“Don’t worry about genius and don’t worry about not being clever. Trust rather to hard work, perseverance, and determination. The best motto for a long march is “Don’t grumble. Plug on.” You hold your future in your own hands. Never waver in this belief. Don’t swagger. The boy who swaggers - like the man who swaggers - has little else that he can do. He is a cheap-Jack crying his own paltry wares. It is the empty tin that rattles most. Be honest. Be loyal. Be kind. Remember that the hardest thing to acquire is the faculty of being unselfish. As a quality it is one of the finest attributes of manliness. Love the sea, the ringing beach and the open downs. Keep clean, body and mind.”
—Sir Frederick Treves. (via quote-book)
February 2011
“Without self-discipline, success is impossible, period.”
—Lou Holtz
“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.”
—W.C. Fields
“People aren’t either wicked or noble. They’re like chef’s salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.”
—Lemony Snickett
“All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.”
—Thurber (via daniellekiemel)
“But the world is always curious, and people become valuable merely for their inaccessibility.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
“A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.”
—Nabokov (via perfeitamenteinutil)
January 2011
“Dust to dust. Ashes to ashes. The grim poetry of existence. But life is more than that. We foray into our hearts and look for ways to rise above them. We ache and we love, we hurt and we heal. Human beings, being human.”
—Stephen James- The Bishop (via quote-book)
“Maybe love, too, is beautiful because it has a wildness that cannot be tamed. I don’t know. All I know is that passion can take you up like a house of cards in a tornado, leaving destruction in it’s wake. Or it can let you alone because you have built a stone wall against it, set out the armed guards to keep it from touching you. The real trick is to let it in, but to hold on. To understand that the heart is as vast and wide as the universe, but that we come to know it best from here, this place of gravity and stability, where our feet can still touch the ground.”
—Deb Caletti, Wild Roses (via thingssheloves)
“I’ve often lost myself, in order to find the burn that keeps everything awake.”
—Federico García Lorca
“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson
“Is it possible, finally, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another? We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close are we able to come to that person’s essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?”
—Haruki Murakami (via justbesplendid)
“To become learned, each day add something. To become enlightened, each day drop something.”
—Lao Tzu
“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.” —Sonnet 130, William Shakespeare
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.” —Sonnet 130, William Shakespeare
“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”
—Harry S. Truman
“Change the changeable, accept the unchangeable, and remove yourself from the unacceptable.”
—Denis Waitley (via mmitchelldaviss)
“The best thing about acting is that I get to lose myself in another character and actually get paid for it… It’s a great outlet. I’m not really sure who I am; it seems I change every day.”
—Leonardo DiCaprio
“I believe gender is really fluid and although we are born into a sex - male, female and intersex - who you are really depends on a couple of things, like environmental factors. I think that everybody can be a little bit of something or the other.”
—Sia Furler (via williams-blood)
“Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.”
—Claude Monet
“The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television.”
—Andrew Ross (via cantshutup)
“Being born a woman is an awful tragedy… Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars - to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording - all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night…”
—Sylvia Plath (via bibliofeminista)
“I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.”
—Theodore Roethke
“You make yourself strong because it’s expected of you.
You become confident because someone beside you is unsure.
You turn into the person others need you to be.” —Jodi Picoult
You become confident because someone beside you is unsure.
You turn into the person others need you to be.” —Jodi Picoult
“I can’t stand “real” men. Masculinity is trash. Go cry in a corner, write in a diary, hug your mom. Please. I’ve felt the painful consequences of this posturing for too long; seen fragile men who never should have been told to be anything else in the first place crack under the weight of our flawed expectations. Let our boys paint. Let them wear skinny jeans and read Ellison. However soft spoken or uncoordinated, leave them be. If you don’t, you and me will have a serious problem.”
—Joshua Bennett
The hardest thing for me is to say no. I feel like a bitch. But sometimes, I don’t have a choice.
— Rihanna
“We’re flawed because we want so much more. We’re ruined because we get these things and wish for what we had.”
—Don Draper, Mad Men
“But it’s precisely in despair that you find the most intense pleasure, especially if you are already powerfully conscious of the hopelessness of your predicament.”
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground (via superjohnny4)
“On film you put all your energies into a single glance.”
—Alan Rickman
“You know hurt is a funny thing. The same thing that makes one person angry, can put another person into grief.”
—The Tale of Despereaux (via quote-book)
“The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.”
—Goethe
“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
—James Baldwin (via thechocolatebrigade)
“When people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they never had, and never will have.”
—Edgar Watson Howe (via thingssheloves)
“To live a creative life we must lose our fear of being wrong.”
—Joseph Chilton Pearce
“Music in the soul can be heard by the universe.”
—Lao Tsu
“Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”
—Henry Ford (via followandreblog)
“Something is fundamentally wrong with the female body and it’s natural to be unhappy with it. It’s not just natural teenage insecurity either. In our society, adult female bodies are treated like mistakes that continually need correcting. It’s too smelly, it’s too hairy, it’s the wrong shape, it’s the wrong colour. We’re seen to be badly designed somehow, needing extra stuff to make them okay. Being unhappy about your body is often presented as one of the essential personality traits of women, if we believe what society tells us.”
—Teenagers and Cosmetic Surgery - The F-Word (via phantomwise) (via loveyourchaos, ilovefat)
“Wouldn’t it just be rock ‘n roll if liking someone meant they had to like you back? ‘Course that would be a different universe and something else would probably suck.”
—Pushing Daisies (via misswallflower)
“We have before us the glorious opportunity to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of our civilization.”
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
“I don’t want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic. I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things. I don’t tell truths. I tell what ought to be truth.”
—A Streetcar Named Desire (via quotewhore)
“There are immeasurably more left inside than what comes out in words.”
—Fyodor Dostevsky (via vintage-hippie)
“Don’t react against a bad situation; Merge with that situation instead. And the solution will arise from the challenge. Because surrendering yourself doesn’t mean giving up, it means acting with responsibility.”
—Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth (via justbesplendid)
“How many hearts would be invaded for the wrong reasons, if each time you said “I love you”, you meant it?”
—I Wrote This For You (via quotewhore)
“Everybody is a genius. But, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
—Albert Einstein
“Believe in love. Believe in magic. Hell, believe in Santa Clause. Believe in others. Believe in yourself. Believe in your dreams. If you don’t, who will?”
—Jon Bon Jovi (via misswallflower)
