• "Better to be hated, than love love loved for what you're not" (Marina & The Diamonds)
• "Once I dropped a tear in the ocean. When I find it is when I'll stop loving you." (Anonymous)
• "But there is something about Time. The sun rises and sets. The stars swing slowly across the sky and fade. Clouds fill with rain and snow, empty themselves, and fill again. The moon is born, and dies, and is reborn. Around millions of clocks swing hour hands, and minute hands, and second hands. Around goes the continual circle of the notes of the scale. Around goes the circle of night and day, the circle of weeks forever revolving, and of months, and of years." (Madeleine L'Engle)
• "She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful." (Neil Gaiman)
• "Ghosts are real, and monsters are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win." (Stephen King)
• "I always felt like I was meant to have been born in another era, another time." (Johnny Depp)
• "There is more to be learned in one day of discomfort, poverty and anxiety than in a lifetime of apparent happiness, security, riches and power." (Anonymous)
• "You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself, any direction you choose." (Dr. Seuss)
• "And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." (Sylvia Plath)
• "I don't need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better." (Plutarch)
• "Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today." (Mark Twain)
• "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages." (William Shakespeare)
• "The brain is wider than the sky." (Emily Dickinson)
• Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up." (Robert Frost)
• "Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words." (Edgar Allan Poe)
• "I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes." (E.E. Cummings)
• "A great man is always willing to be little" (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
• "Life isn't about finding yourself. It's about creating yourself." (George Bernard Shaw)
• "Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are." (Kurt Cobain)
• "The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do." (Andy Warhol)
• "Happiness depends upon ourselves" (Aristotle)
• "The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen." (Elizabeth Kubler Ros)
• "There are two kinds of secrets: those we keep from others and the ones we hide from ourselves." (Frank)
• "People are like stained - glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within." (Elizabeth Kubler Ros)
• "So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane." (John Green,Looking For Alaska)
• "What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?" (John Green,An Abundance of Katherines)
• "Lucky Charms are like the vampires of breakfast cereal. They're magical, they're delicious, they're a little bit dangerous and bad for you. They initially make you feel great, but then over time you realize that maybe your relationship with Lucky Charms is just a little bit unhealthy and you start to think, 'Maybe I don't want to be in a long-term relationship with a breakfast cereal that tastes delicious but damages my health.' But then the Lucky Charms gets all stalker on you and for some reason you kind of like that. It makes you feel special. So yeah, you spend your life with Lucky Charms. That's awesome. That's a great way to... get diabetes." (John Green)
• "Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
• "When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us." (Hellen Keller)
• "It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield." (William Butler Yeats)
• "Gazing at the rain, I consider what it means to belong, to become part of something. To have someone cry for me. From someplace distant, so very distant. From, ultimately, a dream. No matter how far I reach out, no matter how fast I run, I’ll never make it. Why would anyone want to cry for me?" (Haruki Murakami)
• "To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting." (E.E. Cummings)
• "I like people too much, or not at all" (Sylvia Plath)
• "It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting." (Paulo Coehlo)
• "She's never where she is, I said. She’s only inside her head." (White Oleander)
• "Turn your face to the sun and the shadows fall behind you." (Maori Proverb)
• "I think perfection is ugly. Somewhere in the things humans make, I want to see scars, failure, disorder, distortion." (Yohji Yamamoto)
• “Sometimes I’m terrified of my heart; of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants. The way it stops and starts.” (Edgar Allan Poe)
• “We cannot stay home all our lives, we must present ourselves to the world and we must look upon it as an adventure.” (Beatrix)
• “So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them.” (Sylvia Plath)
• “Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn’t carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.”
• “I get my ideas out of my dreams…if you’re lucky enough to use something you see in your dreams, it is purely original. It’s not in the world - it’s in your head. I think that is amazing.”
• “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
• “I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?” (Syliva Plath)
• “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” Marianne Williamson (A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles)
• “Generally speaking, the most miserable people I know are those who are obsessed with themselves; the happiest people I know are those who lose themselves in the service of others…By and large, I have come to see that if we complain about life, it is because we are thinking only of ourselves.” (Gordon B. Hinckley)
• “Sometimes I look a the Moon, and I imagine that those darker spots are caverns, cities, islands, and the places that shine are those where the sea catches the light of the sun like the glass of a mirror. I would like to tell of war and friendship among the various parts of the body, the arms that do battle with the feet, and the veins that make love with the arteries or the bones with the marrow. All the stories I would like to write persecute me when I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, the little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, ‘Sir, write me, I am beautiful’.” (Umberto Eco)
• “Life is an echo. What you send out comes back. What you sow, you reap. What you give, you get. What you see in others exists in you.” (Zig Ziglar)
• “No woman who understands the gospel would ever think that any other work is more important or would ever say, “I am just a mother,” for mothers heal the souls of men.” (Sheri Dew)
• "He will convert your supposed inadequacies into recognized strengths."(Thomas S. Monson)
• "I have called to mind all the past moments of my life, and am left to mourn and shed tears of sorrow for my folly in suffering the adversary of my soul to have so much power over me as he has had in times past. But God is merciful and has forgiven my sins, and I rejoice that he sendeth forth the Comforter unto as many as believe and humbleth themselves before him” (Joseph Smith)
• "...it is through sorrow and suffering, toil and tribulation, that we gain the education that we come here to acquire and which will make us more like our Father and Mother in heaven." (Spencer W. Kimball)
• "You can't inspire change in others if you are not willing to change yourself." (Brady Iden)
• "We become what we want to be by consistently being what we want to become each day.” (Richard G. Scott)
• “Man’s destined purpose is to conquer all habits, to overcome the evil in him and to restore good to its rightful place.” (Mahatma Ghandi)
• "I've learned that God's love is the great motivator behind all that I do." (Sister Russell)
• “Hearts can inspire other hearts with its fire.” (Oscar Hammerstein)
• "If you're not getting better, you're getting worse without knowing it." (David Romero)
• “He who does not read has no advantage over him who cannot read.”
• “If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.” (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
• Someone has said, “It may make a difference to all eternity whether we do right or wrong today” (James Freeman Clarke, in Elbert Hubbard’s Scrap Book [1923], 95).
• "Self-contempt is of Satan; there is none of it in heaven." (Neal A Maxwell)
• "All the minds and spirits that God ever sent into the world are susceptible of enlargement.” (Joseph Smith)
• "The day will come when after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and on that day for the second time in the history of the world man will have discovered fire.” (Pierre de Chardin)
• “Every woman gives her life for what she believes. Sometimes people believe in little or nothing, nevertheless, they give up their lives to that little or nothing. One life is all we have, and we live it as we believe in living it, and then it’s gone. But to surrender what you are, and live without belief--that’s more terrible than dying--more terrible than dying young.” (Maxwell Anderson, “Joan of Lorraine,”)
• “Carefully, warily, the wolf came down out of the forest one night, attracted by the smell of a flock of sheep. With slow steps he drew near to the sheepfold, placing his feet with the utmost caution so as not to make the slightest sound which might disturb the sleeping dog.But one careless paw stepped on a board; the board creaked and woke the dog. The wolf had to run away, unfed and hungry. And so, because of one careless foot, the whole animal suffered.” (Adapted from Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, “Fantastic Tales,” Bestiary, no. 1225.)
• “The devil has no power over us only as we permit him. The moment we revolt at anything which comes from God, the devil takes power.” (Joseph Smith)
• “Think twice before you speak and three times before you act.”
• "Tis easier to prevent bad habits than to break them." (Benjamin Franklin)
• “Do not yield to the bad, but always oppose it with good.” (Virgil.)
• "The mind, like the dyer’s hand, is colored by what it holds." (Harvard Psychologist Professor William James)
• “When God wants a great work done in the world or a great wrong righted, he goes about it in a very unusual way. He doesn’t stir up his earthquakes or send forth his thunderbolts. Instead, he has a helpless baby born, perhaps in a simple home out of some obscure mother. And then God puts the idea into the mother’s heart, and she puts it into the baby’s mind. And then God waits. The greatest forces in the world are not the earthquakes and the thunderbolts. The greatest forces in the world are babies.” (The Treasure Chest, p. 53 -- E.T. Sullivan)
• “The choice to repent is a choice to burn bridges in every direction [having determined] to follow forever only one way, the one path that leads to eternal life.” (Noel Reynolds)
• “When we pray unto the Father in the name of Jesus for specific personal things, we should feel in the very depths of our souls that we are willing to subject our petitions to the will of our Father in heaven. … The time will come when we shall know the will of God before we ask. Then everything for which we pray will be ‘expedient.’ Everything for which we ask will be ‘right.’ That will be when as a result of righteous living, we shall so enjoy the companionship of the spirit that he will dictate what we ask” (Marion G. Romney)
• "miracles are the fruits of faith." (Joseph Smith)
• “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and godesses” (The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis)
• “Whatever is only almost true is quite false, and among the most dangerous of errors, because being so near truth, it is the more likely to lead astray.” (Henry Ward Beecher)
• "Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God's handwriting--a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing." (Emerson)
• "Not failure, but low aim, is crime." (Lowell)
• "Nature is too thin a screen; the glory of the omnipresent God bursts through everywhere." (Emerson)
• "All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen." (Emerson)
• “The brightest crowns that are worn in heaven have been tried, and smelted, polished and glorified through the furnace of tribulation” (Thomas Carlyle)
• "It’s all about falling in love with yourself and sharing that love with someone who appreciates you, rather than looking for love to compensate for a self love deficit." (Eartha Kitt)
• "When you choose to follow Christ, you choose to be changed." (Ezra Taft Benson)
• "As individuals we are strong, but with God we are unstoppable." (Rosemary M. Wixom)
• "When I stand before God at the end of my life, I hope that I don't have a single bit of talent left, and say, I used everything you gave me." (Lana Del Rey)
• “I think that people who study the scriptures get a dimension to their life that nobody else gets and that can’t be gained in any way except by studying the scriptures. There’s an increase in faith and a desire to do what’s right and a feeling of inspiration and understanding that comes to people who study the gospel—meaning particularly the Standard Works—and who ponder the principles, that can’t come in any other way.” (Bruce R. McConkie)
• "Woman is God’s supreme creation. Only after the earth had been formed, after the day had been separated from the night, after the waters had been divided from the land, after vegetation and animal life had been created, and after man had been placed on the earth, was woman created; and only then was the work pronounced complete and good." (Gordon B. Hinckley)
• "What we know about the Eternal Father and His plan of happiness, about the Lord Jesus Christ and His Atonement, and about the nature of our relationship to the Father and the Son should influence everything we think, say, and do—and all that we yearn to become. Knowing is the important first step—but it is only a beginning. Because of the gift of moral agency, we are agents blessed with the power and capacity to act and not objects to be acted upon. Thus, what we do with the truths we know and how we “act in doctrine” are essential elements and key indicators of our testimony, conversion, and spiritual development." (David A. Bednar)
• "We have implanted in our souls a desire to be free. The Lord understood this when He granted us our mortal probation. With that freedom, however, comes accountability. We are instructed not to idle away our time nor bury our talents and not use them. We are expected to make our lives better through our own initiatives and efforts." (L. Tom Perry)
• "Let someone love you just the way you are – as flawed as you might be, as unattractive as you sometimes feel, and as unaccomplished as you think you are. To believe that you must hide all the parts of you that are broken, out of fear that someone else is incapable of loving what is less than perfect, is to believe that sunlight is incapable of entering a broken window and illuminating a dark room." (Marc Hack)
• "Food doesn’t taste better or worse when documented by Instagram. Laughter is as genuine over Skype as it would be sharing a sofa. Pay attention. Take in nature, hold someone’s hand, read a book. But don’t ever apologize for snapping a photo of a sunrise after a hike, or blogging about the excitement of having a crush, or updating your goodreads account. All of these things are good and should be celebrated. Smile at strangers on the sidewalk and like your friends’ selfies. It’s all good for the human spirit."
• "God makes it attractive to choose the right by letting us feel the effects of our choices. If we choose the right, we will find happiness—in time. If we choose evil, there comes sorrow and regret—in time. Those effects are sure. Yet they are often delayed for a purpose. If the blessings were immediate, choosing the right would not build faith. And since sorrow is also sometimes greatly delayed, it takes faith to feel the need to seek forgiveness for sin early rather than after we feel its sorrowful and painful effects." (Henry B. Eyring)
• "You cannot pray for an A on a test and study for a B. You cannot pray for a celestial marriage and live a telestial life. You cannot pray for something and act less." (Tad R. Callister)
• "God is always seeking you. Every sunset. Every clear blue sky. Each ocean wave. The starry hosts of night. He blankets each new day with the invitation, ‘I am here.’" (Louie Giglio)
• "We should not use the same phrases at each prayer. Each of us would become disturbed if a friend said the same few words to us each day, treated the conversation as a chore, and could hardly wait to finish in order to turn on the TV and forget us." (Ezra Taft Benson)
• "This year, mend a quarrel. Seek out a forgotten friend. Dismiss suspicion and replace it with trust. Write a letter. Give a soft answer. Encourage youth. Manifest your loyalty in word and deed. Keep a promise. Forgo a grudge. Forgive an enemy. Apologize. Try to understand. Examine your demands on others. Think first of someone else. Be kind. Be gentle. Laugh a little more. Express your gratitude. Welcome a stranger. Gladden the heart of a child. Take pleasure in the beauty and wonder of the earth. Speak your love and the speak it again." (Howard W. Hunter)
• "Think of the purest, most all-consuming love you can imagine. Now multiply that love by an infinite amount—that is the measure of God’s love for you." (Dieter F. Uchtdorf)
• "When we do not retaliate—when we turn the other cheek and resist feelings of anger—we too stand with the Savior." (Robert D. Hales)
• "Draw a monster. Why is it a monster?" (Janice Lee)
• "We’ve been placed on Earth in troubled times. We live in a complex world with currents of conflict everywhere to be found. Political schemes ruin the stability of nations, despots grasp for power, and segments of society seem forever downtrodden, deprived of opportunity and left with a feeling of failure. The sophistries of men ring in our ears, and sin surrounds us. Ours is the responsibility to be worthy of all the glorious blessings our Father in Heaven has in store for us." (Thomas S. Monson)
• "Don't turn him into a husband before God turns him into a man." (Peggy Pickett)
• "The flower that blooms in adversity is the rarest and most beautiful of all." (Disney's Mulan)
• "We don’t know when he will act. In his time, no doubt, not ours. In the meantime he would like us to do what we can on our own." (C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian)
• "He who has ceased to pray has lost a great friendship." (Richard L. Evans)
• "May I share with you a formula that in my judgment will help you and help me to journey well through mortality... First, fill your mind with truth; second, fill your life with service; and third, fill your heart with love.” (Thomas S. Monson)
• "Being in healthy relationships means choosing to invest your time in people who nourish your heart and mind. Commitment, then, is only healthy when what you're committed to is committed to your well-being." (L.B.- A Few Things About Love)
• "Home should be the place in which a person can unburden his soul and find renewed strength to face the world, where there is comfort, joy, and understanding, where best friends live, and where we can learn to be our best selves." (Marvin J. Ashton)
• "Be the love you never received." (Rune Cazuli)
• "People grow when they are loved well. If you want to help others heal, love them without an agenda." (Mike McHargue)
• "If you love deeply, you’re going to get hurt badly. But it’s still worth it." (C.S. Lewis)
• "Having a soft heart in a cruel world is courage, not weakness." (Katherine Henson)
• __"Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining." (Anne Lamott)
• "To have someone understand your mind is a different kind of intimacy."
• "A well-chosen book saves you from everything, including yourself." (F.Scott Fitzgerald)
• "What a comfort to know that God is a poet." (Rachel Held Evans)
• "We are all broken, that’s how the light gets in." (Ernest Hemingway)
• "But I would never kiss anyone who doesn’t burn me like the sun." (Jens Lekman)
• "I am occasionally lovable but for the most part I’m like loving a raincloud." (Sara Quin)
• "Isn’t it amazing that God’s voice can make the mountains crumble and in that same voice speak love gently into your heart?" (Pablo Verzosa)
• "Some people reflect light, some deflect it, you by some miracle, seem to collect it." (From House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski)
• "Bear patiently, my heart - for you have suffered heavier things." (Homer, The Illiad)
• "The way to love someone is to lightly run your finger over that person’s soul until you find a crack, and then gently pour your love into that crack." (Keith Miller)
• "I carry Sorrow, a grey / bird, sluggish, in my chest." (Osip Mandelstam - from “Light Sheds it’s Meager Ray")
• "If he writes her a few sonnets, he loves her. If he writes her 300 sonnets, he loves sonnets" (an english professor)
• "Sometimes, I’m the mess. / Sometimes, I’m the broom. / On the hardest days, /I have to be both." (Rudy Francisco)
• "When is a monster not a monster?...Oh, when you love it." (Caitlyn Siehl)
• "I used to think home was when I slept in my bed at my parents house, or when I could relive the old days, but now that I’ve met you, I can say what home really is. Home is the smile you give me when I tell you that I love you, or the laugh you make when I tell a joke. Home is my hand in yours, reminding me that you are here and not a dream. Home is your name on my lips as I say how much I’ve missed you. Home is not the familiar, it’s you and I together again, and darling, I’m homesick for you every time I say goodbye. Yet, I can’t help but be thankful that I can finally say that I’ve found home, and it’s the most beautiful home I could ever hope to have." (T.B. LaBerge // Home)
• "Be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here." (Sylvia Plath)
• When that pernicious wound pops up yet again in your heart, pay attention: God wants to heal you on an even deeper level than last time. We sometimes think that one encounter with God’s love will heal us completely. But our wounds run deeper than we know, and God is patient." (Audrey Assad)
• "Loving someone should be hard and active, not easy and passive. When you sign up to actually love people – no fakers allowed – then you sign up for a life of runny noses, awkward car rides, hugs that last too long, pauses that demand no noise, and admitting you were wrong. If you want to actually love people then you have to be willing to be wrong. / Love is forgiveness. And it’s atonement. And it’s basically like putting your soul in a washing machine – it’s not some gentle cycle, it’s a fierce whipping that rings you out good. / It makes the stains fade. / Best of all, it fills the holes." (Hannah Brencher)
• "Sometimes God says no. Rejoice in that. He is saving you from a will that is not His. He is saving you from disappointment, pain, hurt, and sin. He loves you enough to say no."
• “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).” (Mark Twain)
• "People are rivers, always ready to move from one state of being into another. It is not fair, to treat people as if they are finished beings. Everyone is always becoming and unbecoming." (Kathleen Winter, Annabel)
• "Sometimes we just have to cut off the dead branches in our life. Sometimes that’s the only way we can keep the tree alive. It’s hard and it hurts, but it’s what’s best." (Nicole Williams)
• "The prettier the garden, the dirtier the hands of the gardener." (B. E. Barnes)
• "You don’t drown by falling in the water; you drown by staying there."

(Edwin Louis Cole)

• "Recently, my son said to me after seeing a ballet on television: ‘It’s beautiful, but I don’t like it.’ And I thought, Are many grown-ups capable of such a distinction? It’s beautiful, but I don’t like it. Usually, our grown-up thinking is more along the lines of: I don’t like it, so it’s not beautiful. What would it mean to separate those two impressions for art making and for art criticism?" (Sarah Ruhl - 100 essays I don’t have time to write: on umbrellas and sword fights, parades and dogs, fire alarms, children, and theater)