• All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• No matter how often I think I can’t stand it anymore, I always do. There is no alternative. I don’t fall, I don’t foam at the mouth, faint, collapse or die. It’s the same for all of us. You can’t get out of the inside of your own head. Something keeps you going. Something always does. ~Janice Galloway
• The best advice I’ve ever received is, ‘No one else knows what they’re doing either. ~Ricky Gervais
• The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change. ~Carl Rogers
• If you judge people, you have no time to love them. ~Mother Teresa
• You face the biggest challenge of all: to have the courage to seek your big dream regardless of what anyone says. You are the only person alive who can see your big picture and even you can’t see it all. ~Oprah Winfrey
• You have to be vigilant about keeping your own fire alive. ~Tift Merritt
• "What is important: the unsayable, the white space between the words, while these words themselves we always insert as side-issues, which as such are not the central part of we mean. Our core concern remains unwritten, and that means, quite literally, that you write around it. You adjust the settings. You provide statements that can never contain actual experience: experience itself remains beyond the reach of language.... and that unsayable reality appears, at best, as a tension between the statements." ~Max Frisch
• i am not the versions of myself that live inside of other people’s heads
• We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become. ~Ursula K. Le Guin
• Be careful who you vent to.
• Do not expect people to love you as passionately as much as you do them because you will be let down every time. Everyone loves in different ways and sometimes that small amount of passion they give you is all they have left.
• Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
• I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer. ~Jim Carrey
• Try to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably can’t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie. Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. an alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out. ~Mitch Albom, The Time Keeper
• The snow goose need not bathe to make itself white. Neither need you do anything but be yourself. ~Lao Tzu
• No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit. ~Ansel Adam
• The unhappiest people in this world are those who care the most about what other people think. ~C. JoyBell C.
• You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength. ~Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
• I personally like being unique. I like being my own person with my own style and my own opinions and my own toothbrush. ~Ellen DeGeneres
• Truly powerful people have great humility. They do not try to impress, they do not try to be influential. They simply are. People are magnetically drawn to them. They are most often very silent and focused, aware of their core selves. They never persuade, nor do they use manipulation or aggressiveness to get their way. They listen. If there is anything they can offer to assist you, they offer it; if not, they are silent. ~Sanaya Roman, Living with Joy: Keys to Personal Power and Spiritual Transformation
• A book can teach you, a conversation can assure you, a poem can seduce you, a genius can inspire you but only you can save yourself. ~Anthony Anaxagorou
• Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness… ~Kurt Vonnegut
• If you pour a handful of salt into a cup of water, the water becomes undrinkable. But if you pour the salt into a river, people can continue to draw the water to cook, wash, and drink. The river is immense, and it has the capacity to receive, embrace, and transform. When our hearts are small, our understanding and compassion are limited, and we suffer. We can’t accept or tolerate others and their shortcomings, and we demand that they change. But when our hearts expand, these same things don’t make us suffer anymore. We have a lot of understanding and compassion and can embrace others. We accept others as they are, and then they have a chance to transform. ~Thich Nhat Hanh
• Be a light unto yourself ~Buddha
• Do everything with a mind that lets go. Do not expect praise or reward. ~Ajahn Chah
• "I must be willing to give up what I am in order to become what I will be." ~Albert Einstein
• To hold our tongues when everyone is gossiping, to smile without hostility at people and institutions, to compensate for the shortage of love in the world with more love in small, private matters; to be more faithful in our work, to show greater patience, to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable from mockery and criticism: all these are things we can do. ~Hermann Hesse
• Nature is not a place to visit. It is home. ~Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild
• A circle is both a forward movement, a step on the path, and a constant return to the place of origin. ~Emily Strasser
• If you feel scared, do it scared.
• Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. ~George Bernard Shaw
• The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear. ~Aung San Suu Kyi
• I need solitude. I need space. I need air. I need the empty fields round me; and my legs pounding along roads; and sleep; and animal existence. ~Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf
• If someone digs a hole in you, plant some nice flowers and tell them to go fuck themselves.
• There are all these moments you think you won’t survive. And then you survive. ~David Levithan
• You can’t get much done in life if you only work on days when you feel good. ~Jerry West
• A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new. ~Albert Einstein
• Being both soft and strong is a combination very few have mastered. ~Yasmin Mogahed
• You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace. ~Frank McCourt
• Truly powerful people have great humility. They do not try to impress, they do not try to be influential. They simply are. People are magnetically drawn to them. They are most often very silent and focused, aware of their core selves. They never persuade, nor do they use manipulation or aggressiveness to get their way. They listen. If there is anything they can offer to assist you, they offer it; if not, they are silent. ~Sanaya Roman, Living with Joy: Keys to Personal Power and Spiritual Transformation
• When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are. ~Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
• It seems very safe to me to be surrounded by green growing things and water. Barbara Kingsolver
• Thought’s surface: word.

Word’s surface: gesture. Gesture’s surface: skin. Skin’s surface: shiver. ~Vera Pavlova, “[Thought’s surface: word]”, translated by Steven Seymour

• The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear. ~Aung San Suu Kyi
• QUESTION:

Where are the gods? ANSWER: The gods are silent. The gods are lost. The gods are helpless. The gods are us. ~query #23 | mio huang

• They kept asking me, ‘What does the poem mean? What does the poem mean?’ And it was frustrating me because poems don’t mean. They suggest. They enact. They provoke. ~Richard Siken
• My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all. ~John Lennon
• For each person there is a sentence—a series of words—which has the power to destroy them. ~Philip K. Dick
• I don’t sleep at all. And all night long I write. Everything is dying off—I can’t walk, can’t sleep, can’t eat, but this for some reason remains. ~Anna Akhmatova, from a journal entry featured in The Akhmatova Journals: 1938 - 1941
• It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things. ~Leonardo da Vinci
• Put your heart, mind, and soul into even your smallest acts. This is the secret of success. ~Swami Sivanada
• A mind once opened never loses
• When you read a book, you hold another’s mind in your hands. ~James Burke
• celebrate your personal victories because no one else understands what it took to accomplish them
• At the end of everything, is the beginning of something else. Something different than before.
• If you’re going through hell, keep going ~Winston Churchill
• You can’t get much done in life if you only work on days when you feel good. ~Jerry West
• I opened my mouth, almost said something. Almost. The rest of my life might have turned out differently if I had. But I didn’t. ~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
• My real self wanders elsewhere, far away, wanders on and on invisibly and has nothing to do with my life. ~Hermann Hesse
• * All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason. ~Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
• If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.”
• We will feel many things, but feelings are only feelings, and thoughts are only thoughts. If we hold on to them, they will hold on to us. ~Stephanie Ericsson
• Ability is what you’re capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it. ~Raymond Chandler
• Some cry with tears; others with thoughts. ~Octavio Paz
• There are all these moments you think you won’t survive. And then you survive.
• I have survived, but I have not been spared. ~Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless
• For everything I’m not, there’s something that I am. ~William Chapman
• You must be the person you have never had the courage to be. Gradually, you will discover that you are that person, but until you can see this clearly, you must pretend and invent. ~Paulo Coelho
• Surround yourself with the things you love. Discard the rest. ~Kate Spade
• the truth about forever is that it is happening right now. ~Sarah Dessen
• Do everything with a mind that lets go. Do not expect praise or reward. ~Ajahn Chah
• Ride the energy of your own unique spirit. ~Gabrielle Roth
• Call me whatever you like; I am who I must be. ~Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
• The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart. ~The Little Prince (2015), Dir. Mark Osborne
• The tragedy is not that we are alone, but that we cannot be. At times I would give anything in the world to no longer be connected by anything to this universe of men. ~Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959
• Somewhere someone is searching for you in every person they meet
• If you are a reader, you are already halfway to being a writer…For you have a love of words and pleasure from seeing them on a page. And if you are a writer, then you will find that you are driven to write. It is a gift that demands to be shared. You cannot be a silent singer. ~Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen
• …Words…altered the universe. By merely speaking you could create damage and pain, cause tears to fall, drive people away, make yourself feel better, make your life worse. ~Lev Grossman, The Magicians
• We will feel many things, but feelings are only feelings, and thoughts are only thoughts. If we hold on to them, they will hold on to us. ~Stephanie Ericsson
• Do not fear to lose what needs to be lost. ~Sue Monk Kidd, The Invention of Wings
• Sometimes you have to lose yourself in the moon and the stars to find yourself in the sun and the sky. ~penqwen
• It’s not what happens, it’s how you handle it.