Angelou, Maya
“You did then what you knew how to do, and when you knew better, you did better.”
Anonymous
“Don’t frown because you never know who might be falling in love with your smile.”
Byatt, A.S.
“What makes us men is that we can think logically. What makes us human is that we sometimes choose not to.”
The Virgin in the Garden
“There was a boy, a chess player, once, who revealed that his gift consisted partly in a clear inner vision of potential moves of each piece as objects with flashing or moving tails of coloured light: He saw a possible pattern of potential moves and selected them according to which ones made the pattern strongest, the tensions greatest. His mistakes were made when he selected not the toughest, but the most beautiful lines of light.”
The Virgin in the Garden
Cather, Willa
“Where there is great love, there are always great miracles…The miracles of the church…rest not so much on faces or voices or healing powers coming suddenly near to us from far off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what there is always about us.”
Death Comes for the Archbishop
“There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon.”
O! Pioneers
Conrad, Joseph
“Brute force is nothing to boast of when you have it; your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.”
Heart of Darkness
Dafoe, Daniel
“So certainly does interest banish all manner of affection, and so naturally do men give up honor, justice, and humanity to secure themselves.”
Moll Flanders
De la Rouchefoucauld, Francois
“Absence diminishes the small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and blows up the bonfire.”
Dostoevsky, Fyodor
“The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him or around him.
The Brothers Karamazov
“The only hell is being unable to love.”
The Brothers Karamazov
Einstein, Albert
“The world is a dangerous place to live, not because people do evil, but because people sit by and let them.”
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
The Great Gatsby
Forster, E.M.
“Love must confirm and old relation rather than reveal a new one.”
Howards End
“Rent to the ideal, to your own faith in human nature…Trust strangers, and if they fool you say—‘It’s better to be fooled than to be suspicious;’ the confidence trick is the work of man, the want-of confidence trick is the work of the devil.
Howards End
“Any human being lies nearer to the unseen than any organization.”
Howards End
“It is so easy to talk of ‘passing emotion’ and forget how vivid the emotion was ere it passed. Our impulse to sneer, to forget, is at root a good one. We recognize that emotion is not enough, and that men and women are personalities capable of sustained relations, not mere opportunities for electrical discharge…Yet, we do not admit that by collisions of this trivial sort, the doors of heaven are shaken open.”
Howards End
“It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die—neither as victim nor fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering and the shore he must leave.”
Howards End
“The nature of our daily lives is chaotic and different form the orderly sequence that has been fabricated by historians. Actual life is full of false clues and signposts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes. The most successful career most show a waste of strength that might have moved mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of a man who is taken unprepared, but of him who was prepared but never taken. On a tragedy of that kind, our national morality is silent. It assumes that preparation against danger is in itself a good, and that men, like nations, are the better of staggering through life fully armed.”
Howards End
“The crime of suicide lies in its disregard for the feelings of those whom we leave behind.”
Howards End
“It is those who cannot connect who hasten to cast the first stone.”
Howards End
“When the book of life is opening, our readings are secret and we are unwilling to give the chapter and the verse.”
The Longest Journey
“It is in what we value, not in what we have, that the test of us resides.”
The Longest Journey
“We are all of us bubbles in an extremely rough sea. Into this sea…humanity has built some little breakwaters—scientific knowledge, civilized restraint—so that the bubbles do not break so frequently or so soon. But the sea has not been altered and it is only by chance that we do not die.”
The Longest Journey
“I suspect that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.”
“If I ever had to choose between my country and my friend, I hope I would be brave enough to choose my friend.”
Frost, Robert
“Before I built a wall, I’d ask to know what I was walling in our out,
And to whom I was giving like offense
Something is there that does not love a wall
That wants it down”
“The Mending Wall”
Gogol, Nikolai
“However stupid a fool’s words may be, they are sometimes enough to confound an intelligent man.”
Dead Souls
Golden, Arthur
“We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in on direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.”
Memoirs of a Geisha
“Dreams can be such dangerous things: the smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes consume us completely.”
Memoirs of a Geisha
“WE can never flee the misery that is within us”
Memoirs of a Geisha
“Adversity is like a strong wind…it doesn’t just hold us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward, we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.
Memoirs of a Geisha
“Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however, we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.”
Memoirs of a Geisha
Gourevitch, Philip
“The so-called survival instinct is often described as an animal urge to preserve oneself. But once the threat of bodily annilation is removed, the soul still requires preservation, and a wounded soul becomes the source of its own affliction; it cannot nurse itself directly. So survival can seem a curse, for one of the dominant needs of the needy soul is to be needed.”
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with our Families
“All history is a record of successive struggles for power, and to a very large extent power consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of reality.”
We Wish to Inform You…
Gray, Thomas
“The paths of glory lead but too the grave.”
“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
Guterson, David
“Accident rules every corner of the universe except the chambers of the heart.”
Snow Falling on Cedars
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
“The act of the passing generation is the germ which may and must produce good or evil fruit in a far distant time; that, together with the seed of the merely temporary crop, which mortals term expedience, they inevitably sow the acorns of a more enduring growth, which may darkly overshadow their posterity.”
The House of the Seven Gables
“The influential classes, and those who take upon themselves to be leaders of the people, are fully liable to all the passionate error which has ever characterized the maddest mob.”
The House of the Seven Gables
Hugo, Victor
“Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.”
“The greatest happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved.”
King, Stephen
“Hope is a good thing, maybe even the best of things. And no good thing ever dies.”
The Shawshank Redemption
Kingsolver, Barbara
“If chained is where you have been, your arms will always bear the marks of the shackles. What you have to lose is your own story, your own slant. You’ll look at the scars on your arms and see mere ugliness or you’ll take great care to look away from them and see nothing. Either way, you have no words for the story of where you came from…we are our injuries as much as we are our successes.”
The Poisonwood Bible
Knowles, John
“The old giants of your memories become pygmies while you are looking away.”
A Separate Peace
“I was subject to the dictates of my mind, which gave me the maneuverability of a strait jacket.”
A Separate Peace
Kundera, Milan
“Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but tin the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).”
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weights so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, with someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”
The Unbearable lightness of Being
“Those who yearn for ‘something higher’ are likely to get vertigo.”
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Larson, Jonathan
“Let ye who are without sin be the first to condemn”
Rent
Law , Vernon Sanders
“Experience is the hardest teacher because it gives the test first, the lesson afterward.”
Lawrence, D.H.
“A dangerous phenomenon in the world is a man of narrow belief, who denies his neighbor’s right to be alone.”
The Man Who Died
Lee, Chang-rae
“One can hardly understand why another has conducted his life in such a way, how he came to commit certain actions and other others, whether he looks upon the past with mostly pleasure or equanimity or regret. It seems difficult enough to consider one’s own triumphs and failures with perfect verity, for it’s no secret that the past proves a most unstable mirror, typically too sever and flattering all at once, and never as truth-reflecting as people would like to believe.”
A Gesture Life
Lee, Harper
“True courage is when you know you’re licked from the beginning but you begin anyway and see it through to the end.”
To Kill a Mockingbird
McDermott, Alice
“The ability to believe and the ability to be deceived go hand in hand.”
Charming Billy
Mencken, H.L.
“Religion is used as a club and a cloak by both politicians and moralists, all of them lusting for power and most of them palpable frauds.”
O’Brien, Tim
“The act of writing led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse. By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened,…and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.”
The Things They Carried
Orwell, George
“Sanity is not statistical.”
1984
Paine, Thomas
“Canst thou find the almighty perfection? No; not only because the power and wisdom he has manifested in the structure of creation that I behold is to me incomprehensible, but because even this manifestation, great as it is, is probably but a small display of power and wisdom by which millions of other worlds, to me invisible by their distance, were created and continue to exist.”
The Age of Reason
Plato
“It is love that creates peace among men, calm upon the sea, rest for the winds from strife, and sleep in sorrow.”
The Symposium
Quindlen, Anna
“Our parents are never people to us…they’re always character traits, Achilles’ heels, dim nightmares, vocal tics, bad noses, hot tears, al handed down with us and stuck with them…There is only room in your lifeboat for one, and you always choose yourself, and you turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat.”
One True Thing
Rand, Ayn
“Man cannot escape from his need for philosophy; his only alternative is whether the philosophy guiding him is to be chosen by his mind or by chance.”
Roux, Joseph
“WE call that person who has lost his father and orphan, and a widower that man who has lost his wife. But that man who has the immense unhappiness of losing a friend, by what name do we call him? Here every language is silent and holds its peace in impotence.”
Socrates
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Quoted by Plato in The Apology
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander
“It is not our level of prosperity that makes for happiness but the kinship of heart to heart and the way we look at the world. Both attitudes lie within our power, so that a man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy, and no one can stop him.”
Cancer Ward
Stahl, Leslie
“If you must juggle many balls, the important thing to remember is which are rubber and which are glass.”
Thomas, Dylan
“Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
Thoreau, Henry David
“If you have built castles in the air, your work is not lost; that is where they should be. Now build foundations under them.”
Tolstoy, Leo
“Everyone thinks to change the world but no one thinks to change themselves.”
Turgenev, Ivan
“None but immoral or silly people can live without principles.”
Fathers an sons
“We have no right to yield to the satisfactions of our personal egoisms.”
Fathers and Sons
“However passionate, sinning, and rebellious the heart hidden in the tomb, the flowers growing over it peep serenely at us with innocent eyes; they tell us not of eternal peace alone, of that great pace of the indifferent nature; they tell us too of eternal reconciliation and of life without end.”
Fathers and Sons
Turow, Scott
''TV and the movies have spoiled the most intimate moments of our lives. They have given us conventions which dominate our expectations in instants whose intensity would ordinarily make them spontaneous and unique”
Presumed Innocent
Vonnegut, Kurt
“If you want to be a friend of civilization, become an enemy of the truth and a fanatic of harmless balderdash.”
Waugh, Evelyn
“Memories are our lives, for we possess nothing certainly except the past…They are the memorials and pledges of the vital hours of a lifetime.”
Brideshead Revisited
“We keep company in this world with a hoard of abstractions and reflections and counterfeits of ourselves—the sensual man, the economic man, the man of reason, the beast, the machine, and the sleep walker, and heaven knows what besides all in our own image, indistinguishable from ourselves to the outward eye. We get borne along, out of sight in the press, unresisting, till we get the chance to drop behind unnoticed or to doge down a side street, pause, breathe freely, and take our bearings, or to push ahead, out distance our shadows, lead them a dance, so that at length they catch up with us, they look at once another askance, knowing we have a secret we shall never share.”
Brideshead Revisited
Wharton, Edith
“It is less mortifying to believe one’s self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness.”
The House of Mirth
Wiesel, Elie
“Terrible things happen when good men stand still.”
Wilde, Oscar
“Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.”
Wilder, Thornton
“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Woolf, Virginia
“No one sees anyone as he actually is…they see all sorts of things…they seem themselves.”
Jacob’s Room
“All the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.”
To the Lighthouse
“What is the meaning of life?…The great revelation never does come. Instead there re daily miracles, illuminations, matches that strike unexpectedly in the dark.”
To the Lighthouse