A New Selection of Collected Quotes
June 2023
"What I am is good enough if I would only be it openly."
- Carl Rogers
*
"We exist only the extent that we can tell the story about our existence."
"In the end, it's all about storytelling."
— Costica Bradatan (The Gray Area, The Case For Failure)
*
"Compassion is the natural state of the mind."
- The Dalai Lama
*
"It all comes to this: The simplest way to be happy is to do good."
- Helen Keller
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" 'Common' dismisses something that we should be paying attention to."
- Drew Lanhan, ornithologist
(On Being with Krista Tippett)
*
“Our inventions are morally neutral. It depends upon how we use them.”
- John Goodenough
*
"Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention."
- Joan Didion
*
"Grief starts to become indulgent, and it doesn’t serve anyone, and it’s painful. But if you transform it into remembrance, then you’re magnifying the person you lost and also giving something of that person to other people, so they can experience something of that person."
- Patti Smith
*
"If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
*
"You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to."
- Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
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"Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life."
- Anne Roiphe
*
"I quote others only in order the better to express myself."
Michel de Montaigne
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"It's said that "power corrupts", but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power. When they do act, they think of it as service, which has limits. The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insatiable, implacable."
- David Brin
*
"Remember: The time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life’s cruelest irony."
– Douglas Coupland
*
"Anything worth dying for... is certainly worth living for."
– Joseph Heller
*
"The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it."
– Arthur Schopenhauer
*
"Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art."
– Frederic Chopin
*
"I live in the world rather as a spectator of mankind than as one of the species."
-Joseph Addison
*
"You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from."
– Cormac McCarthy
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"Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison."
- Mary Wollstonecraft
*
Hofstadter's Law:
"It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law."
*
"Draw the map instead of reading it"
-Seth Godin
*
"The secret of joy is the mastery of pain."
- Anais Nin
*
"Leaving home in a sense involves a kind of second birth in which we give birth to ourselves."
– Robert Neelly Bellah
*
"I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort."
- Clarice Lispector
*
"If you cannot find peace within yourself, you will never find it anywhere else."
- Marvin Gaye
*
"Do not let the behavior of others destroy your inner peace."
"Do not confuse peace of mind with spaced-out insensitivity. A truly peaceful mind is very sensitive, very aware."
- Tenzin Gyatso (the 14th Dalai Lama)
*
"If there is to be any peace it will come through being, not having."
- Henry Miller
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"Peace is its own reward."
- Gandhi
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"Meditation is not a way of making your mind quiet. It is a way of entering into the quiet that is already there — buried under the 50,000 thoughts the average person thinks every day."
- Deepak Chopra
*
"You are the sky. Everything else — it’s just the weather."
- Pema Chödrön
*
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one… just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
*
"I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it."
- Maya Angelou
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"Whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?"
- Marcus Aurelius
*
"Judge tenderly, if you must. There is usually a side you have not heard, a story you know nothing about, and a battle waged that you do not have to fight."
- Traci Lea Larussa
*
"No one reaches out to you for compassion or empathy so you can teach them how to behave better. They reach out to us because they believe in our capacity to know our darkness well enough to sit in the dark with them."
- Brené Brown
*
"I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person."
- Walt Whitman
*
"You need to let the little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you."
- Andy Warhol
*
" Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: Both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other."
- Arthur Schopenhauer
*
"The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits."
- Albert Camus
*
" Boredom is the fear of self."
- Marie Josephine de Suin
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"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity."
- Ellen Parr
*
"They sicken of the calm who knew the storm."
- Dorothy Parker
*
"I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart."
&
"No one has ever become poor by giving."
- Anne Frank
*
"Don’t forget, a person’s greatest emotional need is to feel appreciated."
- H. Jackson Brown Jr
*
"I lost myself when I learned how to please."
- Glennon Doyle
*
"What the superior man seeks is in himself; what the small man seeks is in others."
- Confucius
*
" Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape."
- bell hooks
*
"Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion."
- Henry David Thoreau
*
"You are a very special person. There is only one like you in the whole world. There’s never been anyone exactly like you before, and there never will be again."
- Fred Rogers
*
"Sometimes history takes things into its own hands."
- Thurgood Marshall
*
"The truth is the kindest thing we can give folks in the end."
- Harriet Beecher Stowe
*
"You have to train your mind as much as your body."
- Venus Williams
*
"Discipline morphs into habit."
- Twyla Tharp
*
"Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others."
- Cicero
*
"Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance."
- Eckhart Tolle
*
"Joy is the simplest form of gratitude."
- Karl Barth
*
"Music is God's voice."
- Brian Wilson
*
"Since when do we have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?"
- Lillian Hellman
*
"A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true."
- Martin Luther King Jr.
*
"There is far too much law for those who can afford it and far too little for those who cannot."
-Derek Bok
*
"It is better to prevent crimes than to punish them."
-Cesare Beccaria
*
"The tenderest love requires to be rekindled by intervals of absence."
- Samuel Johnson
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"The only thing sweeter than union is reunion."
- Kathleen McGowan
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"Anybody with artistic ambitions is always trying to reconnect with the way they saw things as a child."
- Tim Burton
*
"Growing apart doesn’t change the fact that for a long time we grew side by side; our roots will always be tangled."
- Ally Condie
*
"Always try to be a little kinder than is necessary."
- J.M. Barrie
*
"I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live."
-Francoise Sagan
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"It doesn’t matter who you love or how you love, but that you love.”
- Rod McKue
*
What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness? -Jean Jacques Rousseau
*
“I believe that love is the greatest thing in the world; that it alone can overcome hate; that right can and will triumph over might.”
- John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
*
"Find a purpose to serve, not a lifestyle to live."
Criss Jami
*
"Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get—only with what you are expecting to give—which is everything."
- Katharine Hepburn
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"Value those people who tell you the truth, not just those people who tell you what you want to hear."
- Pat Summitt
*
"Don't be afraid to feel as angry or as loving as you can, because when you feel nothing, it's just death."
- Lena Horne
*
“There is only one success: To be able to spend your life in your own way.”
- Christopher Morley