinta. Berikan hatimu waktu tuk mempelajarinya. #Cupids juga butuh waktu tuk mencari hati yg pantas bagimu.

Aku mungkin mudah merasakan, tapi tidak mudah melepaskan. Aku mungkin mudah memaafkan, tapi tidak mudah melupakan. -@AmandaAdriani

Jangan harapkan cinta untuk SELALU berada dalam keadaan terbaiknya, karena ada suka dan duka di dalamnya. Belajarlah menghargai keberadaannya.

Belajarlah untuk mengagumi PELANGI setelah kamu mengeluh derasnya HUJAN. Seperti halnya mencintai lagi meski hatimu pernah terluka.

Tak perlu yg sempurna tuk dicinta, yg kamu butuh hanya yg nyata, perlakukanmu dgn baik, dan bahagia ketika bersamamu lebih dr apapun jg.

Kadang masalah adalah cara terbaik tuk menyadari siapa sahabat terbaikmu dan siapa yang hanya hadir ketika dia membutuhkan sesuatu darimu.

Salah satu hal terbaik tentang sahabat: mereka tahu semua hal kecil tentangmu, bukan karena kamu terus mengingatkannya, tapi karena mereka PEDULI

Kadang kamu tak sadari apa yang kamu miliki, hingga dia pergi. Kamu telah buatnya terluka, tapi masih membiarkan hal kecil merusak segalanya.

Tuhan memang menjanjikan yang terbaik dalam hidupmu, namun bukan berarti segalanya akan mudah bagimu. Kamu juga harus berusaha.

Jangan biarkan seseorang jadi bagian terpenting dlm hidupmu, jika kamu hanya sebuah pilihan ketika dia bosan dalam hidupnya. -@AidiMs

Terkadang, ada beberapa hal yang sebaiknya tidak kamu ketahui. Dan jangan pernah bertanya jika kamu tak ingin mendengar jawabannya.

Pada akhirnya kamu akan menyadari bahwa tak ada satu pun yang bisa kamu andalkan di dunia ini, kecuali Tuhan & dirimu sendiri. -@WilzKanadi

Bertahanlah jika kamu benar-benar mencintai. Tapi terkadang kamu diharuskan untuk pergi sebelum membuat keadaan menjadi lebih buruk lagi.

"Melepaskan": memaafkan masa lalumu, membiarkan waktu menyembuhkan lukamu, & membiarkan Tuhan menuntun jalanmu. -@AmandaAdriani

Hal baik akan didapati ketika kamu bersyukur. Hal buruk akan dialami ketika kamu mengeluh. Pilih mana, bersyukur atau mengeluh?

Tak perlu malu untuk menerima bantuan. Karena dibantu tak selalu berarti bahwa kamu lemah, tetapi itu berarti bahwa kamu tak sendiri.

Berpikirlah sebelum berbicara. Tapi jangan berpikir terlalu lama, karena ada beberapa hal yang membutuhkan tindakan yang cepat.

Ketika kamu berpikir untuk menyerah, ingatlah, Tuhan tak akan berikan cobaan melebihi kemampuanmu, Tuhan hanya menguji kesabaranmu.

Doaku pagi ini: Tuhan, beri aku kekuatan tuk bisa melalui hari ini, tuk menghadapi segala masalah yang kutahu hanya buatku dewasa.

Jangan terus tangisi dia yang telah pergi demi orang lain. Dia menghampiri hidupmu tuk mengingatkan bahwa yang terbaik telah menantimu di depan.

Ketika tulus mencinta, meski dia telah berikan luka yg tak terlupa, rasa yang ada takkan pernah sirna, terutama kenangan indah bersamanya.

Terkadang, meski masih sendiri, kamu tahu bahwa hatimu telah dimiliki oleh seseorang yang bahkan tak menyadari kehadiranmu. -@AidiMs

Menyakitkan ketika kamu tengah memikirkan dia yang kamu cinta, dan kamu tahu bahwa dia tengah memikirkan orang lain.. :|

Hanya karena dia tak menyukai sikapmu, tak berarti kamu harus mengubah kepribadianmu. Jangan kehilangan dirimu dlm proses mencintai seseorang.

Apapun yang terjadi, tersenyumlah. Jangan biarkan mereka yang membencimu merasa bahagia karena melihatmu tak mampu bertahan dari sebuah masalah.

Terkadang, kamu tahu kapan harus melepaskan sesuatu yang terus buatmu terluka. Tapi TAHU adalah hal yang berbeda dengan BISA. -@AidiMs

Kita bertengkar, kita semakin mengenal. Kita menyakiti, kita semakin mencintai. Kita menghindar, kita semakin merindukan. -@AmandaAdriani

Miscellaneous Quotations

It's pretty hard to be efficient without being obnoxious. ~Kin Hubbard


Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form
Glasses itself in tempests.
~George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage


All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stolen forth of Holy Writ
And seem a saint when most I play the devil.
~William Shakespeare, Richard III, 1593


From the satisfaction of desire there may arise, accompanying joy and as it were sheltering behind it, something not unlike despair. ~André Gide, The Counterfeiters, 1925


To live is in itself a value judgment. To breathe is to judge. ~Albert Camus, The Rebel, 1951


No man sees far; the most see no farther than their noses. ~Thomas Carlyle, "Count Cagliostro," 1833


Revolutions are not made: they come. A revolution is as natural as an oak tree. It comes out of the past; its foundations are laid far back. ~Wendell Phillips,Address, Anti-Slavery Society, 1852


He who is allowed to do as he likes will soon run his head into a brick wall out of sheer frustration. ~Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, 1930


It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity. ~Robert Louis Stevenson, "Crabbed Age and Youth," Virginibus Puerisque, 1881


We confess to little faults only to persuade ourselves that we have no great ones. ~François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, 1665


We learn geology the morning after the earthquake. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life, 1860


The sinning is the best part of repentance. ~Arab Proverb


Most people die at the last minute; others twenty years beforehand, some even earlier. They are the wretched of the earth. ~Louis Céline, Voyage au bout du monde, 1932


Most men are more capable of great actions than of good ones. ~Montesquieu,Variètès


Some defeats [are] more triumphant than victories. ~Montaigne, Essays, 1588


We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Just because you're not uptight doesn't mean you're irresponsible. And vice versa. When will those Conservatives ever learn? ~Carrie Latet


The passion to get ahead is sometimes born of the fear lest we be left behind. ~Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind, 1954


In every age "the good old days" were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them. ~Brooks Atkinson, Once Around the Sun, 1951


It takes more strength of character to withstand good fortune than bad. ~La Rochefoucauld, Reflections, 1665


The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously. ~Hubert Humphrey, speech, Madison, Wisconsin, 23 August 1965


Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same. ~G.B. Shaw, "Maxims for Revolutionists," 1898


I think the enemy is here before us.... I think the enemy is simple selfishness and compulsive greed.... I think he stole our earth from us, destroyed our wealth, and ravaged and despoiled our land. ~Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again, 1949


Is a stolen copyright a copywrong? ~Anonymous


There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the type that most often writes about himself. ~W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up, 1938


I find my joy of living in the fierce and ruthless battles of life, and my pleasure comes from learning something. ~Auguste Strindberg, Miss Julie, 1888


Men are idolaters and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don't make it out of wood, you must make it out of words. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Poet at the Breakfast Table, 1872


We look for some reward of our endeavours and are disappointed; not success, not happiness, not even peace of conscience, crowns our ineffectual efforts to do well. ~Robert Louis Stevenson, "Pulvis et umbra," 1888


Where is Hollywood located? Chiefly between the ears. In that part of the American brain lately vacated by God. ~Erica Jong


Believe me, for certain men at least, not taking what one doesn't desire is the hardest thing in the world. ~Albert Camus


No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself. ~Henry Adams


We're seldom drawn to a character we admire; only to a personality we like. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Eloquence is vehement simplicity. ~Richard Cecil


True eloquence forgoes eloquence. ~André Gide


...for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life. ~Rainer Maria Rilke, "Archaic Torso of Apollo," about a sculpture, translated by Stephen Mitchell


Sometimes I have to stand on my head to see things as they are, when the world seems so upside-down that this is the only position in which anything makes sense. ~Author Unknown


Girls we love for what they are; young men for what they promise to be. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


If fortune smiles, who doesn't? If fortune doesn't, who does? ~Chinese Proverb


No man is truly great who is great only in his own lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history. ~William Hazlitt, Table Talk, 1822


Few great men could pass personnel. ~Paul Goodman


I have learned the truth of the observation that the more one approaches great men the more one finds that they are men. ~Bernard M. Baruch


No man was ever great without a touch of divine afflatus. ~Cicero


There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great. ~G.K. Chesterton


We have, I fear, confused power with greatness. ~Stewart Udall


It is a mistake to imagine that potentially great men are rare. It is the conditions that permit the promise of greatness to be fulfilled that are rare. What is so difficult to achieve is the cultural background that permits potential greatness to be converted into actual greatness. ~Fred Hoyle, Of Man and Galaxies


I suppose that everyone of us hopes secretly for immortality; to leave, I mean, a name behind him which will live forever in this world, whatever he may be doing, himself, in the next. ~A.A. Milne


The least of man's original emanation is better than the best of a borrowed thought. ~Albert Pinkham Ryder


The mark of highest originality lies in the ability to develop a familiar idea so fruitfully that it would seem no one else would ever have discovered so much to be hidden in it. ~Goethe


An impossibility does not disturb us until its accomplishment shows what fools we were. ~Henry S. Haskins


We talk much more about individualism and liberty than our ancestors. But as so often happens, when anything becomes conscious, the consciousness is compensatory for absence in practice. ~John Dewey


There is a kind way of assisting our fellow-creatures which is enough to break their hearts while it saves their outer envelope. ~Joseph Conrad


Our strength is often composed of the weakness we're damned if we're going to show. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


A curse on every wish that blurs the sight, paralyzes the tongue, cramps the hand, and prevents the truth being seen, said, and written. ~Theodor Haecker


Light comes to us unexpectedly and obliquely. Perhaps it amuses the gods to try us. They want to see whether we are asleep. ~H.M. Tomlinson


It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. ~Upton Sinclair


Understanding a person does not mean condoning; it only means that one does not accuse him as if one were God or a judge placed above him. ~Erich Fromm


The Lord gives us friends to push us to our potential - and enemies to push us beyond it. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


The only time you realize you have a reputation is when you're not living up to it. ~José Iturbi


The mind is seldom quickened to very vigorous operations but by pain, or the dread of pain. We do not disturb ourselves with the detection of fallacies which do us no harm. ~Samuel Johnson


The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist. ~Thomas Carlyle, Sir Walter Scott, in London and Westminster Review, 12 November 1838


Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again. ~Hermann Hesse


The conflict of forces and the struggle of opposing wills are of the essence of our universe and alone hold it together. ~Havelock Ellis


Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things. ~George Eliot, Felix Holt, The Radical


I don't say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could. ~Orson Welles


'Tis known by the name of perseverance in a good cause, and obstinacy in a bad one. ~Laurence Sterne


Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy. ~Howard W. Newton


Many people's tombstones should read, "Died at 30. Buried at 60." ~Nicholas Murray Butler


No man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else. ~James M. Barrie


Most people like hard work. Particularly when they are paying for it. ~Franklin P. Jones


There's a mighty big difference between good, sound reasons and reasons that sound good. ~Burton Hillis


We are wide-eyed in contemplating the possibility that life may exist elsewhere in the universe, but we wear blinders when contemplating the possibilities of life on earth. ~Norman Cousins


Originality is the art of concealing your source. ~Franklin P. Jones


I would rather have men ask why I have no statue than why I have one. ~Marcus Porcius Cato


It is one of the commonest of mistakes to consider that the limit of our power of perception is also the limit of all there is to perceive. ~C.W. Leadbeater


Every nation ridicules other nations, and all are right. ~Arthur Schopenhauer


We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books about it. ~Peter Drucker


We would often be ashamed of our finest actions if the world understood all the motives which produced them. ~Duc de La Rochefoucauld


Fame - the aggregate of all the misunderstandings that collect around a new name. ~Rainer Maria Rilke


I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. ~Henry David Thoreau


He gave her a look you could have poured on a waffle. ~Ring Lardner


Hate the sin and love the sinner. ~Mohandas Gandhi


He not only overflowed with learning, but stood in the slop. ~Sydney Smith


The brighter you are, the more you have to learn. ~Don Herold


We see then how far the monuments of wit and learning are more durable than the monuments of power, or of the hands. For have not the verses of Homer continued twenty-five hundred years or more, without the loss of a syllable or letter; during which time infinite palaces, temples, castles, cities have been decayed and demolished? ~Francis Bacon


Resting is the sort of thing you've got to work up to gradually. It's very dangerous to rest all of a sudden. ~From the movie Topper, 1937


A little learning is not a dangerous thing to one who does not mistake it for a great deal. ~William Allen White


A society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure, and to another all the burdens of work, dooms both classes to spiritual sterility. ~Lewis Mumford


Liberalism... is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet. ~José Ortega y Gasset


The first requisite for immortality is death. ~Stanislaw J. Lec


The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives. ~Albert Schweitzer


The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't being said. ~Author Unknown


A weak mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things but cannot receive great ones. ~Lord Chesterfield


But words are things, and a small drop of ink, falling like dew, upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps, millions, think. ~Lord Byron,Don Juan, 1819


In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;
But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud.
~Wallace Stevens


That which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly. ~Thomas Paine


By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. ~Benjamin Franklin (Thank you, Kyle.)


You can't hold a man down without staying down with him. ~Booker T. Washington


Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity. ~George S. Patton


Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the corn field. ~Dwight D. Eisenhower


A writer who wishes to be read by posterity must not be averse to putting hints which might give rise to whole books, or ideas for learned discussions, in some corner of a chapter so that one should think he can afford to throw them away by the thousand. ~Georg Christoph Lichtenberg


We understand nature by resisting it. ~Gaston Bachelard, La Formation de l'esprit scientifique, 1938


I don't think necessity is the mother of invention - invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble. ~Agatha Christie, An Autobiography, 1977


Novelties please less than they impress. ~Byron, Don Juan, 1824


Order marches with weighty and measured strides; disorder is always in a hurry. ~Napoleon I, Maxims, 1815


Nature has placed man under the government of two sovereign masters, pain andpleasure. ~Jeremy Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation, 1789


The good die young - because they see it's no use living if you've got to be good. ~John Barrymore


It is almost impossible systematically to constitute a natural moral law. Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil. ~Anatole France


Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good. ~Mohandas Gandhi


The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ~Various wordings of this quotation are attributed to Charles F. Aked and Edmund Burke, among others but no author has yet been confirmed as the originator (Thanks, Garson O'Toole of quoteinvestigator.com!)


Probably the most honest "self-made man" ever was the one we heard say: "I got to the top the hard way - fighting my own laziness and ignorance every step of the way." ~James Thom


I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. ~Isaac Newton


I have never for one instant seen clearly within myself. How then would you have me judge the deeds of others? ~Maurice Maeterlinck


The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been kindness, beauty, and truth. ~Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions


More good things in life are lost by indifference than ever were lost by active hostility. ~Robert Gordon Menzies


An age is called Dark, not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it. ~James A. Michener, Space


Sometimes the best helping hand you can get is a good, firm push. ~Joann Thomas


Children have never been good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. ~James Baldwin


There are times when forgetting can be just as important as remembering - and even more difficult. ~Harry and Joan Mier, Happiness Begins Before Breakfast


If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life. ~Albert Camus


It is an incredible con job when you think of it, to believe something now in exchange for life after death. Even corporations with all their reward systems don't try to make it posthumous. ~Gloria Steinem


Oh, one world at a time! ~Henry David Thoreau, when asked about afterlife


I have little confidence in any enterprise or business or investment that promises dividends only after the death of the stockholders. ~Robert G. Ingersoll


Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. ~Aldous Huxley


If you could eavesdrop on everything said about you, you'd spend most of your time waiting for the subject to come up. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


There is a very fine line between "hobby" and "mental illness." ~Dave Barry, "Things That It Took Me 50 Years to Learn"


To say yes, you have to sweat and roll up your sleeves and plunge both hands into life up to the elbows. It is easy to say no. ~Jean Anouilh


Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions. ~Mark Twain


Take care of the minutes, for the hours will take care of themselves. ~Lord Chesterfield


Man never made any material as resilient as the human spirit. ~Bern Williams


Not to go back is somewhat to advance
And men must walk, at least, before they dance.
~Alexander Pope


A problem well stated is a problem half solved. ~Charles F. Kettering


No matter how big and tough a problem may be, get rid of confusion by taking one little step towards solution. Do something. Then try again. At the worst, so long as you don't do it the same way twice, you will eventually use up all the wrong ways of doing it and thus the next try will be the right one. ~George F. Nordenhold


I didn't know I'd have to be torn down before I could be built up. ~Author Unknown


Every problem contains within itself the seeds of its own solution. ~Edward Somers


Little things console us because little things afflict us. ~Blaise Pascal


People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not. ~Neil Postman


There are three modes of bearing the ills of life: by indifference, by philosophy, and by religion. ~Charles Caleb Colton


The game of life is not so much in holding a good hand as playing a poor hand well. ~H.T. Leslie


Sympathy is never wasted except when you give it to yourself. ~John W. Raper


Self-pity is... a sinkhole from which no rescuing hand can drag you because you have chosen to sink. ~Elizabeth Elliot


Even the cry from the depths is an affirmation: Why cry if there is no hint of hope of hearing? ~Martin Marty


My mother said to me, "If you become a soldier, you'll be a general, if you become a monk you'll end up as the pope." Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso. ~Pablo Picasso


To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor. ~Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus puerisque, 1881


We should scarcely desire things ardently if we were perfectly acquainted with what we desire. ~Francois de La Rochefoucauld


Granting our wish is one of Fate's saddest jokes. ~James Russell Lowell


Beginnings are apt to be shadowy. ~Rachel Carson


If a man would move the world, he must first move himself. ~Socrates


Many persons wonder why they don't amount to more than they do, have good stuff in them, energetic, persevering, and have ample opportunities. It is all a case of trimming the useless branches and throwing the whole force of power into the development of something that counts. ~Walter J. Johnston


The guts carry the feet not the feet the guts. ~Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, 1605


Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on. ~Frederic Chopin


But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life, and thanks to a benevolent arrangement the greater part of life is sunshine. ~Thomas Jefferson


The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts. ~Marcus Aurelius Antonius


Today we have a temporary aberration called "industrial capitalism" which is inadvertently liquidating its two most important sources of capital... the natural world and properly functioning societies. No sensible capitalist would do that. ~Amory Lovins


There I am in my younger days, stargazing,
painting picture perfect maps
of how my life and love would be
not counting the unmarked paths of misdirection,
my compass faith in love's perfection
I missed a million miles of road I should have seen.
~Indigo Girls


I shall not let a sorrow die
Until I find the heart of it,
Nor let a wordless joy go by
Until it talks to me a bit.
~Sara Teasdale


A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song. ~Chinese Proverb


It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to. ~George Santayana


The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else. ~Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyper Reality, 1986


We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity - romantic love and gunpowder. ~André Maurois, BBC-TV, January 1958


To say yes, you have to sweat and roll up your sleeves and plunge both hands into life up to the elbows. It is easy to say no, even if saying no means death. ~Jean Anouilh, Antigone, 1942


Of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: "It might have been!"
~John Greenleaf Whittier, "Maud Muller," 1854


The chief characteristics of the [liberal] attitude are human sympathy, a receptivity to change, and a scientific willingness to follow reason rather than faith. ~Chester Bowles, New Republic, 22 July 1946


Liberal institutions straightway cease from being liberal the moment they are soundly established. ~Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 1888


The thing I am most aware of is my limits. And this is natural; for I never, or almost never, occupy the middle of my cage; my whole being surges toward the bars. ~André Gide, Journals, 4 August 1930


Loyalty in a free society depends upon the toleration of disloyalty. ~Alan Barth,The Loyalty of Free Man, 1951


His designs were strictly honorable, as the phrase is: that is, to rob a lady of her fortune by way of marriage. ~Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, 1749


The absurd is clear reason recognizing its limits. ~Albert Camus, Le Suicide philosophique


When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought
And with old woes new wail my dear times' waste.
~William Shakespeare, Sonnet No. 30


The world more often rewards the appearance of merit than merit itself. ~La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, 1665


It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking to it that one overcomes it; often it is by working on the one next to it. Some things and some people have to be approached obliquely, at an angle. ~André Gide, Journals, 26 October 1924


The professional military mind is by necessity an inferior and unimaginative mind; no man of high intellectual quality would willingly imprison his gifts in such a calling. ~H.G. Wells, The Outline of History, 1920


It is not reason that gives us our moral orientation, it is sensitivity. ~Maurice Barreès, La Grande Pitié des églises de France, 1914


Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, 1834


Doubt is not a pleasant state of mind, but certainty is absurd. ~Voltaire, 1767


Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt. ~Herbert Hoover, attributed


I identify more with people who ask each day for divine guidance than people equipped with a divine guidance system. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want. ~Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom, 1941


We kill because we are afraid of our own shadow, afraid that if we used a little common sense we'd have to admit that our glorious principles were wrong. ~Henry Miller, The Wisdom of the Heart, 1941


Everybody wants to be somebody; nobody wants to grow. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Wandering seemed no more than the happiness of an anxious man. ~Albert Camus


Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared - this must some day become the highest maxim for every single commonwealth. ~Friedrich Nietzsche


What a pity that the only way to heaven is in a hearse. ~Stanislaw J. Lec


The wicked often work harder to go to hell than the righteous do to enter heaven. ~Josh Billings


The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever. ~Anatole France


The People, though we think of a great entity when we use the word, means nothing more than so many millions of individual men. ~James Bryce


When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom - freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse. ~Eric Hoffer


The new frontier lies not beyond the planets but within each one of us. ~Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Biodynamics


It is often wonderful how putting down on paper a clear statement of a case helps one to see, not perhaps the way out, but the way in. ~Arthur Christopher Benson


However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. ~Henry David Thoreau


None are so blind as those who will not see. ~Author Unknown


"But" is a fence over which few leap. ~German Proverb


For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal. ~Elizabeth Bowen


The goal of all civilization, all religious thought, and all that sort of thing is simply to have a good time. But man gets so solemn over the process that he forgets the end. ~Don Marquis


Preach not to others what they should eat, but eat as becomes you and be silent. ~Epictetus


Undoubtedly the desire for food has been and still is one of the main causes of political events. ~Bertrand Russell


Never argue at the dinner table, for the one who is not hungry always gets the best of the argument. ~Richard Whately


A converted cannibal is one who, on Friday, eats only fishermen. ~Emily Lotney


There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats grapenuts on principle. ~G.K. Chesterton


Wine is sure proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. ~Benjamin Franklin


With what a leaden and retarding weight
Does expectation load the wing of time!
~William Mason


When you reach for the stars, you may not quite get one, but you won't come up with a handful of mud either. ~Leo Burnett


Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


It is difficult to remember all, and ungracious to omit any. ~Cicero


Spirituality is... the awareness that survival is the savage fight between you and yourself. ~Author Unknown


A man needs self-acceptance or he can't live with himself; he needs self-criticism or others can't live with him. ~James A. Pike


Ruin and recovery are both from within. ~Epictetus


Circumstances are the rulers of the weak; they are but the instruments of the wise. ~Samuel Lover


To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.


The only man who can change his mind is a man that's got one. ~Edward Noyes Westcott


To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves. ~Will and Ariel Durant


He was a "how" thinker, not an "if" thinker. ~Author Unknown


I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


To be always ready a man must be able to cut a knot, for everything cannot be untied. ~Henri Frederic Amiel


Passion and prejudice govern the world, only under the name of reason. ~John Wesley


Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibers, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. ~Oscar Wilde


People "died" all the time.... Parts of them died when they made the wrong kinds of decisions - decisions against life. Sometimes they died bit by bit until finally they were just living corpses walking around. If you were perceptive you could see it in their eyes; the fire had gone out... you always knew when you made a decision against life.... The door clicked and you were safe inside - safe and dead. ~Anne Morrow Lindbergh


If... you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning. ~Catherine Aird


There is only one thing about which I am certain, and that is that there is very little about which one can be certain. ~W. Somerset Maugham


Let us then be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Psalm of Life


Experience taught me a few things. One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper. The second is that you're generally better off sticking with what you know. And the third is that sometimes your best investments are the ones you don't make. ~Donald Trump


You're not dumb, or stupid, just thoroughly wrong. ~Jerry Kopke


The best things in life aren't things. ~Art Buchwald


A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much. ~Homer


I am convinced, the longer I live, that life and its blessings are not so entirely unjustly distributed as when we are suffering greatly we are inclined to suppose. ~Mary Todd Lincoln


Wanting to change, to improve, a person's situation means offering him, for difficulties in which he is practiced and experienced, other difficulties that will find him perhaps even more bewildered. ~Rainer Maria Rilke


The minute a phrase becomes current, it becomes an apology for not thinking accurately to the end of the sentence. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes


Comparison, more than reality, makes men happy or wretched. ~Thomas Fuller


If a man could have just half of his wishes, he would double his troubles. ~Benjamin Franklin


The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it. ~Samuel Johnson


Every man has three characters - that which he exhibits, that which he has, and that which he thinks he has. ~Alphonse Karr


Know then thyself, presume not God to scan:
The proper study of mankind is man.
~Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, 1733


Much unhappiness results from our inability to remember the nice things that happen to us. ~W.N. Rieger


If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire. ~Simone Weil


There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat. ~James Russell Lowell, Democracy and Other Addresses, 1887


To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life. ~T.S. Eliot


It is not how busy you are, but why you are busy - the bee is praised, the mosquito is swatted. ~Author Unknown


The sunrise never failed us yet. ~Celia Thaxter


Bear shame and glory with an equal peace and an ever tranquil heart. ~Bhagavad Gita


Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us examine how happy they are, who already possess it. ~François Duc de La Rochefoucauld


[W]hat counts can't be counted. ~Author unknown, c.1956 quoted in Political science in the United States of America: a trend report, UNESCO, see also "[N]ot everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted" by William Bruce Cameron, 1963, commonly attributed to Albert Einstein as "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." (Thanks, Garson O'Toole of quoteinvestigator.com!)


The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it. ~Harry Emerson Fosdick


I dwell in Possibility
A fairer house than Prose
More numerous of Windows
Superior - for Doors.
~Emily Dickinson


If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants. ~Isaac Newton, letter to Robert Hooke, 5 February 1675 ("Bernard of Chartres used to say that we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size." ~John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, 1159, translated from Latin)


Unless we change direction, we are likely to end up where we are going. ~Author Unknown


Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday. ~John Wayne


If there's another world, he lives in bliss;
If there is none, he made the best of this.
~Robert Burns, "Epitaph on William Muir"


I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy. ~J.D. Salinger


All she keeps inside isn't on the label. ~Fuel


The greatest evil which fortune can inflict on men is to endow them with small talents and great ambition. ~Luc de Clapiers marquis de Vauvenargues


The self cannot be escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, distracted. ~Donald Barthelme


Myths and creeds are heroic struggles to comprehend the truth in the world. ~Ansel Adams


An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less. ~Nicholas Murray Butler


Civilizations have been founded and maintained on theories which refused to obey facts. ~Joe Orton, What the Butler Saw, 1969


Only as high as I reach can I grow
Only as far as I seek can I go
Only as deep as I look can I see
Only as much as I dream can I be.
~Karen Ravn


He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, and he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Celebrate the happiness that friends are always giving. Make every day a holiday and celebrate just living! ~Amanda Bradley


Discretion is being able to raise your eyebrow instead of your voice. ~Author Unknown


There is a fine line between dreams and reality, it's up to you to draw it. ~B. Quilliam


Grow old with me! The best is yet to be. ~Robert Browning


He drew a circle that shut me out - heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win - and we drew a circle that took him in!
~Edwin Markham


It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end. ~Ursula K. Le Guin


I will not die an unlived life.... I choose to risk my significance; to live so that which comes to me as seed goes to the next as blossom and that which comes to me as blossom, goes on as fruit. ~Dawna Markova


The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered fire. ~Pierre Tielhard de Chardin


Some people skate to the puck. I skate to where the puck is going to be. ~Wayne Gretzky


Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So... get on your way. ~Dr. Seuss


It's not enough to have a dream,
unless you're willing to pursue it.
It's not enough to know what's right,
unless you're strong enough to do it.
It's not enough to learn the truth,
unless you also learn to live it.
It's not enough to reach for love,
unless you care enough to give it.
~Author Unknown


Please be patient. God has not finished with me yet. ~Author Unknown


We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic cords of memory will swell when again touched as surely they will be by the better angels of our nature. ~Abraham Lincoln


If God doesn't destroy Hollywood Boulevard, he owes Sodom and Gomorrah an apology. ~Jay Leno


A part of you has grown in me. And so you see, it's you and me together forever and never apart, maybe in distance, but never in heart. ~Author Unknown


Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don't walk behind me, I may not lead. Walk beside me, and just be my friend. ~Albert Camus


My nature is subdu'd
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand.
~William Shakespeare


Be it true or false, what is said about men often has as much influence on their lives, and especially on their destinies, as what they do. ~Victor Hugo


Your best work always seems to have been done by someone else. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


If there were dreams to sell,...
Merry and sad to tell,
And the crier rang the bell,
What would you buy?
~Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Dream-Pedlary


[T]hou art to me a delicious torment. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Friendship"


Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important. ~T.S. Eliot


No star is ever lost we once have seen,
We always may be what we might have been.
~Adelaide A. Procter, Legend of Provence


God give me the strength to face a fact though it slay me. ~Thomas Huxley


The way my life goes, I can't tell if there are pits in my cherries or cherries among my pits, philosophically speaking. ~Rhann Morgan


Reach high, for stars lie hidden in your soul. Dream deep, for every dream precedes the goal. ~Pamela Vaull Starr


But who shall parcel out
His intellect by geometric rules,
Split like a province into round and square?
~William Wordsworth, The Prelude


Every man is the son of his own works. ~Miguel de Cervantes


Jesus accepts you the way you are, but loves you too much to leave you that way. ~Lee Venden


A woman will do anything to keep a pretty figure, but hardly anything to get one. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Society is doing a great deal for the workingman, for the lower classes; but it seems to me, sometimes, as if it formed associations to obtain for them toys, and then formed other associations to teach them to play with them. ~John B. Gough


When it comes time to do your own life, you either perpetuate your childhood or you stand on it and finally kick it out from under. ~Rosellen Brown


Often we can help each other most by leaving each other alone; at other times we need the hand-grasp and the word of cheer. ~Elbert Hubbard


Traditions are group efforts to keep the unexpected from happening. ~Mignon McLaughlin


Every man expects some miracle - either from his mind or from his body or from someone else or from events. ~Paul Valéry


The private lives of the ancients are now the public sport of the moderns. ~Ivor Brown


The age is a vociferous one, and no prophet is without honor who is able to strike an attitude and to speak loud enough to make himself heard. ~Ellen Glasgow


Perhaps this is an age when men think bravely of the human spirit; for surely they have a strange lust to lay it bare. ~Christopher Morley


The present age, for all its cosmopolitan hustle, is curiously suburban in spirit. ~Norman Douglas


A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles. ~Tim Cahill


I cannot help it, - in spite of myself, infinity torments me. ~Alfred de Musset,L'Espoir en Dieu


It has been said that figures rule the world; maybe. I am quite sure that it is figures which show us whether it is being ruled well or badly. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1830, translated


God and the devil lose to a common enemy: inertia. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Someday perhaps the inner light will shine forth from us, and then we'll need no other light. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


An honorable man will not be bullied by a hypothesis. ~Bergen Evans, "A Tale of a Tub," The Natural History of Nonsense


No healthy civilization can ever be reared on a foundation of devitalized work. ~William Ralph Inge


History is apt to judge harshly those who sacrifice tomorrow for today. ~Harold MacMillan


Is devotion to others a cover for the hungers and the needs of the self, of which one is ashamed? I was always ashamed to take. So I gave. It was not virtue. It was a disguise. ~Anaïs Nin


The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is noninterference with their own peculiar ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours. ~William James


Youth is not enough. And love is not enough. And success is not enough. And, if we could achieve it, enough would not be enough. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


To conquer oneself is a greater task than conquering others. ~Buddha


A man who finds no satisfaction in himself, seeks for it in vain elsewhere. ~François Duc de La Rochefoucauld


Many are saved from sin by being so inept at it. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


But it seems an irony of creation that man's mind knows how to handle things the better the farther removed they are from the center of his existence. Thus we are cleverest where knowledge matters least.... ~Hermann Weyl


When darkness descends on summer nights, the air around campfires, lanterns and cottage windows becomes filled with swirling moths seemingly intent on self destruction. The suicide fliers are drawn to the flames and light because they normally navigate a straight course by keeping constant the angle of moonlight or sunbeams falling on their eyes. Night lights created by humans disorient moths, causing them to flutter round and round the source without being able to get their bearings. ~Doug Bennet and Tim Tiner, Up North


One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries. ~A.A. Milne


Three passions, simple but overwhelming, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. ~Bertrand Russell, Autobiography, 1967


Vain the ambition of kings
Who seek by trophies and dead things
To leave a living name behind,
And weave but nets to catch the wind.
~John Webster


To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first and, whatever you hit, call it the target. ~Patrick Toche


All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost.
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
~J.R.R. Tolkien


A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world. ~Oscar Wilde


A fanatic is one who sticks to his guns whether they're loaded or not. ~Franklin P. Jones


A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. ~Winston Churchill


Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize until you have tried to make it precise. ~Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism


Vision is the art of seeing things invisible. ~Jonathan Swift, "Thoughts on Various Subjects," Miscellanies, 1711


There are few who would not rather be taken in adultery than in provincialism. ~Aldous Huxley, Antic Hay, 1923

Quotations about Yoga

When this body has been so magnificently and artistically created by God, it is only fitting that we should maintain it in good health and harmony by the most excellent and artistic science of Yoga. ~Geeta Iyengar


Yoga teaches us to cure what need not be endured and endure what cannot be cured. ~B.K.S. Iyengar


The yoga mat is a good place to turn when talk therapy and antidepressants aren't enough. ~Amy Weintraub


The yogi will tell you that you feel and look as young as your spine is elastic. ~Richard Hittleman


Yoga is the fountain of youth. You're only as young as your spine is flexible. ~Bob Harper


You cannot do yoga. Yoga is your natural state. What you can do are yoga exercises, which may reveal to you where you are resisting your natural state. ~Sharon Gannon


Yoga is possible for anybody who really wants it. Yoga is universal.... But don't approach yoga with a business mind looking for worldly gain. ~K. Pattabhi Jois


By embracing your mother wound as your yoga, you transform what has been a hindrance in your life into a teacher of the heart. ~Phillip Moffitt


Yoga is 99% practice and 1% theory. ~K. Pattabhi Jois


I would like for people to realize that yoga is not about touching your toes. ~Gary Kraftsow


I like the physical part, but I'm also drawn to the spiritual. For me, yoga is not just a workout—it's about working on yourself. ~Mary Glover, "Health Profile: Yoga leaves aches and pains behind," Arizona Republic, 2004 April 6


In our uniquely human capacity of connect movement with breath and spiritual meaning, yoga is born. ~Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa


A photographer gets people to pose for him. A yoga instructor gets people to pose for themselves. ~Terri Guillemets


I do yoga so that I can stay flexible enough to kick my own arse if necessary. ~Betsy Cañas Garmon, www.wildthymecreative.com


The beauty is that people often come here for the stretch, and leave with a lot more. ~Liza Ciano, co-owner & co-director of Yoga Vermont, yogavermont.com


Yoga in Mayfair or Fifth Avenue, or in any other place which is on the telephone, is a spiritual fake. ~Carl Jung


Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape. ~Author Unknown


Vogue and Self are putting out the message of yoginis as buff and perfect. If you start doing yoga for those reasons, fine. Most people get beyond that and see that it's much, much more. ~Patricia Walden


When asked what gift he wanted for his birthday, the yogi replied: "I wish no gifts, only presence." ~Author Unknown


While doing yoga we are more ourselves, and more than ourselves. ~Valerie Jeremijenko


Yoga is bodily gospel. ~Reaven Fields


The aim of yoga is to eliminate the control that material nature exerts over the human spirit, to rediscover through introspective practice what the poet T.S. Eliot called "the still point of the turning world." ~Barbara Stoler Miller


Without proper breathing, the yoga postures are nothing more than calisthenics. ~Rachel Schaeffer


If I'm losing balance in a pose, I stretch higher and God reaches down to steady me. It works every time, and not just in yoga. ~Terri Guillemets


Yoga, an ancient but perfect science, deals with the evolution of humanity. This evolution includes all aspects of one's being, from bodily health to self-realization. Yoga means union—the union of body with consciousness and consciousness with the soul. Yoga cultivates the ways of maintaining a balanced attitude in day-to-day life and endows skill in the performance of one's actions. ~B.K.S. Iyengar,Astadala Yogamala


Yoga is not about self-improvement, it's about self-acceptance. ~Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa


Anyone who practices can obtain success in yoga but not one who is lazy. Constant practice alone is the secret of success. ~Svatmarama


Yoga is the practice of quieting the mind. ~Patañjali


Asanas attune the body to meditation, just as a guitar is tuned before a performance. ~Author Unknown


Yoga is the perfect opportunity to be curious about who you are. ~Jason Crandell, quoted in Yoga Journal, November 2005


Yoga is difficult for the one whose mind is not subdued. ~Bhagavad Gita


Yoga is essentially a practice for your soul, working through the medium of your body. ~Tara Fraser


Yoga doesn't take time, it gives time. ~Ganga White


Yoga has a sly, clever way of short-circuiting the mental patterns that cause anxiety. ~Baxter Bell, quoted in "Worry Thwarts," Yoga Journal, March 2006


Concentrating on poses clears the mind, while focusing on the breath helps the body shift out of fight-or-flight mode. ~Melanie Haiken, "Worry Thwarts," Yoga Journal, March 2006


The practice of Yoga brings us face to face with the extraordinary complexity of our own being. ~Sri Aurobindo


That's exactly how it is in yoga. The places where you have the most resistance are actually the places that are going to be the areas of the greatest liberation. ~Rodney Yee


The ultimate essence of yoga is the contact and the union between the individual consciousness and the divine consciousness. ~Raphael, Essence and Purpose of Yoga: The Initiatory Pathways to the Transcendent


Practicing yoga during the day is a matter of keeping your eyes on the road and one ear turned toward the infinite. ~Erich Schiffmann


The autonomic nervous system is divided into the sympathetic system, which is often identified with the fight-or-flight response, and the parasympathetic, which is identified with what's been called the relaxation response. When you do yoga — the deep breathing, the stretching, the movements that release muscle tension, the relaxed focus on being present in your body — you initiate a process that turns the fight-or-flight system off and the relaxation response on. That has a dramatic effect on the body. The heartbeat slows, respiration decreases, blood pressure decreases. The body seizes this chance to turn on the healing mechanisms. ~Richard Faulds


When you inhale, you are taking the strength from God. When you exhale, it represents the service you are giving to the world. ~B.K.S. Iyengar


Inhale, and God approaches you. Hold the inhalation, and God remains with you. Exhale, and you approach God. Hold the exhalation, and surrender to God. ~Tirumalai Krishnamacharya


Hatha is the sanctuary for those suffering every type of pain. It is the foundation for those practicing every type of Yoga. ~Svatmarama, The Hatha Yoga Pradipika, translated from Sanskrit by Brian Dana Akers (yogavidya.com)


One succeeds in all Yogas through energetic practice—even if one is young, old, very old, sick, or weak. ~Svatmarama, The Hatha Yoga Pradipika, translated from Sanskrit by Brian Dana Akers (yogavidya.com)


For those wounded by civilization, yoga is the most healing salve. ~Terri Guillemets


What we're trying to do in yoga is to create a union, and so to deepen a yoga pose is to actually increase the union of the pose, not necessarily put your leg around your head. ~Rodney Yee


Sun salutations can energize and warm you, even on the darkest, coldest winter day. ~Carol Krucoff


I was in yoga the other day. I was in full lotus position. My chakras were all aligned. My mind is cleared of all clatter and I'm looking out of my third eye and everything that I'm supposed to be doing. It's amazing what comes up, when you sit in that silence. "Mama keeps whites bright like the sunlight, Mama's got the magic of Clorox 2." ~Ellen DeGeneres


Warrior pose battles inner weakness and wins focus. You see that there is no war within you. You're on your own side, and you are your own strength. ~Terri Guillemets


Mountain pose teaches us, literally, how to stand on our own two feet.... teaching us to root ourselves into the earth.... Our bodies become a connection between heaven and earth. ~Carol Krucoff


Mountain pose is an affirmation. You can conquer anything with your natural boldness and resolute strength. Only you can reach the peak of your success. ~Terri Guillemets


All unimportant matters drop off you in ragdoll pose. Very few things are genuinely important. The Truth sways before you. ~Terri Guillemets


Tree pose grows confidence. ~Terri Guillemets


Chair pose is a defiance of spirit, showing how high you can reach even when you're forced down. ~Terri Guillemets


Corpse pose restores life. Dead parts of your being fall away, the ghosts are released. ~Terri Guillemets


Yoga practitioners advise the times around sunrise and sunset, well before eating a meal, as the best time for yoga and meditation practice. The science of biometeorology (the study of natural forces on human and animal life) tells us that the sun has a tremendous impact upon the lives of plants, animals, and human beings. Even our blood chemistry changes with the rising and setting of the sun! Therefore, there may be a chemical basis for the thousands of years of belief, in every spiritual tradition, that to meditate and pray at sunrise and sunset is somehow more effective, more auspicious. ~Vimala Schneider McClure, A Woman's Guide to Tantra Yoga


We are aware of yoga only as a technique to gain physical strength, flexibility, or increased health. And indeed these are potent side effects of the practice. But that is what they are: side effects. To focus on these largely insignificant manifestations is to miss the point entirely. ~John McAfee


The asanas are useful maps to explore yourself, but they are not the territory. ~Donna Farhi


The harmonizing of opposing forces is a key aspect of yoga — hot energy is united with cool energy, strong with soft, and masculine with feminine. ~Tara Fraser


Yoga accepts. Yoga gives. ~Terri Guillemets


Basketball is an endurance sport, and you have to learn to control your breath; that's the essence of yoga, too. So, I consciously began using yoga techniques in my practice and playing. I think yoga helped reduce the number and severity of injuries I suffered. As preventative medicine, it's unequaled. ~Kareem Abdul-Jabbar


Before you've practiced, the theory is useless. After you've practiced, the theory is obvious. ~David Williams, Ashtanga yoga teacher in Maui, Hawaii, quoted from yoga.com


I tried yoga once but took off for the mall halfway through class, as I had a sudden craving for a soft pretzel and world peace. ~Terri Guillemets


The last time I opened my chakra so I could feel my peace, I got thrown right out of the pub. ~Terri Guillemets

Quotations about Writing

So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it. ~Harold Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete, 1948


The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. ~Anaïs Nin


You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. ~Ray Bradbury


Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. ~E.L. Doctorow


A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket. ~Charles Peguy


And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. ~Sylvia Plath


I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all. ~Richard Wright, American Hunger, 1977


I try to leave out the parts that people skip. ~Elmore Leonard


If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. ~Toni Morrison


What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers. ~Logan Pearsall Smith, "All Trivia," Afterthoughts, 1931


The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium. ~Norbet Platt


It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. ~Vita Sackville-West


Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say. ~Sharon O'Brien


Never use the word, 'very.' It is the weakest word in the English language; doesn't mean anything. If you feel the urge of 'very' coming on, just write the word, 'damn,' in the place of 'very.' The editor will strike out the word, 'damn,' and you will have a good sentence. ~William Allen White (Thanks, Garson O'Toole of quoteinvestigator.com!)


I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter. ~James Michener


The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say. ~Mark Twain


The wastebasket is a writer's best friend. ~Isaac Bashevis Singer


Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction. ~Dylan Thomas, letter to Vernon Watkins, March 1938


Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. ~William Wordsworth


The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible. ~Vladimir Nabakov


Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. ~Anton Chekhov


Easy reading is damn hard writing. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne


Ink and paper are sometimes passionate lovers, oftentimes brother and sister, and occasionally mortal enemies. ~Terri Guillemets


Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space. ~Orson Scott Card


A metaphor is like a simile. ~Author Unknown


The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter - it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning. ~Mark Twain, letter to George Bainton, 1888 (Thanks, Andrew & Barbara), variation of Josh Billings' "Don't mistake vivacity for wit, thare iz about az much difference az thare iz between lightning and a lightning bug."


The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it. ~Jules Renard, "Diary," February 1895


Proofread carefully to see if you any words out. ~Author Unknown


A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer. ~Karl Kraus


A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose. ~Samuel McChord Crothers, "Every Man's Natural Desire to Be Somebody Else," The Dame School of Experience, 1920


When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen. But if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any way you can. ~Samuel Lover, Handy Andy, 1842


I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions. ~James Michener


Writing is my time machine, takes me to the precise time and place I belong. ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com


If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster. ~Isaac Asimov


I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork. ~Peter De Vries


Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne


A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind. ~Catherine Drinker Bowen, Atlantic, December 1957


To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music the words make. ~Truman Capote, McCall's, November 1967


A writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right. ~John K. Hutchens, New York Herald Tribune, 10 September 1961


I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top. ~English Professor (Name Unknown), Ohio University


Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. ~Hannah Arendt


It seems to me that the problem with diaries, and the reason that most of them are so boring, is that every day we vacillate between examining our hangnails and speculating on cosmic order. ~Ann Beattie, Picturing Will, 1989


For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain [and] the noise of battle. ~John Cheever


Do not put statements in the negative form.
And don't start sentences with a conjunction.
If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a
great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.
De-accession euphemisms.
If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.
~William Safire, "Great Rules of Writing"


No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous. ~Henry Brooks Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 1907


Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. ~Gene Fowler


Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable. ~Francis Bacon


The expression "to write something down" suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it. ~William Gass, "Habitations of the Word," Kenyon Review, October 1984


Be obscure clearly. ~E.B. White


Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. ~Flannery O'Connor


It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page. ~Joan Baez


When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence. ~Samuel Butler


Ink on paper is as beautiful to me as flowers on the mountains; God composes, why shouldn't we? ~Terri Guillemets


Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost any subject he may. ~Walter Savage Landor, Imaginary Conversation: Diogenes and Plato


Let me walk through the fields of paper
touching with my wand
dry stems and stunted
butterflies....
~Denise Levertov, "A Walk through the Notebooks"


When we see a natural style we are quite amazed and delighted, because we expected to see an author and find a man. ~Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670


Every writer I know has trouble writing. ~Joseph Heller


Writer's block is a disease for which there is no cure, only respite. ~Terri Guillemets


A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one. ~Baltasar Gracián, translated from Spanish


When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing. ~Enrique Jardiel Poncela


I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces. ~Harold Ross


When you are describing,
A shape, or sound, or tint;
Don't state the matter plainly,
But put it in a hint;
And learn to look at all things,
With a sort of mental squint.
~Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll)


Writing comes more easily if you have something to say. ~Sholem Asch


The ablest writer is only a gardener first, and then a cook: his tasks are, carefully to select and cultivate his strongest and most nutritive thoughts; and when they are ripe, to dress them, wholesomely, and yet so that they may have a relish. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. ~Lord Byron


If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it. ~Anais Nin


I'd rather be caught holding up a bank than stealing so much as a two-word phrase from another writer. ~Jack Smith


An incurable itch for scribbling takes possession of many, and grows inveterate in their insane breasts. ~Juvenal, Satires


Writing is a struggle against silence. ~Carlos Fuentes


Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will none the less get something that looks remarkably like it. ~Jack London, "Getting Into Print," 1905


The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation. ~Elias Canetti


It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader. If you do not believe in the characters or the story you are doing at that moment with all your mind, strength, and will, if you don't feel joy and excitement while writing it, then you're wasting good white paper, even if it sells, because there are other ways in which a writer can bring in the rent money besides writing bad or phony stories. ~Paul Gallico, "Confessions of a Story Writer," 1946


All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper. ~Isaac Bashevis Singer


One hates an author that's all author. ~George Gordon, Lord Byron, "Beppo"


What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window. ~Burton Rascoe


The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes. ~Agatha Christie


An old racetrack joke reminds you that your program contains all the winners' names. I stare at my typewriter keys with the same thought. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Every word born of an inner necessity - writing must never be anything else. ~Etty Hillesum, quoted in Ten Fun Things to Do Before You Die by Karol Jackowski


A writer's mind seems to be situated partly in the solar plexus and partly in the head. ~Ethel Wilson


Publication - is the auction of the Mind of Man. ~Emily Dickinson


If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves. ~Don Marquis


There are men that will make you books, and turn them loose into the world, with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters. ~Miguel de Cervantes


Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake. ~E.L. Doctorow


The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure. ~Henry David Thoreau


You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke. ~Arthur Polotnik


An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff. ~Adlai Stevenson, as quoted in You Said a Mouthful edited by Ronald D. Fuchs


The first goal of writing is to have one's words read successfully. ~Robert Brault,www.robertbrault.com


Most editors are failed writers - but so are most writers. ~T.S. Eliot


What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told. ~André Gide


Some authors write with a grave ink, of a dramatic pen dipped into their dark souls. ~Terri Guillemets


Authors and lovers always suffer some infatuation, from which only absence can set them free. ~Samuel Johnson


Lists are the butterfly nets that catch my fleeting thoughts... ~Betsy Cañas Garmon, www.wildthymecreative.com


A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident. ~W. Somerset Maugham, Summing Up, 1938


They lard their lean books with the fat of others' works. ~Robert Burton,Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621


The road to hell is paved with adverbs. ~Stephen King


It is plagiarism when you take something out of a book and use it as your own. If you take it out of several books then it is research. ~Quoted by Ralph Foss, 1932(Thanks, Garson O'Toole of quoteinvestigator.com!)


My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin. ~Karl Kraus


As to the adjective, when in doubt, strike it out. ~Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson, 1894


We write to remember our nows later. ~Terri Guillemets


As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall. ~Virginia Woolf


Caress your phrase tenderly: it will end by smiling at you. ~Anatole France


I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension. ~Norman Mailer


When I don't make any progress, it is because I have bumped into the wall of language. Then I draw back with a bloody head. And would like to go on. ~Karl Kraus, translated from German by Harry Zohn


I've had secrets come out of my typewriter in invisible ink. ~Terri Guillemets


To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all. ~Lord Byron


Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes. ~Theodore Dreiser, 1900


It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else. ~Havelock Ellis


Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason. They made no such demand upon those who wrote them. ~Charles Caleb Colton


You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write. ~Saul Bellow


Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good. ~Author Unknown, commonly misattributed to Samuel Johnson (*) (Thanks, Frank Lynch)


How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. ~Henry David Thoreau, Journal, 19 August 1851


I am a man, and alive.... For this reason I am a novelist. And being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog. ~D.H. Lawrence, preface to Shestov, All Things Are Possible, 1938


The land of literature is a fairy land to those who view it at a distance, but, like all other landscapes, the charm fades on a nearer approach, and the thorns and briars become visible. ~Washington Irving


Ink surrounds me all the time
On my bed sheets, recorded in rhyme
Quills 'ever scribbling in my head
Sometimes damnit I forget what they said.
Ink has settled into my fingerprints
But to keep the words I fear to rinse...
~Terri Guillemets


Write your first draft with your heart. Re-write with your head. ~From the movie Finding Forrester


It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write. ~Sinclair Lewis


Being an author is being in charge of your own personal insane asylum. ~Terri Guillemets


[T]he author writes as a race-horse runs, for the sake of it. He feels like it, and kindles just because he enjoys burning. ~The Living Way, edited and published by S.D. Simonds, Volume III, 1872, referring to Joaquin Miller and his poem "Isles of the Amazons"


Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen? ~Friedrich Nietzsche


It is indeed certain, that whoever attempts any common topick, will find unexpected coincidences of his thoughts with those of other writers; nor can the nicest judgment always distinguish accidental similitude from artful imitation. ~Samuel Johnson, 1751


Writing is both mask and unveiling. ~E.B. White


A notepad by the bedside accounts for half the earnings of my livelihood. If it weren't for bedtime, half my novels would still be stuck at dock. ~Terri Guillemets


Dialogue is not just quotation. It is grimaces, pauses, adjustments of blouse buttons, doodles on a napkin, and crossings of legs. ~Jerome Stern, Making Shapely Fiction, 1991


Let's hope the institution of marriage survives its detractors, for without it there would be no more adultery and without adultery two thirds of our novelists would stand in line for unemployment checks. ~Peter S. Prescott


It's not plagiarism - I'm recycling words, as any good environmentally conscious writer would do. ~Uniek Swain


True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,
As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance.
~Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Criticism"


Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself. ~Franz Kafka


An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere. ~Gustave Flaubert


If I fall asleep with a pen in my hand, don't remove it — I might be writing in my dreams. ~Terri Guillemets


There's only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that's a writer sitting down to write. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


One ought only to write when one leaves a piece of one's own flesh in the inkpot, each time one dips one's pen. ~Leo Tolstoy


The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book. ~Samuel Johnson


Authors are magpies, echoing each other's words and seizing avidly on anything that glitters. ~Bergen Evans


What things there are to write, if one could only write them! My mind is full of gleaming thought; gay moods and mysterious, moth-like meditations hover in my imagination, fanning their painted wings. But always the rarest, those streaked with azure and the deepest crimson, flutter away beyond my reach. ~Logan Pearsall Smith


No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published. ~Russell Lynes


A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order. ~Jean Luc Godard


Loafing is the most productive part of a writer's life. ~James Norman Hall


Whatever an author puts between the two covers of his book is public property; whatever of himself he does not put there is his private property, as much as if he had never written a word. ~Gail Hamilton


Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought? ~Joan Didion


I could give you a number of examples to show how widespread has been this practice of mutual pilfering among the authors of our old literature.... by transferring something of theirs to his own immortal work he [Virgil] has ensured that the memory of these old writers—whom, as the tastes of today show, we are already beginning to deride as well as to neglect—should not wholly perish. ~Macrobius, Saturnalia


I write because I'm afraid to say some things out loud. ~Gordon Atkinson, reallivepreacher.com


Journal: fitting your heart and soul into ruled lines. ~Terri Guillemets


Sleep on your writing; take a walk over it; scrutinize it of a morning; review it of an afternoon; digest it after a meal; let it sleep in your drawer a twelvemonth; never venture a whisper about it to your friend, if he be an author especially. ~A. Bronson Alcott


The artist's only responsibility is his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one.... If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate: The "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies. ~William Faulkner, quoted in M. Cowley, Writers at Work, 1958


A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. ~Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades, 1947


The reason why many people are so fond of using superlatives, is, they are so positive that the poor positive is not half positive enough for them. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


A person who publishes a book wilfully appears before the populace with his pants down. ~Edna St. Vincent Millay


[A] great writer creates his precursors. ~Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952, translated from Spanish


The only cure for writer's block is insomnia. ~Terri Guillemets


Sit down, and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it. ~Colette, Casual Chance, 1964


Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted. ~Jules Renard, Journal, 10 April 1895


The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. ~Ray Bradbury


Being an author is having angels whisper in your ear - and devils, too. ~Terri Guillemets


Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all. ~Franklin P. Adams, Half a Loaf, 1927


You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world. ~G.K. Chesterton


The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes. ~André Gide, Journals, 1894


Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death - fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant. ~Edna Ferber, A Kind of Magic, 1963


The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax. ~Alfred Kazin, Think, February 1963


i never think at all when i write
nobody can do two things at the same time
and do them both well
~Don Marquis, Archy's Life of Mehitabel, 1933


Our passions shape our books; repose writes them in the intervals. ~Proust, The Past Recaptured, 1927


Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out. ~Samuel Johnson, "Recalling the Advice of a College Tutor," Boswell, Life of Johnson, 1791


An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate. ~Chateaubriand, Le Génie du Christianisme, 1802


Keep a diary and one day it'll keep you. ~Mae West


The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads. ~William Styron, interview, Writers at Work, 1958


There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as do exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft. ~Jessamyn West, Saturday Review, 21 September 1957


I hate writing, I love having written. ~Dorothy Parker, may not be exact wording


Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. ~George Orwell, "Why I Write," 1947 (Thanks, Jennifer)


One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment. ~Hart Crane


He that uses many words for the explaining any subject doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink. ~John Ray


Writing is a product of silence. ~Carrie Latet


A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. ~G.K. Chesterton


Novelists... fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence. ~Fay Weldon


Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. ~Rainer Maria Rilke


Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such. ~Samuel Butler


It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous. ~Robert Benchley


No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman. ~Van Wyck Brooks


The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it. ~Ernest Hemingway, interview in Paris Review, Spring 1958


The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new. ~Samuel Johnson


For, to speak my private Opinion, I am for every Man's working upon his own Materials, and producing only what he can find within himself, which is commonly a better Stock than the Owner knows it to be. I think Flowers of Wit ought to spring, as those in a Garden do, from their own Root and Stem, without Foreign Assistance. I would have a Man's Wit rather like a Fountain, that feeds it self invisibly, than a River, that is supply'd by several Streams from abroad.
Or if it be necessary, as the Case is with some barren Wits, to take in the Thoughts of others, in order to draw forth their own, as dry Pumps will not play till Water is thrown into them; in that Necessity, I would recommend some of the approv'd Standard-Authors of Antiquity for your Perusal, as a Poet and a Wit; because Maggots being what you look for, as Monkeys do for Vermin in their Keepers Heads, you will find they abound in good old Authors, as in rich old Cheese, not in the new; and for that Reason you must have the Classicks, especially the most Worm-eaten of them, often in your Hands.
But with this Caution, that you are not to use those Ancients as unlucky Lads do their old Fathers, and make no Conscience of picking their Pockets and pillaging them. Your Business is not to steal from them, but to improve uponthem, and make their Sentiments your own; which is an Effect of the great Judgment; and tho difficult, yet very possible, without the scurvy Imputation of Filching: For I humbly conceive, tho' I light my Candle at my Neighbour's Fire, that does not alter the Property, or make the Wyck, the Wax, or the Flame, or the whole Candle, less my own.
Possibly you may think it a very severe Task, to arrive at a competent Knowledge of so many of the Ancients, as excel in their Way; and indeed it would be really so, but for the short and easie Method lately found out of Abstracts, Abridgments, Summaries, &c. which are admirable Expedients for being very learned with little or no Reading; and have the same Use with Burning-Glasses, to collect the diffus'd Rays of Wit and Learning in Authors, and make them point with Warmth and Quickness upon the Reader's Imagination. And to this is nearly related that other modern Device of consulting Indexes, which is to read BooksHebraically, and begin where others usually end; and this is a compendious Way of coming to an Acquaintance with Authors: For Authors are to be used likeLobsters, you must look for the best Meat in the Tails, and lay the Bodies back again in the Dish....
~Jonathan Swift, "A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet: Together With a Proposal for the Encouragement of Poetry in this Kingdom," 1721


The best style is the style you don't notice. ~Somerset Maugham


There are thousands of thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen and writes. ~William Makepeace Thackeray


I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head. ~John Updike


When I state myself, as the representative of the verse, it does not mean me, but a supposed person. ~Emily Dickinson


Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man's life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible. ~Leo Tolstoy


Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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