life lessons Quotes

“‘Trust people,’ he would tell me, ‘until they give you a reason not to. And then never turn your back.‘”

“You see, I read all books on hunting published in English, French, and Russian. I have but one passion in my life, Mr. Rainsford, and it is the hunt.”

“Perhaps our brightest hope for the future lies in the lessons of the past. The people who have come to this country have made America, in the words of one perceptive writer, ‘a heterogeneous race but a homogeneous nation.’ ”

“There were many ways down Mount Fuji, according to my guidebook, but only one way up. Life lesson in that, I thought.”

“Every struggle is a victory.”

“Let this be my final lesson. Everyone and everything has a time to die.”

“Maybe it was good that the world forgot every lesson, every good and bad memory, every triumph and failure, all of it dying with each generation. Perhaps this cultural amnesia spared them all. Perhaps if they remembered everything, hope would die instead.”

“Embrace your journey and look for the lessons. Believe in divine timing and know that what’s for you will not pass you.”

“What we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.”

“One thing I’ve learned about people is that the easiest way to get them to like you is to shut up and let them do the talking.”

“I’m not really putting this very well. My point is this: This book contains precisely zero Important Life Lessons, or Little-Known Facts About Love, or sappy tear-jerking Moments When We Knew We Had Left Our Childhood Behind for Good, or whatever. And, unlike most books in which a girl gets cancer, there are definitely no sugary paradoxical single-sentence-paragraphs that you’re supposed to think are deep because they’re in italics. Do you know what I’m talking about? I’m talking about sentences like this: The cancer had taken her eyeballs, yet she saw the world with more clarity than ever before. Barf. Forget it. For me personally, things are in no way more meaningful because I got to know Rachel before she died. If anything, things are less meaningful. All right?”

“But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.”

“Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.”

“That lesson suggests that in the end, we can only find peace in our human lives by accepting the will of the universe.”

“We either learn to accept or we end up writing letters home with crayons.”

“And once you live a good story, you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, and you can’t go back to being normal; you can’t go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time.”

“How disappointing would it be get to heaven and find out God created life to be enjoyed while all we did was worry?”

“It was on reputedly disreputable Beale Street in Memphis that I had met the warmest, friendliest person I had ever known, that I discovered that all human beings were not mean.”

“All humans make mistakes. What determine a person’s character aren’t the mistakes we make. It is how we take those mistakes and turn them into lessons rather than excuses.”

“My life . . . in America had led me to feel . . . that the problem of human unity was more important than bread, more important than physical living itself.”

“One of the most powerful, though difficult, lessons we all need to learn on our spiritual pilgrimage is that even when bad things happen and we do not understand why, we can trust God to be present and working on our behalf.”

“Volatility and change had been the watchwords of my life. If I had learned anything it was that it’s never the end of the world, no matter how bleak things can be.”

″‘It’s work, son,’ Father said. ‘That’s what money is; it’s hard work.‘”

“Time out.”

“It is a strange paradox, that many of the clearest, most comforting life lessons are learned while we are at our lowest.”

“Jock had many things to learn besides the lessons he got from me- the lessons of experience which nobody could teach him.”

“According to science, you start off as coal and you end up as coal. Maybe that was the real-life lesson.”

“Deep into her thirties, Emira would wrestle with what to take from her time at the Chamberlain house. Some days she carried the sweet relief that Briar would learn to become a self-sufficient person. And some days, Emira would carry the dread that if Briar ever struggled to find herself, she’d probably just hire someone to do it for her.”

In nine cases out of ten, a woman had better show more affection than she feels.

He knew that he would regret in the morning but at present he was glad of the rest, glad of the dark stupor that would cover up his folly. He leaned his elbows on the table and rested his head between his hands, counting the beats of his temples. The cabin door opened and he saw the Hungarian standing in a shaft of grey light: “Daybreak, gentlemen!”

“He gave her in requital of all things else, which ye had taken from me. She is my happiness!—she is my torture, none the less!

“A knowledge of men″s hearts will be needful to the completest solution of that problem.”

“Be it so! But, again! He to whom only the outward and physical evil is laid open, knoweth, oftentimes, but half the evil which he is called upon to cure.”

“A kiss for a blow is always best, though it’s not very easy to give it sometimes,” said her mother, with the air of one who had learned the difference between preaching and practicing.

Many wise and true sermons are preached us every day by unconscious ministers in street, school, office, or home.

Gentlemen, which means boys, be courteous to the old maids, no matter how poor and plain and prim, for the only chivalry worth having is that which is the readiest to pay deference to the old, protect the feeble, and serve womankind, regardless of rank, age, or color.

“I had nearly five thousand volumes in my library at Rome; but after reading them over many times, I found out that with one hundred and fifty well-chosen books a man possesses, if not a complete summary of all human knowledge, at least all that a man need really know.

Philosophers may well say, and practical men will always support the opinion, that money mitigates many trials; and if you admit the efficacy of this sovereign balm, you ought to be very easily consoled—you, the king of finance, the focus of immeasurable power.

“I have often thought with a bitter joy that these riches, which would make the wealth of a dozen families, will be forever lost to those men who persecute me. This idea was one of vengeance to me, and I tasted it slowly in the night of my dungeon and the despair of my captivity. But now I have forgiven the world for the love of you; now that I see you, young and with a promising future,—now that I think of all that may result to you in the good fortune of such a disclosure, I shudder at any delay, and tremble lest I should not assure to one as worthy as yourself the possession of so vast an amount of hidden wealth.”

Mrs. Hubble shook her head, and contemplating me with a mournful presentiment that I should come to no good, asked, “Why is it that the young are never grateful?” This moral mystery seemed too much for the company until Mr. Hubble tersely solved it by saying, “Naterally wicious.” Everybody then murmured “True!” and looked at me in a particularly unpleasant and personal manner.

“Two things I can tell you,” said Estella. “First, notwithstanding the proverb that constant dropping will wear away a stone, you may set your mind at rest that these people never will—never would in a hundred years—impair your ground with Miss Havisham, in any particular, great or small. Second, I am beholden to you as the cause of their being so busy and so mean in vain, and there is my hand upon it.”

“The fool has had no more sense than to jump at a woodcutter’s campfire, and has burned his feet,”

“Tabaqui came to me not long ago with some rude talk that I was a naked man’s cub and not fit to dig pig-nuts. But I caught Tabaqui by the tail and swung him twice against a palm-tree to teach him better manners.”

You mustn’t swim till you’re six weeks old, Or your head will be sunk by your heels; And summer gales and Killer Whales are bad for baby seals. Are bad for baby seals, dear rat, As bad as bad can be; But splash and grow strong, And you can’t be wrong. Child of the Open Sea!”