concept

life Quotes

100+ of the best book quotes about life
01
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“The second act is called “The Turn”. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you’re looking for the secret... but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know.”
Christopher Priest
author
The Prestige
book
life
secrets
extraordinary
ordinary
illusions
knowing
looking
wanting
showing
magician
concepts
02
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“All’s well that ends better.”
Hamfast Gamgee
character
life
concept
03
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“These problems are real, and you can’t turn off real life. So I won’t try. Instead, I’ll give you a set of tools to help you deal with real life.”
05
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“Just follow me and run like your life depends on it. Because it does.”
06
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“Holy men tell us life is a mystery. They embrace that concept happily. But some mysteries bite and bark and come to get you in the dark.”
07
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“Is there some meaning to this life? What purpose lies behind the strife? Whence do we come, where are we bound? These cold questions echo and resound through each day, each lonely night.”
08
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“It seems to me that if you place music (and books, probably, and films, and plays, and anything that makes you feel) at the center of your being, then you can’t afford to sort out your love life, start to think of it as the finished product.”
09
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“JUROR #8: This is somebody’s life. We can’t decide in five minutes.”
10
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“Moon Shadow, you once asked me who or what caused the earthquake. I don’t know. It could have been the gods, or dragons, or demons, or it could have simply been a natural event. It doesn’t matter, supernatural or natural; it means the same. This life is too short to spend it pursuing little things. I have to do what I know I can and must do.”
11
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Black Dog looked at me intently. “Why shouldn’t we get some pleasure in this life? Why later? Why not now?” “Because we don’t owe things just to ourselves. There are others.”
12
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“It’s no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn’t even speak to each other if they met at a party.”
13
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“Our knowledge of life is limited to death.”
14
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“Though the captives’ resistance was dangerous, through such acts, dignity was preserved and through dignity, life itself.”
15
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″... the pieces all fit together. Yet everything was falling apart.”
16
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“Life, he realized, was much like a song. In the beginning there is mystery, in the end there is confirmation, but it’s in the middle where all the emotion resides to make the whole thing worthwhile.”
17
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“Sometimes, Gansey felt like his life was made up of a dozen hours that he could never forget.”
18
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“There was some beauty to life after all, even if it was only the beauty of hope.”
19
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“Life without meaning cannot be borne. We find a mission to which we’re sworn”
20
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“It’s brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.”
21
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“Finally there is nothing here for death to take away.”
22
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“To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!”
23
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“You’ve got to pick at it, keep it alive and in turmoil, you’ve got to pick at it and unravel it until it all comes apart and you’re compelled to start all over again. Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship.”
24
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“JUROR #8: Look, this boy’s been kicked around all his life. You know - living in a slum, his mother dead since he was nine. He spent a year and a half in an orphanage while his father served a jail term for forgery. That’s not a very good head start. He had a pretty terrible sixteen years. I think maybe we owe him a few words. That’s all.”
25
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“I play ‘Got to Get You off My Mind’ by Solomon Burke, and everyone has a go, just out of duty, even though only the best dancers would be able to make something of it, and nobody in the room could claim to be among the best dancers, or even among the most average.”
26
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“morning, it touches the nerves quickly as if we were already in the hunter’s sights. the body yawns and stretches in the light. the pilgrimage is about to begin.”
27
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“It’s not what you like but what you are like that’s important.”
28
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“When pressed with the choice between life or death, it is not necessary to gain one’s aim.”
29
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“Life breaks us, Teft. Then we fill the cracks with something stronger.”
30
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“Speak Life: You are loved. You have purpose. You are a masterpiece. You are wonderfully made. God has a great plan for you.”
31
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“my friends don’t seem to be friends at all but people whose phone numbers I haven’t lost.”
32
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“There are worse lives to live. Don’t feel sorry for me.”
33
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“Is it wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection? It’s not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique thimbles. ”
34
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“I don’t even feel as if I’m the center of my own world, so how am I supposed to feel as though I’m the center of anyone else’s?”
35
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″‘See these perfect rows, Miguel? They are like what my life would have been. These rows know where they are going. Straight ahead. Now my life is like the zigzag in the blanket on Mama’s bed.‘”
36
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“Life, I’ve learned, is never fair. If people teach anything in school, that should be it.”
37
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“May you recognize in your life the presence, power, and light of your soul. May you realize that you are never alone, that your soul in its brightness and belonging connects you intimately with the rhythm of the universe. May you have respect for your own individuality and difference. ”
38
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“A man is not hurt so much by what happens, as by his opinion of what happens.”
39
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“We are like the phoenix,” said Abuelita. “Rising again, with a new life ahead of us.”
40
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“Do you ever wonder why things have to turn out the way they do?”
41
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“Think of your life as an hourglass. You know there are thousands of grains of sand in the top of the hourglass; and they all pass slowly and evenly through the narrow neck in the middle. Nothing you or I could do would make more than one grain of sand pass through this narrow neck without impairing the hourglass. You and I and everyone else are like this hourglass…if we do not take [tasks] one at a time and let them pass…slowly and evenly, then we are bound to break our own…structure.”
42
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“If You Have A Lemon, Make A Lemonade That is what a great educator does. But the fool does the exact opposite. If he finds that life has handed him a lemon, he gives up and says: ‘I’m beaten. It is fate. I haven’t got a chance.’ Then he proceeds to rail against the world and indulge in an orgy of selfpity. But when the wise man is handed a lemon, he says: ‘What lesson can I learn from this misfortune? How can I improve my situation? How can I turn this lemon into a lemonade?‘”
43
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“All through your life your soul takes care of you...your soul is alive and awakened, gathering, sheltering and guiding your ways and days in the world. In effect, your soul is your secret shelter.”
44
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“One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon—instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today. Why are we such fools—such tragic fools?”
45
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“The most important thing in life is not to capitalize on your gains. Any fool can do that. The really important thing is to profit from your losses.”
46
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“Take a lamp, for instance. When you plug it in, it comes alive, in a way. It lights up. That’s because it’s connected to a wire that’s connected to the generator, which is making electricity, though don’t ask me how. But a bean seed isn’t connected to anything. Neither are people. We don’t have plugs and wires that connect us to generators. What makes living things go is inside them somehow.”
47
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“You can sing only what you are. You can paint only what you are. You must be what your experiences, your environment, and your heredity have made you. For better or for worse, you must play your own little instrument in the orchestra of life.”
48
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“...to gaze into the face of another is to gaze into the depth and entirety of his life.”
49
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“Relaxation and Recreation The most relaxing recreating forces are a healthy religion, sleep, music, and laughter. Have faith in God—learn to sleep well— Love good music—see the funny side of life— And health and happiness will be yours.” ― Dale Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living”
50
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“Huddled together in the dining room and waiting for the sun to rise, none of us had any notion that a way of life had ended.”
Amir
character
war
life
changes
concepts
51
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“Psychologists call it ‘learned helplessness’ when a person believes, as I did during my youth, that the choices I made had no effect on the outcomes in my life.”
52
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“Let’s not allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. Remember ‘Life is too short to be little’”
53
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“Yes, I do; as long as the heart beats, as long as body and soul keep together, I cannot admit that any creature endowed with a will has need to despair of life.”
54
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“The way you look at things is the most powerful force in shaping your life.”
55
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“George served, and surprised her by his anxiety to win. She remembered how he had sighed among the tombs at Santa Croce because things wouldn’t fit; how after the death of that obscure Italian he had leant over the parapet by the Arno and said to her: ‘I shall want to live, I tell you.’ He wanted to live now, to win at tennis, to stand for all he was worth in the sun—the sun which had begun to decline and was shining in her eyes; and he did win.”
56
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“I’ve committed to nothing...and that’s just suicide...by tiny, tiny increments.”
57
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“Look at all the things that can go wrong for men. There’s the nothing-happening-at-all problem, the too-much-happening-too-soon problem, the dismal-droop-after-a-promising-beginning problem; there’s the size-doesn’t-matter-except-in-my-case problem, the failing-to-deliver-the-goods problem…and what do women have to worry about? A handful of cellulite? Join the club. A spot of I-wonder-how-I-rank? ”
58
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“No one plows the field just by thinking about it.”
59
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“It is not the content of a company’s values that correlates with performance, but the strength of conviction with which it holds those values, whatever they might be. ”
60
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“Liberty is to faction, what air is to fire, an aliment, without which it instantly expires. But it could not be a less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourish faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.”
61
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“That’s why; he’s worried about how his life is turning out, and he’s lonely, and lonely people are the bitterest of them all”
62
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“If your thoughts are as tall as the height of your ceiling, you can’t fly above your room.”
63
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“We must be learning if we are to feel fully alive, and when life, or love, becomes too predictable and it seems like there is little left to learn, we become restless - a protest, perhaps, of the plastic brain when it can no longer perform its essential task.”
64
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“A dream! What is a dream? And is not our life a dream?”
65
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“‘Life is a drama full of tragedy and comedy,’ Mom told me. ‘You should learn to enjoy the comic episodes a little more.‘”
66
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“I saw clearly that so long as I was still a human being and not nothingness, I was alive and so could suffer, be angry and feel shame at my actions.”
67
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“Is there suffering upon this new earth? On our earth we can only love with suffering and through suffering. We cannot love otherwise, and we know of no other sort of love.”
68
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“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…”
69
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“A hundred times I was upon the point of killing myself; but still I loved life. This ridiculous foible is perhaps one of our most fatal characteristics; for is there anything more absurd than to wish to carry continually a burden which one can always throw down? to detest existence and yet to cling to one’s existence? in brief, to caress the serpent which devours us, till he has eaten our very heart?”
Voltaire
author
The Old Woman
character
life
burdens
suicide
concepts
70
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“Though there were moments of beauty, Mariam knew for the most part that life had been unkind to her.”
71
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“The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere.”
72
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“She was alive, and they were dead. She had to try to make her life big.”
73
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“The shape of my life is, of course, determined by many things; my background and childhood, my mind and its education, my conscience and its pressures, my heart and its desires.”
74
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“The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.”
75
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“I find there is a quality to being alone that is incredibly precious. Life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid, fuller than before.”
76
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“Beauty, youth, good fortune, even love itself, cannot keep care and pain, loss and sorrow, from the most blessed for...into each life some rain must fall, some days must be dark and sad and dreary.”
77
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“I wanted to let the world know that no one had a perfect life, that even the people who seemed to have it all had their secrets.”
78
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“The cast is so soft and slow that it can be followed like an ash settling from a fireplace chimney. One of life’s quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful, even if it is only a floating ash.”
79
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“It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime…”
80
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“Living’s heavy work, but off to one side, the way we are, it’s useless, too. It don’t make sense. If I known how to climb back on the wheel, I’d do it in a minute. You can’t have living without dying. So you can’t call it living, what we got. We just are, we just be, like rocks beside the road.”
81
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“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.”
82
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“You are disobedient, you are trying to keep some part of your life under your own control. That is what is preventing you from listening to Christ and believing in his grace. You cannot hear Christ because you are wilfully disobedient. Somewhere in your heart you are refusing to listen to his call. Your difficulty is your sins.”
83
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“‘But for what end, then, has this world been formed?’ said Candide. ‘To plague us to death,’ answered Martin.”
Voltaire
author
Candide
Martin
characters
life
purpose
mortality
concepts
84
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“Life’s got to be lived, no matter how long or short. We just go along, like everybody else, one day at a time. Funny—we don’t feel no different. Leastways, I don’t. Sometimes I forget about what’s happened to us, forget it altogether.”
85
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“The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. That is why so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask. I have shed my mask.”
86
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“When you become addict in to MATERIAL things in life then the TRUE natural life start to run away from you, YES! it’s can give you certain pleasure in the society but in the same time it will sabotage your true HAPPINESS of life which we could have simply with GRATITUDE and FORGIVENESS”
87
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“And he made a promise to himself: if he lived through the war, he was going to find an isolated farm somewhere and spend the remainder of his life in peace and quiet.”
88
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“Your comfort zone is a place where you keep yourself in a self-illusion and nothing can grow there but your potentiality can grow only when you can think and grow out of that zone.”
89
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“Don’t live the same day over and over again and call that a life. Life is about evolving mentally, spiritually, and emotionally.”
90
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“Small thinking keeps small businesses small”
91
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″Have something to bring to the table, because that will make you more welcome.″
92
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“To be alive is to be missing.”
93
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“We ask for long life, but ‘tis deep life, or grand moments, that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical.”
94
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″Fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals. As a college professor, I’ve seen this as one lesson so many kids ignore, always to their detriment:You’ve got to get the fundamentals down, because otherwise the fancy stuff is not going to work.″
95
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“Look, I’m going to find a way to be happy, and I’d really love to be happy with you, but if I can’t be happy with you, then I’ll find a way to be happy without you.”
96
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″My parents had raised me to recognize that automobiles are there to get you from point A to point B. They are utilitarian devices, not expressions of social status. And so I told Jai we didn’t need to do cosmetic repairs.We’d just live with the dents and gashes….that is my belief that you don’t repair things if they still do what they’re supposed to do. The cars still work. Let’s just drive ’em.″
97
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″Ask yourself: Are you spending your time on the right things? You may have causes, goals, interests. Are they even worth pursuing?I’ve long held on to a clipping from a newspaper in Roanoke, Virginia.It featured a photo of a pregnant woman who had lodged a protest against a local construction site. She worried that the sound of jackhammers was injuring her unborn child. But get this: In the photo, the woman is holding a cigarette. If she cared about her unborn child,the time she spent railing against jackhammers would have been better spent putting out that cigarette.″
98
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″Complaining does not work as a strategy. We all have finite time and energy. Any time we spend whining is unlikely to help us achieve our goals. And it won’t make us happier.″
99
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″People are more important than things. A car, even a pristine gem like my new convertible, was just a thing.″
100
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“Time is all you have. And you may find one day that you have less than you think.”
101
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″When you’re screwing up and nobody says anything to you anymore, that means they’ve given up on you.″
102
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″When you use money to fight poverty, it can be of great value, but too often, you’re working at the margins. When you’re putting people on the moon, you’re inspiring all of us to achieve the maximum of human potential, which is how our greatest problems will eventually be solved.″
103
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‘NO MATTER how bad things are, you can always make things worse. At the same time, it is often within your power to make them better.″
104
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″You can always change your plan, but only if you have one. I’m a big believer in to-do lists. It helps us break life into small steps. I once put “get tenure” on my to-do list. That was naïve. The most useful to-do list breaks tasks into small steps. It’s like when I encourage Logan to clean his room by picking up one thing at a time.″
105
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“She gazed at him with touched and troubled eyes. ‘Is that all?...Isn’t there something over and above earthly things—some more glorious meaning to one’s life and activities?‘”
106
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“Sometimes he wished he had no ambitions—often wondered where they had come from in his life, because he remembered how satisfied he had been as a youngster, and that with the little he had—a dog, a stick, an aloneness he loved.”
107
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“Nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in the images in our heads”
108
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“He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances. ”
109
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″Jon warned me that sometimes this took great patience—even years.’But in the end,’ he said, ‘people will show you their good side. Almost everybody has a good side. Just keep waiting. It will come out.’ ″
110
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“I never did learn anything out of my past life, now I have to suffer again.”
111
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“You’re both the fire and the water that extinguishes it. You’re the narrator, the protagonist, and the sidekick. You’re the storyteller and the story told. You are somebody’s something, but you are also your you.”
112
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“The problem with happy endings, I said, is that they’re either not really happy, or not really endings, you know? In real life, some things get better and some things get worse. And then eventually you die.”
113
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“We live in a world that has walls. And those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Lieutenant Weinberg? I have a great responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. The luxury of the blind. The luxury of not knowing what I know: That Santiago’s death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and uncomprehensible to you, saves lives. You can’t handle it. Because deep down, in places you don’t talk about, you want me on that wall. You need me there. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as a backbone to a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it. I’d prefer you just said thank you and went on your way. Otherwise, I’d suggest you pick up a weapon and stand a post.”
114
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“And if you can’t pick what you do or think about, then maybe you aren’t really real, you know? Maybe I’m just a lie that I’m whispering to myself.”
115
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“For the record, he who does fear death also dies only once, but whatever.”
116
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“I change myself, I change the world.”
117
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″Luck is indeed where preparation meets opportunity.″
118
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“When it’s all said and done, it’s the energy we send out into the universe that often comes back to us. That’s a universal law, love.”
119
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“Too many people go thru life complaining about their problems. I’ve always believed if you take one-tenth the energy you put into complaining and applied it to solve the problem, you’d be surprised by how well things can work out.”
120
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“All reaction is limited by, and dependant on, what it is reacting against.”
121
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“There are so many things to be tortured about. So many torturous things in this life. Don’t let someone who doesn’t love you be one of them.”
122
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“Awareness of our situation must come before inner changes, which in turn come before changes in society. Nothing happens in the “real” world unless it first happens in the images in our heads.”
123
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“Nobody’s going to save you. No one’s going to cut you down, cut the thorns thick around you. No one’s going to storm the castle walls nor kiss awake your birth, climb down your hair, nor mount you onto the white steed. There is no one who will feed the yearning. Face it. You will have to do, do it yourself.”
124
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“I can’t seem to stay out of my own way.”
125
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“I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails...”
126
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“Even though I laughed with them, it felt like I was watching the whole thing from somewhere else, like I was watching a movie about my life instead of living it.”
127
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“Goals give us direction. They put a powerful force into play on a universal, conscious, and subconscious level. Goals give our life direction.”
128
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“Today, I will accept my circumstances even if I lack direction and insight. I will remember to do things that make myself and others feel good during those times. I will trust that clarity will come of its own accord.”
129
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“But I was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell. Of course, you pretend to be the author. You have to.”
130
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“Though Oz had given her a twisted life, hadn’t it also made her capable?”
131
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“In trying to become ‘objective,’ Western culture made ‘objects’ of things and people when it distanced itself from them, thereby losing ‘touch’ with them.”
132
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“When you discard arrogance, complexity, and a few other things that get in the way, sooner or later you will discover that simple, childlike, and mysterious secret known to those of the Uncarved Block: Life is Fun.”
133
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“Do we really have the right to take care of ourselves? Do we really have the right to set boundaries? Do we really have the right to be direct and say what we need to say? You bet we do.”
134
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“By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it.”
135
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“Why am I compelled to write? Because the writing saves me from this complacency I fear. Because I have no choice.”
136
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“I am visible-see this Indian face-yet I am invisible. I both blind them with my beak nose and am their blind spot. But I exist, we exist. They’d like to think I have melted in the pot. But I haven’t. We haven’t.”
137
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“I used to spend so much time reacting and responding to everyone else that my life had no direction. Other people’s lives, problems, and wants set the course for my life. Once I realized it was okay for me to think about and identify what I wanted, remarkable things began to take place in my life.”
138
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“...the plan will happen in spite of us, not because of us.”
139
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“What we say and what we do ultimately comes back to us so let us own our responsibility, place it in our hands, and carry it with dignity and strength.”
140
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“To love and be loved. That is the meaning of life.”
141
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“Make New Year’s goals. Dig within, and discover what you would like to have happen in your life this year. This helps you do your part. It is an affirmation that you’re interested in fully living life in the year to come.”
142
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“Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don’t have a career. You have a life.”
143
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“What would you like to have happen in your life this year? What would you like to do, to accomplish? What good would you like to attract into your life? What particular areas of growth would you like to have happen to you? What blocks, or character defects, would you like to have removed? What would you like to attain? Little things and big things? Where would you like to go? What would you like to have happen in friendship and love? What would you like to have happen in your family life? What problems would you like to see solved? What decisions would you like to make? What would you like to happen in your career? Write it down. Take a piece of paper, a few hours of your time, and write it all down - as an affirmation of you, your life, and your ability to choose. Then let it go.”
144
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“Though we tremble before uncertain futures may we meet illness, death and adversity with strength may we dance in the face of our fears.”
145
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“The new year stands before us, like a chapter in a book, waiting to be written. We can help write that story by setting goals.”
146
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“You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity.”
147
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“To be alive──is Power.”
148
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“Boundaries emerge from deep within. They are connected to letting go of guilt and shame, and to changing our beliefs about what we deserve. As our thinking about this becomes clearer, so will our boundaries. Boundaries are also connected to a Higher Timing than our own. We’ll set a limit when we’re ready, and not a moment before. So will others. There’s something magical about reaching that point of becoming ready to set a limit. We know we mean what we say; others take us seriously too. Things change, not because we’re controlling others, but because we’ve changed.”
149
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“If we weren’t trying to control whether a person liked us or his or her reaction to us, what would we do differently? If we weren’t trying to control the course of a relationship, what would we do differently? If we weren’t trying to control another person’s behavior, how would we think, feel, speak, and behave differently than we do now? What haven’t we been letting ourselves do while hoping that self-denial would influence a particular situation or person? Are there some things we’ve been doing that we’d stop? How would we treat ourselves differently? Would we let ourselves enjoy life more and feel better right now? Would we stop feeling so bad? Would we treat ourselves better? If we weren’t trying to control, what would we do differently? Make a list, then do it.”
150
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“To live will be an awfully big adventure.”
151
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“The electric things have their life too. Paltry as those lives are.”
152
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“Dewey Dell rises, heaving to her feet. She looks down at the face. It is like a casting of fading bronze upon the pillow, the hands alone still with any semblance of life: a curled, gnarled inertness; a spent yet alert quality from which weariness, exhaustion, travail had not yet departed, as though they doubted even yet the actuality of rest, guarding with horned and penurious alertness the cessation which they know cannot last.”
153
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“And to every kid in Georgetown and in all ‘the Gardens’ of the world: your voices matter, your dreams matter, your lives matter. Be the roses that grow in the concrete.”
154
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“Earth is crammed with Heaven.”
155
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“I can’t change where I come from or what I’ve been through, so why should I be ashamed of what makes me, me?”
156
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“Do not work primarily for money; do your duty to patients first and let the money follow; our life is short, we don’t live twice; the whirlwind will pick up the leaves and spin them, but then it will drop them and they will form a pile.”
157
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“It is true we love life; not because we are wont to live, but because we are wont to love. There is always some madness in love. But there is always, also, some method in madness.”
158
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“If I really want to improve my situation, I can work on the one thing over which I have control - myself.”
159
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“When people say it’s for life, it’s for life. You gotta be willing to die in it or die for it. You want out?”
160
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“Life would be a lot easier if conversations were rewindable and erasable, like videos.”
161
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A terrible, painful sadness clutched at Ellen. More than ever before, she felt that her life—the best part of it, at least, the part that was fresh and fun—was behind her. Recognizing the sensation made her feel guilty, for she read it as proof that she was an unsatisfactory mother, an unsatisfied wife. She hated her life, and hated herself for hating it. She thought of a line from a song Billy played on the stereo: “I’d trade all my tomorrows for a single yesterday.”
162
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“There are four Ways in which men pass through life: as gentlemen, farmers, artisans, and merchants.”
163
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“The lesson being that in life you control what you can.”
164
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“This is the truth: when you sacrifice your life, you must make fullest use of your weaponry. Not to do so, and to die with a weapon not yet drawn is false.”
165
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″What matters most is how we respond to what we experience in life.″
166
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“Both in fighting and in everyday life you should be determined though calm. Meet situations without tenseness yet not recklessly, your spirit settled yet unbiased.”
167
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“The passions that incline men to peace are: fear of death; desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a hope by their industry to obtain them. And reason suggesteth convenient articles of peace upon which men may be drawn to agreement.”
168
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“To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, ‘tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there’s the respect That makes calamity of so long life; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover’d country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.--Soft you now! The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remember’d!”
169
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“Life was created in the valleys. It blew up onto the hills on the old yours, the old lusts, the old despairs. That’s why you must walk up the hills do you can ride down.”
Darl
character
life
despair
lust
concepts
170
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“Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.”
171
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“Life... is a paradise to what we fear of death.”
172
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“And then there was Tick. Brave little Tick, who had flown into the faces of an army of rats to save his baby sister. Tick - who never spoke much. Tick - who shared her food. Tick - who was after all just a roach. Just a roach who had given all the time she had left so that Boots could have more.”
173
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“You got to take the crookeds with the straights. That’s what Papa used to say.”
174
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“When we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds rather than to maintain commitment.”
175
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“You cannot, sir, take from me any thing that I will more willingly part withal: except my life, except my life, except my life.”
176
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“I love Twinkies, and the reason I am saying that is because we are all supposed to think of reasons to live.”
177
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“It was starting to seem to me that just when I had life all figured out it changed.”
178
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“The lion and the giraffe and the wombat and the rest do what they do and are what they are. And somehow manage to make it there in the cage, living the unexamined life. But to be human is to know and care and ask. To keep rattling the bars of the cage of existence hollering, ‘What’s it for?’ at the stones and stars, and making prisons and palaces out of the echoing answers. That’s what we do and that’s what we are. And that’s why a zoo is a nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there.”
179
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“‘And then, if you make it to bedtime, you feel the joy of cheating death out of one more day,’ she said. ‘Do you see?‘”
180
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“Men think more about returning home than about leaving.”
181
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“Don’t be a pawn, when you’re meant to be the king.”
182
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“The ancient code of the Knights Radiant says “journey before destination.” Some may call it a simple platitude, but it is far more. A journey will have pain and failure. It is not only the steps forward that we must accept. It is the stumbles. The trials. The knowledge that we will fail. That we will hurt those around us.”
183
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“Both halves were there, in the bushes. I saved them as a kind of souvenir. At first, they reminded me that the night wasn’t a dream. As I got older, they reminded me of what mattered in life.”
184
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“That man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.”
185
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“In life, there will be times when we do everything right, perhaps even perfectly. Yet the results will somehow be negative: failure, disrespect, jealousy, or even a resounding yawn from the world.”
186
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“Nothing shocked them anymore. It was the way things were. It was what they had come to expect of life . . . He himself had not yet come to that, he did not want to come to it.”
187
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“Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. ”
188
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“This was the only shame he felt. And this shame was so great in him that he wondered if all his life thereafter would be long enough to wash out of his brain and blood and the last pollution of its loathsome taint. And yet, he would have it thought that he was bitter.”
189
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“When we feel deeply drawn to someone, we cathect them; that is, we invest feelings or emotion in them. That process of investment wherein a loved one becomes important to us is called ‘cathexis’.”
190
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“Why do we have limiting beliefs about our success? Why do we not love ourselves? Why do we have fears? Isn’t thinking negative/small a sin then?”
191
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“Consider the idea that charisma can be as much a liability as an asset. Your strength of personality can sow the seeds of problems
192
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“Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of ‘not knowing.”
193
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“Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.”
194
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“When men and women punish each other for truth telling, we reinforce the notion that lies are better. To be loving we willingly hear the other’s truth, and most important, we affirm the value of truth telling. Lies may make people feel better, but they do not help them to know love.”
195
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Life is like a grapefruit. Well, it’s sort of orangey-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It’s got pips inside, too. Oh, and some people have half a one for breakfast.
196
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“The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.”
197
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“A significant portion of what we call reality was shaped by human effort.”
198
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“The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it.”
199
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“Also, the car headlights can only see 20 metres ahead but can take you to a 1000 miles journey. Meaning start small but think big.”
200
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“True love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.”
201
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“The wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings. The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others.”
202
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“By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.”
203
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“Nobody’s life is filled with perfect little moments. And if it were, they wouldn’t be perfect little moments. They would just be normal. How would you ever know happiness if you never experienced downs?”
204
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“There is no such thing as a hopeless situation. Every single circumstances of your life can change! ”
life
hope
concepts
205
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“Though fairy tales end after ten pages, our lives do not. We are multi-volume sets. In our lives, even though one episode amounts to a crash and burn, there is always another episode awaiting us and then another. There are always more opportunities to get it right, to fashion our lives in the ways we deserve to have them. Don’t waste your time hating a failure. Failure is a greater teacher than success.”
206
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“It makes utter sense to stay healthy and strong, to be as nourishing to the body as possible. Yet I would have to agree, there is in many women a ‘hungry’ one inside. But rather than hungry to be a certain size, shape, or height, rather than hungry to fit the stereotype; women are hungry for basic regard from the culture surrounding them. The ‘hungry’ one inside is longing to be treated respectfully, to be accepted and in the very least, to be met without stereotyping.”
207
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“Be grateful for what you have now. As you begin to think about all the things in your life you are grateful for, you will be amazed at the never ending thoughts that come back to you of more things to be grateful for. You have to make a start, and then the law of attraction will receive those grateful thoughts and give you more just like them.”
208
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“The truth is that the universe has been answering you all of your life, but you cannot receive the answers unless you are awake.”
life
truth
concepts
209
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“You are the masterpiece of your own life. You are the Michelangelo of your own life. The David you are sculpturing is you.”
210
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“Share everything. Play fair. Don’t hit people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own mess. Don’t take things that aren’t yours. Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody. Wash your hands before you eat. Flush. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you. Live a balanced life-learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some. Take a nap every afternoon. When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together. Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that. Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even little seed in the Styrofoam up-they all die. So do we. And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned-the biggest word of all-LOOK.”
211
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“You become what you think about most.. But you also attract what you think about most.”
212
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“But the longer I’ve lived, the more I’ve lost what’s inside me—and ended up empty.”
213
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“Our mind is powerful. Think Bigger. Dream bigger. Act bigger – and you’ll live a much bigger version of your life!”
214
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“There is a truth deep down inside of you that has been waiting for you to discover it, and that truth is this: you deserve all good things life has to offer.”
life
truth
concepts
215
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“You don’t need to have it all before you start, you don’t need to know everything, you don’t need to understand fully how it works and you don’t need to be sure or assured of the future.”
216
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“The best students are those who never quite believe their professors.”
217
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“Bruno was sure that he had never seen a skinnier or sadder boy in his life but decided that he had better talk to him.”
218
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“Here then at long last is my darkness. No cry of light, no glimmer, not even the faintest shard of hope to break free across the hold.”
219
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“The doors to the world of the wild are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.”
220
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“Go out in the woods, go out. If you don’t go out in the woods nothing will ever happen and your life will never begin.”
221
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“Though her soul requires seeing, the culture around her requires sightlessness. Though her soul wishes to speak its truth, she is pressured to be silent.”
222
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“She had been given a wonderful gift: life. Sometimes it was cruelly taken away too soon, but it’s what you did with it that counted, not how long it lasted.”
223
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“Bad decisions made with good intentions, are still bad decisions.”
224
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″‘Life is for the living,’ Gillian told her. ‘Life is what you make of it. Come on. Just listen to what I’m saying. Please.‘”
225
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“I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you, and that you will work with these stories from your life--not someone else’s life--water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom. That is the work. The only work.”
226
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“Ah! realize your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing. . . . A new Hedonism -- that is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol.”
227
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“For, in the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work.”
228
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“I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream -- I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal -- to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal, it may be.”
229
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“The psyches and souls of women also have their own cycles and seasons of doing and solitude, running and staying, being involved and being removed, questing and resting, creating and incubating, being of the world and returning to the soul-place.”
230
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“Core values are essential for enduring greatness, but it doesn’t seem to matter what those core values are.”
231
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“This insect, which marks off time, clicking like a clock, issues the sound no one ever wants to hear beside her beloved. A man’s tenure on earth is limited enough, but once the beetle’s ticking begins there’s no way to stop it; there’s no plug to pull, no pendulum to stop, no switch that will restore the time you once thought you had.”
232
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“Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. It is made up of divine paradox. To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down.”
233
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“There is a time in our lives, usually in mid-life, when a woman has to make a decision - possibly the most important psychic decision of her future life - and that is, whether to be bitter or not. Women often come to this in their late thirties or early forties. They are at the point where they are full up to their ears with everything and they’ve “had it” and “the last straw has broken the camel’s back” and they’re “pissed off and pooped out.” Their dreams of their twenties may be lying in a crumple. There may be broken hearts, broken marriages, broken promises.”
234
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“The people we interviewed from the good-to-great companies clearly loved what they did, largely because they loved who they did it with.”
235
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“When you want to attract something into your life, make sure your actions don’t contradict your desires.. Think about what you have asked for, and make sure that your actions are mirroring what you expect to receive, and that they’re not contradicting what you‘ve asked for. Act as if you are receiving it. Do exactly what you would do if you were receiving it today, and take actions in your life to reflect that powerful expectation. Make room to receive your desires, and as you do, you are sending out that powerful signal of expectation.”
236
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“The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline–a problem that largely goes away if you have the right people in the first place.”
237
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“Sometimes a hypocrite is nothing more than a man in the process of changing.”
238
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“I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough.”
239
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“For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You’ll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you’ll realize it’s always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won’t understand why or how. You’ll have forgotten what granted you this awareness in the first place
240
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“We all create stories to protect ourselves.”
241
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“I still get nightmares. In fact, I get them so often I should be used to them by now. I’m not. No one ever really gets used to nightmares.”
242
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“There is a time in our lives, usually in mid-life, when a woman has to make a decision - possibly the most important psychic decision of her future life - and that is, whether to be bitter or not. Women often come to this in their late thirties or early forties. They are at the point where they are full up to their ears with everything and they’ve “had it” and “the last straw has broken the camel’s back” and they’re “pissed off and pooped out.” Their dreams of their twenties may be lying in a crumple. There may be broken hearts, broken marriages, broken promises.”
243
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“They’re happy like that; I’m happy like this. Life has changed completely. At that all her being, even her beauty, became for a moment, dusty and out of date.”
244
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“Sometimes the one who is running from the Life/Death/Life nature insists on thinking of love as a boon only. Yet love in its fullest form is a series of deaths and rebirths. We let go of one phase, one aspect of love, and enter another. Passion dies and is brought back. Pain is chased away and surfaces another time. To love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many endings, and many many beginnings- all in the same relationship.”
245
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“In three words, I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life. It goes on.”
life
concept
246
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“Little solace comes to those who grieve when thoughts keep drifting as walls keep shifting and this great blue world of ours seems a house of leaves moments before the wind.”
247
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“Everything. A letter may be coded, and a word may be coded. A theatrical performance may be coded, and a sonnet may be coded, and there are times when it seems the entire world is in code. Some believe that the world can be decoded by performing research in a library.”
248
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“You think ... yesterday don’t count. But yesterday is all that does count. ”
249
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“I will love you if you cut your hair and I will love you if you cut the hair of others. I will love you if you abandon your baticeering, and I will love you if you retire from the theater to take up some other, less dangerous occupation.”
250
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“Sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostagic and hopeful all at the same time.”

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