"All the lessons of history in four sentences: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars." Charles A. Beard

“Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.” Donald Miller

“How does a human being live both softly and fiercely at the same time? How do we balance it? Why can’t we be one or the other? Through perception, first judgements and a sheer naïve mind, I imagined everyone as one or the other. If someone was very kind and light-hearted, I stamped him or her as soft. If someone was bitter, loud, passionate or eccentric, I decided they were fierce, and completely voided the option that somewhere, they were both. What I failed to remember is that even those who are quiet and soft to the touch have shards of glass somewhere on their insides that make them angry. I failed to remember that those who are bitter and relentless sometimes come home from a long day and cry in the bathtub. Wasn’t every angry mother who ever snapped at her children in the grocery isle really just on edge because her heart was aching from sadness and exhaustion from raising her children alone? How often in our lives would we underestimate the quiet ones because we assumed they were not passionate, only to find that they held more grit than any determined lion we’d ever met?” Codi Ann Thomsen

She drinks pints of coffee and writes little observations and ideas for stories with her best fountain pen on the linen-white pages of expensive notebooks. Sometimes, when it’s going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery. David Nicholls

Each second we live is a new and unique moment of the universe, a moment that will never be again. And what do we teach our children? We teach them that two and two make four, and that Paris is the capital of France. When will we also teach them what they are? We should say to each of them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are unique. In all the years that have passed, there has never been another child like you. Your legs, your arms, the way you move. You may become a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, a Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything. Yes, you are a marvel. And when you grow up, can you then harm another who is, like you, a marvel? You must work, we must all work, to make the world worthy of its children. Pablo Casals

Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours. Ayn Rand

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet. Sylvia Plath

I don’t know if you’ve ever felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Or just not exist. Or just not be aware that you do exist. Or something like that. I think wanting that is very morbid, but I want it when I get like this. That’s why I’m trying not to think. I just want it all to stop spinning. Stephen Chbosky

I go to sleep alone, and wake up alone. I take walks. I work until I’m tired. I watch the wind play with the trash that’s been under the snow all winter. Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by absence? Long ago, men went to sea, and women waited for them, standing on the edge of the water, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now I wait for him. He vanishes unwillingly, without warning. I wait for him. Each moment that I wait feels like a year, an eternity. Each moment is as slow and transparent as glass. Through each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting. Why has he gone where I cannot follow? Audrey Niffenegger

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close. Pablo Neruda

The Christian says, 'Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or to be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that country and to help others to do the same. C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

I do not think that one should demand that love be forever. Perhaps it is better that it not be forever. How can one answer for more than the moment? Who knows what strange tides may sweep us away? What depths there may be, or twists and turns and shallows? Each life sails a separate course, although sometimes, and this is the best of times, two lives may move along together until the end of time. Louis L’Amour (The Walking Drum)

She was a sun, radiant, growing, gathering light and storing it--then after an eternity pouring it forth in a glance, the fragment of a sentence, to that part of him that cherished all beauty and all illusion. F. Scott. Fitzgerald, "The Beautiful and Damned"

Keep your face always toward the sunshine - and shadows will fall behind you. Walt Whitman

It is a risk to love. What if it doesn't work out? Ah, but what if it does. Peter McWilliams

I could follow you to the beginning, just to relive the start. Maybe then you'd remember to slow down, at all of our favorite parts. Paramore

Keep the channel open. ... No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others. Martha Graham

She was beautiful, in the quiet way that lonely, unnoticed people are beautiful to those who notice them. Jedediah Berry

May I forget what ought to be forgotten; and recall, unfailing, all that ought to be recalled, each kindly thing, forgetting what might sting. Mary Caroline Davies

One resolution I have made, and try always to keep, is this: to rise above the little things. John Burroughs

All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost; J.R.R. Tolkien

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. Plato

If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I. Michel de Montaigne

I hope you don't mind that I put down in words / How wonderful life is while you're in the world. Elton John

If equal cheese cannot be, let the more cheesy one be me. Ben

You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother's milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes. George Bernard Shaw

By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear. Hebrews 11:3 (KJV)

And the tiny baby! Looking at it is like spontaneous ovulation. Alli Rense

It's all right to have butterflies in your stomach. Just get them to fly in formation. Dr. Rob Gilbert

People so seldom say I love you / And then it's either too late or love goes. / So when I tell you I love you, / It doesn't mean I know you'll never go, / Only that I wish you didn't have to.

I take great comfort in the fact that life is unfair. I'd hate to think I deserved every rotten thing that's ever happened to me.

Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it. Mark Twain

Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time. Jorge Luis Borges, The Threatened One

I reached for sleep and drew it round me like a blanket muffling pain and thought together in the merciful dark. Mary Stewart

For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don't believe, no proof is possible. Stuart Chase

The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone. Harriet Beecher Stowe

This is what you do on your very first day in Paris. You get yourself some rain, not just a drizzle but honest-to-goodness rain. Then you find yourself someone really nice, and drive her through the Bois de Boulogne in a taxi. The rain’s very important, because that’s when Paris smells its sweetest. It’s the damp chestnut trees, you see. Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina

Once upon a time, I wanted to know what love was. Love is there if you want it to be. You just have to see that it's wrapped in beauty and hidden away in between the seconds of your life. If you don't stop for a minute, you might miss it. Cashback

Happy moments, praise God. Difficult moments, seek God. Quiet moments, worship God. Painful moments, trust God. EVERY MOMENT, THANK GOD.

Woman came out of Man’s rib. Not from his feet to be walked on, not from his head to be superior, but from his side to be equal. Under the arm to be protected, and next to the heart to be loved. Unknown

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered. Tom Stoppard

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the foosteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style. Louis Aragon.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music. George Eliot

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?

And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Matthew 6:25

Those were summers when the heart quivered up from the hot yellow gravel and pierced the plaited rushes of my wide-brimmed hats, summers almost without nights. For even then I so loved the dawn that my mother granted it to me as a reward. She used to agree to wake me at half past three and off I would go, an empty basket on each arm, towards the kitchen gardens that sheltered in the narrow bend of the river, in search of strawberries, black currants, and hairy gooseberries. Colette

You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won't tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you've done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you're tired. You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and you're trying not to tell him that you love him, and you're trying to choke down the feeling, and you're trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you've discovered something you don't even have a name for. Anonymous

Sometimes at dusk, when you were trying to relax and not think about the general stagnation, the Garbage God would gather a handful of those choked-off morning hopes and dangle them somewhere just out of reach; they would hang in the breeze and make a sound like delicate glass bells, reminding you of something you never quite got a hold of, and never would. The Rum Diary, Hunter S. Thompson's first novel