February 2024 Collected Quotes
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“The thing about writing is not to talk, but to do it; no matter how bad or even mediocre it is, the process and production is the thing, not the sitting and theorizing about how one should write ideally, or how well one could write if one really wanted to or had the time.”
— Sylvia Plath
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“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.”
— Sylvia Plath
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“The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.”
— Walter Benjamin
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“Everyone can rise above their circumstances and achieve success if they are dedicated to and passionate about what they do.”
- Nelson Mandela
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"If you need something from somebody, always give that person a way to hand it to you."
- Sue Monk Kidd
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"In the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling."
- Gertrude Stein
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“A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect with, what wickedness human beings are capable of; and not be corrupted — made cynical, superficial — by this understanding.”
— Susan Sontag
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“Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.”
— Susan Sontag
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“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings'.”
— Susan Sontag
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“Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness - conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.”
— Susan Sontag
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“As one passion begins to fail it is necessary to form another, for the whole art of going through life tolerably is to keep oneself eager about anything.”
— Susan Sontag
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"The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw."
- Havelock Ellis
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"When you hate, the only person that is suffering is you because most of the people you hate don’t know it and the rest don't care."
- Medgar Evers
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"Tough times never last, but tough people do."
- Robert Schuller
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"We must reach out our hand in friendship and dignity both to those who would befriend us and those who would be our enemy."
- Arthur Ashe
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“I hold it blasphemy to say that a man ought not to fight against authority: there is no great religion and no great freedom that has not done it, in the beginning.”
— George Eliot
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“It is a common sentence that Knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of Ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.”
— George Eliot
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“Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.”
— George Eliot
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“Absolute power, as we have always known, corrupts absolutely; it corrupts because it does not do the trick for the individual. Reality always creeps in--the reality of our helplessness and our mortality; the reality that, despite our reach for the stars, a creaturely fate awaits us.”
— Irvin D. Yalom
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“To the extent that one is responsible for one's life, one is alone.”
— Irvin D. Yalom
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"A day wasted on others is not wasted on one's self."
- Charles Dickens
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"When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece."
- John Ruskin
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"True friendship resists time, distance, and silence."
- Isabel Allende
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"The companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds, which hardly any later friend can obtain."
- Mary Shelley
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"The best kind of laughter is laughter born of a shared memory."
- Mindy Kaling
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"Activism is the rent I pay for living on the planet."
- Alice Walker
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"The quality of your life depends quite a bit on the quality of attention you project out onto the world."
- David Brooks
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“We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.”
— George Bernard Shaw
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“The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor: he took my measure anew every time he saw me, whilst all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.”
— George Bernard Shaw
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“It's so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.”
— George Bernard Shaw
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“There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it.”
— George Bernard Shaw
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“We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices. The opposite view involves some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think – in fact they do so.”
— Bertrand Russell
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“The pleasure of work is open to anyone who can develop some specialised skill, provided that he can get satisfaction from the exercise of his skill without demanding universal applause.”
— Bertrand Russell
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“There are those who blame the Press, but in this I think they are mistaken. The Press is such as the public demands, and the public demands bad newspapers because it has been badly educated.”
— Bertrand Russell
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“Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.”
— Bertrand Russell
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“What can you do to be a bridge, not a gap?”
- Madison Morrigan
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“You don’t have to move mountains. Simply fall in love with life. Be a tornado of happiness, gratitude, and acceptance. You will change the world just by being a warm, kind-hearted human being.”
- Anita Krizzan
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"We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"I am convinced that most people do not grow up. … Our real selves, the children inside, are still innocent and shy as magnolias.”
- Maya Angelou
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"A hungry man is not a free man."
Adlai Stevenson
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“It is a hard thing to leave any deeply routined life, even if you hate it.”
— John Steinbeck
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“We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition.”
— William James
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“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
— George Orwell
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“The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them.”
- Elizabeth Gilbert
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“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"Happiness is not finding success by a certain time, but finding something you love so much time itself seems to disappear.”
- Brianna Wiest
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"Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote."
- George Jean Nathan
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“What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing – as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre
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“In a world, man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines himself.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre
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“When nature starts to be a bit destabilized, it can get very angry.”
- Heïdi Sevestre
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“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
— Kurt Vonnegut
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"People don't slip. Time catches up with them."
- Nat King Cole
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“Behaviour is a mirror in which everyone shows his image.”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goeth
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“Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good.”
— William Faulkner
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“There are some things for which three words are three too many, and three thousand words that many words too less.”
— William Faulkner
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“Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”
— William Faulkner
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"There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept."
-Ansel Adams
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"If I can inspire young people to dedicate themselves to the good of mankind, I've accomplished something."
- John Glenn
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"When you’re 16, 30 seems ancient. When you’re 30, 45 seems ancient. When you’re 45, 60 seems ancient. When you’re 60, nothing seems ancient."
- Helen Mirren
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"This is the world you have made yourself; now you have to live in it."
- Nina Simone
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“To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.”
— Oscar Wilde
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“Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.”
— Oscar Wilde
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"There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity."
- Arthur Schopenhauer
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"Yeah, I'm a thrill seeker, but crikey, education's the most important thing."
- Steve Irwin
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“It was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge.”
— Virginia Woolf
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“Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.”
— Virginia Woolf
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"Children learn more from what you are than what you teach."
- W.E.B. Du Bois
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"Leaving home in a sense involves a kind of second birth in which we give birth to ourselves."
-Robert Neelly Bellah
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“Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself.”
— Albert Camus
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“All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.”
— Albert Camus
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"I wanted what everyone wants. To be me, full-time."
- Phil Knight
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“Anything worthwhile takes a long time.”
- Debbie Millman
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“In my early professional years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?”
— Carl Rogers
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“Experience is, for me, the highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my own experience. No other person's ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience. It is to experience that I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming in me. Neither the Bible nor the prophets — neither Freud nor research — neither the revelations of God nor man — can take precedence over my own direct experience. My experience is not authoritative because it is infallible. It is the basis of authority because it can always be checked in new primary ways. In this way its frequent error or fallibility is always open to correction.”
— Carl Rogers
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"The word “happy” would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness."
- Carl Jung
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"The good life is not one immune to sadness but one in which suffering contributes to our development."
- Alain de Botton
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"Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten."
- B.F. Skinner
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"I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."
- Abraham Maslow
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"Through others, we become ourselves."
- Lev Vygotsky
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"I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence, but it comes from within. It is there all the time."
- Anna Freud
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"No one needs to paint himself into a corner; no one needs to be completely hemmed in by circumstances; no one needs to be the victim of his biography."
- George Kelly
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"Immature love says: “I love you because I need you.” Mature love says: “I need you because I love you.”"
- Erich Fromm
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"The essence of creativity is figuring out how to use what you already know in order to go beyond what you already think."
- Jerome Bruner
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"When people focus on not seeing color, they may also fail to see discrimination."
- Jennifer L. Eberhardt
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"It may be that we are puppets — puppets controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception, with awareness. And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation."
- Stanley Milgram
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"The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second."
-John Steinbeck
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"The greatest thing that we can do is to help somebody know that they're loved and capable of loving."
- Fred "Mister" Rogers
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“Love, friendship, and respect do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something.”
— Anton Chekhov
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“Understanding and loving are inseparable.”
- Erich Fromm
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"Animals cannot speak, but can you and I not speak for them and represent them? Let us all feel their silent cry of agony and let us all help that cry to be heard in the world."
- Rukmini Devi Arundale
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"The years teach much which the days never know."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
-Henry Adams
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"Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours."
— Hermann Hesse
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“Freedom is not procured by a full enjoyment of what is desired, but by controlling the desire.”
— Epictetus
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"There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book."
Carson McCullers
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“Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I've never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year old school girl. Oh well, it doesn't matter. I feel like writing.”
— Anne Frank
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“Human greatness does not lie in wealth or power, but in character and goodness. People are just people, and all people have faults and shortcomings, but all of us are born with a basic goodness."
— Anne Frank
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“I think it's odd that grown-ups quarrel so easily and so often and about such petty matters. Up to now I always thought bickering was just something children did and that they outgrew it.”
— Anne Frank
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“Then, without realizing it, you try to improve yourself at the start of each new day; of course, you achieve quite a lot in the course of time. Anyone can do this, it costs nothing and is certainly very helpful. Whoever doesn't know it must learn and find by experience that a quiet conscience makes one strong.”
— Anne Frank
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“The fact is, that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.”
— Oscar Wilde
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"Imagination is a very high sort of seeing."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
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“Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
- Marcel Proust
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"I do not wish more external goods—neither possessions, nor honors, nor powers, nor persons. The gain is apparent; the tax is certain."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
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“Nothing in the world is harder than speaking the truth and nothing easier than flattery.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky
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“Freedom of the press is perhaps the freedom that has suffered the most from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty.”
— Albert Camus
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"The love that you withhold is the pain that you carry."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories."
— Carl Jung
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“The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination.”
— Carl Rogers
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“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.”
— Maya Angelou
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“The oldest, shortest words— "yes" and "no"— are those which require the most thought.”
— Pythagoras
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“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”
— Anaïs Nin
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“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
— Haruki Murakami
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“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
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“All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
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"I didn't fall in love, I rose in it."
— Toni Morrison
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"The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
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“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed.”
— William Faulkner
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