::: December 2023 Collected Quotes :::
"What information do you wish you had?"
- Susan Liautaud
*
"Curiosity is the essence of human existence."
- Eugene Cernan
*
"What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
*
“It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.”
— Anne Frank
*
“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre
*
"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all."
- Noam Chomsky
*
“Loneliness is not solitude. Solitude requires being alone, whereas loneliness shows itself most sharply in company with others.”
— Hannah Arendt
*
"Seek first the virtues of the mind; and other things either will come, or will not be wanted."
- Francis Bacon
*
"The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
*
"How much of human life is lost in waiting."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
*
"Healing begins where the wound was made."
— Alice Walker
*
"The love that you withhold is the pain that you carry."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
*
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”
— Anaïs Nin
*
“Don’t ever give up on life. Life can be so beautiful, especially after you’ve spent a lot of time with it.”
- Yoko Ono
*
"Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your mind."
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
*
"There is creative reading as well as creative writing."
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
*
"A timid question will always receive a confident answer."
- Charles John Darling
*
"To make peace, one must be an uncompromising leader. To make peace, one must also embody compromise."
- Benazir Bhutto
*
“It is only when you and I add the burden of those two awful eternities, yesterday and tomorrow, that we break down. It is not the experience of today that drives men mad. It is remorse or bitterness for something which happened yesterday or the dread of what tomorrow may bring. Let us therefore do our best to live but one day at a time.”
- Richmond Walker
*
"We change people through conversation, not through censorship."
- Jay Z
*
"The only tired I was, was tired of giving in."
- Rosa Parks
*
"Fear of life closes off more opportunities for us than fear of death ever does."
- Agnes Moorehead
*
"Your passions should fit you exactly but your purpose in life should exceed you."
- Kevin Kelly
*
"If you can walk away from a landing, it's a good landing. If you use the airplane the next day, it's an outstanding landing."
- Chuck Yeager
*
"We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state."
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
*
“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”
— Maya Angelou
*
“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
— James Baldwin
*
“But how could you live and have no story to tell?”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky
*
“Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.”
— Albert Camus
*
“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
— Virginia Woolf
*
"Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment."
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
*
"Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood."
— Marie Curie
*
"Knowledge is the antidote to fear."
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
*
“For all evils there are two remedies - time and silence.”
— Alexandre Dumas
*
“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”
— William Faulkner
*
"The real index of civilization is when people are kinder than they need to be."
– Louis de Bernieres
*
"Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood."
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
*
"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it."
- Steve Jobs
*
"The ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones who do."
- Steve Jobs
*
"When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will see it. You'll know it's there, so you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through."
- Steve Jobs
*
"My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to make them better."
- Steve Jobs
*
"Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful … that’s what matters to me."
- Steve Jobs
*
"Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected."
- Steve Jobs
*
"For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something."
- Steve Jobs
*
"I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don’t know why. Because they’re harder. They’re much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you’ve completely failed."
- Steve Jobs
*
"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."
- Steve Jobs
*
"Getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life."
- Steve Jobs
*
"That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex; you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple."
- Steve Jobs
*
"We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life."
- Steve Jobs
*
"Caring for myself is not self-indulgence; it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare."
- Audre Lorde
*
"It’s about waking up in the morning and saying that I’m worthy of love, belonging, and joy. It’s about engaging with the world from a place of worthiness."
- Brené Brown
*
“If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.”
- Booker T. Washington
*
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress."
- Frederick Douglass
*
"The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world; I am like a snowball — the further I am rolled the more I gain."
- Susan B. Anthony
*
"A human being would certainly not grow to be 70 or 80 years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species to which he belongs. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning."
- Carl Jung
*
"Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young."
- Henry Ford
*
"Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul."
- Frank Crane
*
"Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art."
- Eleanor Roosevelt
*
"The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been."
- Madeleine L'Engle
*
"If you are pining for youth I think it produces a stereotypical old man because you only live in memory, you live in a place that doesn’t exist. I think aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person that you always should have been."
- David Bowie
*
"When you get to my age, you’ll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you. I know people who have a lot of money, and they get testimonial dinners and they get hospital wings named after them. But the truth is that nobody in the world loves them. If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster."
- Warren Buffett
*
"If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we are not really living."
- Gail Sheehy
*
"Most people would prefer to not have to know what others suffer, no matter how close up; they’d rather live."
- Blake Butler
*
"The time to make up your mind about people, is never."
- Philip Barry
*
"In its original literal sense, "moral relativism" is simply moral complexity. That is, anyone who agrees that stealing a loaf of bread to feed one's children is not the moral equivalent of, say, shoplifting a dress for the fun of it, is a relativist of sorts. But in recent years, conservatives bent on reinstating an essentially religious vocabulary of absolute good and evil as the only legitimate framework for discussing social values have redefined "relative" as "arbitrary"."
- Ellen Jane Willis
*
"My self-imposed mandate is to be the voice for the voiceless."
- Dionne Warwick
*
"Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
*
"I ought to be jealous of the tower. She is more famous than I am.
- Gustave Eiffel
*
"You know you're getting old when work is a lot less fun and fun is a lot more work."
- Joan Rivers
*
"You know you’ve reached middle age when you’re cautioned to slow down by your doctor, instead of by the police."
- Joan Rivers
*
"If you’re going to die, die interesting."
- Joan Rivers
*
"All good ideas start out as bad ideas; that’s why it takes so long."
- Steven Spielberg
*
“Things take the time they take. Don’t worry.”
- Mary Oliver
*
"Vulnerability always begets connection and intimacy. Stay vulnerable with each other."
- Kristen Bell
*
"You have to listen to your partner’s problems, suggestions, and advice, and accept that you’re not always right. Conversation is the key to a successful marriage."
- Meryl Streep
*
"Relationships have a strong chance of surviving when they are based on “the good” in the other person, where both partners work together to feed that good and are inspired to become better themselves."
- Suzie Pileggi Pawelski
*
"It’s important to marry somebody who is your equal, and to … be with somebody who wants you to win as much as you want them to win."
- Michelle Obama
*
"It really helps if you find someone you like, not just love … When you’re at your empty nest at the end of the day, it’s important to have somebody who you can just be silent with."
- Martina McBride
*
"“You are my everything” is a lousy pop-song lyric and an even worse relationship plan. No one can be “everything” to anyone. Create relationships outside The Relationship, or The Relationship isn’t going to work anymore."
- Matt Lundquist
*
"You have to allow each other to evolve and grow; you need communication and curiosity. Stay interested in your partner, and make sure to really listen."
- Rita Wilson
*
"Commit to investing an hour — on an ongoing basis — to work on strengthening your relationship, troubleshooting, and making it more satisfying."
- Joseph Cilona
*
"In every good marriage, it helps sometimes to be a little deaf."
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg
*
"You have to learn to communicate and have difficult conversations in constructive ways."
- Ron Howard
*
“Humans are like mirrors: We reflect each other.”
- Haemin Sunim
*
"Pretend you’re more obsessed with this moment and a little bit less with the way it ends."
- Buddy Wakefield
*
"We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever."
- Carl Sagan
*
“I’d like to have a half-hour conversation with my mother across the grave, just to sort some things out. Genetics and science have sorted some of it out, but not the more emotional side.”
- Paul Nurse
*
"All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase— 'I love you.'"
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
*
"It may sound trite, but using the weapons of the enemy, no matter how good one's intentions, makes one the enemy."
- Charles de Lint
*
"Don't sit down and wait for the opportunities to come. Get up and make them."
- Madam CJ Walker
*
"An artist never works under ideal conditions. If they existed, his work wouldn't exist, for the artist doesn't live in a vacuum. Some sort of pressure must exist."
- Andrei Tarkovsky
*
"Never let the pressure exceed the pleasure."
- Joe Maddon
*
"I don't believe in pressure. Pressure is not being prepared for what you want to do."
- Colin Kaepernick
*
"No pressure, no diamonds."
- Conor McGregor
*
"Jealousy is the thief of gains."
- Scott Melker
*
"Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world."
- Miyamoto Musashi
*
"I don't want life to imitate art. I want life to be art."
- Carrie Fisher
*
"Luck is when an opportunity comes along and you're prepared for it."
- Denzel Washington
*
"The magic thing about home is that it feels good to leave, and it feels even better to come back."
- Wendy Wunder
*
“All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land.”
— Jack Kerouac
*
*
"Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
*
"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
*
"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
*
“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.”
— Hermann Hesse
*
"People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
*
"One friend with whom you have a lot in common is better than three friends with whom you struggle to find things to talk about."
— Mindy Kaling
*
"If you have two friends in your lifetime, you’re lucky. If you have one good friend, you’re more than lucky."
— S.E. Hinton
*
"The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away."
— Barbara Kingsolver
*
"Friendships between women, as any woman will tell you, are built of a thousand small kindnesses… swapped back and forth and over again."
— Michelle Obama
*
"I always feel that the great high privilege, relief, and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing."
— Katherine Mansfield
*
“The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.”
— Zadie Smith
*
“The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.”
— Zadie Smith
*
“That which we experience when we are in love is perhaps our normal state. Being in love shows a person who they should be.”
— Anton Chekhov
*
“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
— Blaise Pascal
*
“Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.”
— Blaise Pascal
*
"The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
*
"If we would have new knowledge, we must get us a whole world of new questions."
— Susanne Langer
*
“Not being heard is no reason for silence.”
— Victor Hugo
*
“It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.”
— Victor Hugo
*
“There is an old illusion—it is called good and evil.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
*
“I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
*
"Character is higher than intellect… A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
*
"You become what you think about all day long."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
*
"We can smile and relax. Everything we want is right here in the present moment."
— Thích Nhất Hạnh
*
"The ancestor of every action is a thought."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
*
"Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
*
"Peace requires us to surrender our illusions of control."
— Jack Kornfield
*
"I don't want to be a great leader; I want to be a man who goes around with a little oil can and when he sees a breakdown, offers his help. To me, the man who does that is greater than any holy man in saffron-colored robes. The mechanic with the oilcan: that is my ideal in life."
— Baba Amte
*
"Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your mind."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
*
"Just the other day, I was in my neighborhood Starbucks, waiting for the post office to open. I was enjoying a chocolatey cafe mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the New World. From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao, and the Dutch invention of the chemical process for making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA, and the lifestyle marketing of Seattle's Starbucks, the modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top. No wonder it costs so much."
— Sarah Vowell
*
"One of the most beautiful compensations in life is that no person can help another without helping themselves."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
(A positive spin on saying that true altruism is not how humans are wired)
*
"We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
*
“Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?”
— Clarice Lispector
*
"In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you."
— Mortimer J. Adler
*
“There are many things that seem impossible only so long as one does not attempt them.”
— André Gide
*
“But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
— Ernest Hemingway
*
“In order to write about life first you must live it.”
— Ernest Hemingway
*
“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.”
— Ernest Hemingway
*
"If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
*
“My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people.”
— Patricia Highsmith
*