A long long time ago I began collecting inspirational quotes and aphorisms which became my collection of quotes.
The alternative is an interaction that creates a connection instead of destroying it. Where is the eye contact? Where is the dignity that comes from recognizing another?
When we humanize the person at the other end of the counter or the phone or the Internet, we grant them something precious—personhood. When we treat the people around us with dignity, we create an entirely different platform for the words we utter and the plans we make.
~ Seth Godin
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Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.
~ Marcel Proust
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If you see that some aspect of your society is bad, and you want to improve it, there is only one way to do so: You have to improve people. And in order to improve people, you begin with only one thing: You can become better yourself.
~ Leo Tolstoy
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Many stupid things are uttered by people whose only motivation is to say something original.
~ Voltaire
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I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
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After a long conversation, stop and try to remember what you have just discussed. Don’t be surprised if many things, sometimes even everything you have discussed, were meaningless, empty, and trivial, and sometimes even bad.
~ Leo Tolstoy
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Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment… the present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.
~ C.S. Lewis
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When a person sets to work, even if it is the most unqualified, primitive, simple work, the human soul calms down. As soon as a person starts to work, all the demons leave him and cannot approach him. A man becomes a man.
~ Thomas Carlyle
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Pass on what you have learned. Strength, mastery… but weakness… folly… failure also. Yes, failure most of all. The greatest teacher failure is. Luke, we are what they grow beyond. That is the true burden of all masters.
~ “Yoda”
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You tell me flatly that you are too tired to do anything outside your programme at night. In reply to which I tell you flatly that if your ordinary day’s work is thus exhausting, then the balance of your life is wrong and must be adjusted. A man’s powers ought not to be monopolized by his ordinary day’s work.
~ Arnold Bennett
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To him that waits all things reveal themselves, provided that he has the courage not to deny, in the darkness, what he has seen in the light.
~ Coventry Patmore
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What people think of as the moment of discovery is really the discovery of the question.
~ Jonas Salk
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What I do now is think up a problem and a resolution to that problem. I then begin the story, making it up as I go along, having all the excitement of finding out what will happen to the characters and how they will get out of their scrapes, but working steadily toward the known resolution so that I don’t get lost en route.
When asked for advice by beginners, I always stress that. Know your ending, I say, or the river of your story may finally sink into the desert sands and never reach the sea.
~ Isaac Asimov
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Constant idleness should be included in the tortures of hell, but it is, on the contrary, considered to be one of the joys of paradise.
~ Charles de Montesquieu
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Generous silence provides space for the other person to be with their own self, for you to be with them for presence to show up. It allows them to take a breath. It whispers, “this is an interesting place to be. Let’s hang out here for a moment.” […] Generous silence can allow the delicate insights of a conversation to blossom and bloom.
~ Michael Bungay Stanier
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To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lonely labor, to be given a chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy.
~ Bette Davis
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A person who is lucidly aware of the miracles that surround him, who has learned to bear up under the loneliness, has made quite a bit of progress on the road to wisdom.
~ M. C. Escher
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You want my opinion? We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness—and call it love—true love.
~ Robert Fulghum
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Real wisdom is not the knowledge of everything, but the knowledge of which things in life are necessary, which are less necessary, and which are completely unnecessary to know. Among the most necessary knowledge is the knowledge of how to live well, that is, how to produce the least possible evil and the greatest goodness in one’s life. At present, people study useless sciences, but forget to study this, the most important knowledge.
~ Leo Tolstoy
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Simplicity is the consequence of refined emotions.
~ Jean D’Alembert
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