"Oh what a tangled web parents weave when they think that their children are naive." -- Ogden Nash
"There are long years between Gifted and Eccentric and most of us fill them with Trouble." -- Adair Lara
"You win a few, you lose a few, and some get rained out. But you dress for all the games." -- Adair Lara
"People read to know they're not alone. People write for the same reason." -- Anna Quindlen
"Just start. Keep going. Repeat." -- Me
"Life is just so daily." -- Dick Sattler
"Declare the past, diagnose the present, foretell the future; practice these acts. As to diseases, make a habit of two things -- to help, or at least to do no harm." -- Hippocrates
"If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance." -- George Bernard Shaw
"Before I met my husband, I'd never fallen in love, though I'd stepped in it a few times." -- Rita Rudner
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler." -- Albert Einstein
"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." -- Abraham Lincoln
"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." -- Dr. Seuss
"Writing is easy. All you have to do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein." -- Red Smith
"Be true to your work, your word, and your friend." -- Henry David Thoreau
"While the water is stirring I will step into the pool." -- Sojourner Truth
"It is not enough to be busy. The question is, what are we busy about?" -- Henry David Thoreau
"This thing we call failure is not the falling down, but the staying down." -- Mary Pickford
"Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length." -- Robert Frost
"We put our love where we have put our labor." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions." -- Mahfouz Naguib
"Success is going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm." -- Winston Churchill
"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I- / I took the one less traveled by / And that has made all the difference." -- Robert Frost
"There is never a wrong time to do the right thing." -- Unknown
"I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed." -- Michael Jordan, Nike commercial
"There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it." -- Edith Wharton
"Expectations are premeditated resentments." -- Adair Lara
"A pen and a drop of ink makes the whole world think." -- Ancient Persian saying
"What is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?" -- Albert Camus
"What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us." -- Emerson
"You can't turn back the clock, but you can wind it up again." -- Bonnie Prudden
"We are constantly invited to be who we are." -- Henry David Thoreau
"The love we give away is the only love we keep." -- Elbert Hubbard
"In Germany, they first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Catholic. Then they came for me -- and by that time there was nobody left to speak up." -- Rev. Martin Niemoller, 1945
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." -- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
"A finished person is a boring person." -- Anna Quindlen
"The things we hate about ourselves aren't more real than things we like about ourselves." -- Ellen Goodman
"It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are." -- e.e. cummings
"How we spend our days is how we spend our lives." -- Annie Dillard
"All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle." -- Francis of Assissi
"Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself." -- Unknown
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." -- Marcel Proust
"Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don't walk behind me, I may not lead. Walk beside me, and be my friend." -- Albert Camus
"The one lesson I have learned is that there is no substitute for paying attention." -- Diane Sawyer
"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." -- Thomas Alva Edison
"Happiness is a perfume which you cannot pour on others without getting a few drops on yourself." -- Louis Mann
"What you don't see with your eyes, don't witness with your mouth." -- Jewish proverb
"Lose with truth and right rather than gain with falsehood and wrong." -- Maimonides
"My job was to be loyally subversive." -- Gordon MacKenzie, Creative Paradox, Hallmark
"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies: 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.'" -- Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
"The minute you or anybody else knows what you are, you are not it, you are what you or anybody else knows you are. And as everything in living is made up of finding out what you are, it is extraordinarily difficult really not to know what you are and yet to be that thing." -- Gertrude Stein
"There is no 'can't,' only 'can't yet.'" -- Sensei Rachel
"Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens." -- Jimi Hendrix
"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places." -- Ernest Hemingway
"We didn't lose the game; we just ran out of time." -- Vince Lombardi
"Firstly, never go against the best light you have; secondly, take care that your light be not darkness." -- Bishop Wilson
"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?" -- Hillel
"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing." -- Albert Einstein
"I want to know God's thoughts... the rest are details." -- Albert Einstein
"Be content to tell your small portion of a larger story." -- William Zinsser
"The only way to have a friend is to be one." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"In the end, only kindness matters." -- Jewel
"Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price." -- Joan Didion
"To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else." -- Emily Dickinson
A Mother's Day Collection:
- "The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents, and the second half by our children." -- Clarence Darrow
- "Motherhood is a wonderful thing -- what a pity to waste it on children." -- Judith Pugh
- "Neurotics build castles in the air, psychotics live in them. My mother cleans them." -- Rita Rudner
- "Sooner or later we all quote our mothers." -- Bern Williams
- "How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers' names." -- Alice Walker
"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on." -- Robert Frost
"In seeking wisdom the first step is silence, the second: listening, the third: remembering, the fourth: practicing, the fifth: teaching others." -- Solomon Ibn Gabirol
"A perfect parent is a person with excellent child-rearing theories and no actual children." -- Dave Barry (submitted by Robin)
"Journals honor that most human of instincts: our need to leave a trace." -- Alexandra Johnson
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." -- Pablo Picasso
"If we cannot choose to be lucky, to be talented, to be loved, we can choose to be grateful, to be content with who we are and what we have, and to act accordingly." -- Harold Kushner
"Writing is the axe that breaks the frozen sea within." -- Franz Kafka
"The world is my living room and I'm a gracious hostess passing through, checking to see if everyone's all right." -- Kathleen Tessaro
"The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time." --James Taylor
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." -- Anne Frank
"The tragedy of parenting is that if you do your job well, your love is doomed to become an unrequited passion." -- Ayelet Waldman
"There's a crack in everything; that's how the light gets in." -- Leonard Cohen
"If art is the bridge between what you see in your mind and what the world sees, then skill is how you build that bridge." --Twyla Tharp
"It takes a lot of time and heat to create a diamond." -- Maya Angelou (submitted by Kathy Raney)
"Each day has its own set of thoughts, words and deeds. Live in tune." -- Rebbe Nachman
"The only thing more dangerous than knowing nothing is thinking you know more than you actually do." -- Brian McGrory
"While we can't pick our parents, and we can't pick our children, fortunately we can pick the books that we read." -- from a review of "We Need to Talk About Kevin" in The Oregonian
"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy." -- Abraham Lincoln
"Sometimes you have to stay in the kitchen, even when you can't stand the heat." -- From "Instant Karma" by Barbara Ann Kipfer
"We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." -- T.S. Eliot
"You only live once, but if you work it right, once is enough." -- Joe E. Lewis
"When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us." -- Helen Keller
"It's never too late to be who you might have been." -- George Eliot
"What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?" -- Unknown
"It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end." -- Ursula K. LeGuin
"Being on the tightrope is living; everything else is waiting." --Karl Wallenda
"I cannot live without books." --Thomas Jefferson
"The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him." -- Rachel Carson
"The empty half of the glass is always at the top" -- Joshua Salik
"Climbing teaches that the biggest barriers are not on the rock but in our minds." -- Jim Collins, Author, "Upward Bound"
"Only people who are dead or enlightened are done with their mothers." -- Geneen Roth
"When you could theoretically live a thousand different lives, how do you pick the one where you belong?" -- Susan Isaacs, "Any Place I Hang My Hat"
"The world is big enough for all our dreams" -- Unknown
"In the depths of winter I finally learned there was in me an invincible summer." -- Albert Camus
"The world was a noisy place full of silence." -- from "A Woman of the World"
"Doing nothing is about making a conscious decision to not accelerate the drama." -- Elizabeth Wurtzel
"When we have arrived at the question, the answer is already near." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"There are times when parenthood seems nothing more than feeding the hand that bites you." -- Peter De Vries
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." -- Thomas Alva Edison
"The universe is made of stories, not of atoms." -- Muriel Rukreyser
"The best way out is always through." -- Robert Frost
"I'm sure not afraid of success and I've learned not to be afraid of failure. The only thing I'm afraid of now is of being someone I don't like much." -- Anna Quindlen
"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting." -- e.e. cummings
"If you decide at some point in your life that your vocation is to raise your own children full time, you will surely be criticized by those who think you're wasting your intellect. And if you decide to combine full-time work outside your home with a family within it, you will be criticized for not juggling as well as a circus performer. We live in a country that trashes poor women who will not leave their children to go out to work, and trashes well-to-do women who will." -- Anna Quindlen (from a commencement speech she delivered May 2005 at Barnard College)
"Tell all the truth, but tell it slant." -- Emily Dickinson
"It is not our abilities that show what we truly are. It is our choices." -- Albus Dumbledore
"I really need a break from myself. A little vacation on the soothing shores of somebody else's mind." -- Catherine Newman
"You always want to tell the story instead of having the story told about you." -- Michael Wolff
"Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good." -- Vaclav Havel
"I write for myself -- and through myself, for everyone." -- Natalie Goldberg
"Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards." -- Soren Kierkegaard
"The histories of vampires and people are not so different, really. How many of us can honestly see our own reflection? ... In the exposing light of day, how many of our dark truths would cause us to feel an agony we could not endure? Even the most inexperienced vampires know they must avoid the sun at all costs." -- Lynda Barry
A great collection. Nice Work.
Posted by: Quotes About Life | April 09, 2011 at 10:23 PM
Hey, I recently added a news widget from www.widgetmate.com to my blog. It shows the latest news, and just took a copy and paste to implement. Might interest you too.
Posted by: Mark Vane | June 21, 2007 at 08:38 AM
One love, one life, we get to carry each other...
Bono
Posted by: Peyton | August 04, 2005 at 05:17 PM
Good quotes but I need them for "Esperanza Rising" the book.
Posted by: Naomi Jenkins | April 10, 2005 at 06:25 PM
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you NOT to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightening about shrinking so that other people won't feel unsure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. As we let our own Light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
~Marianne Williamson
Posted by: Toni | January 09, 2004 at 11:43 AM