advice and observation

"The flower doesn't dream of the bee, it blossoms and the bee comes."

• Mark Nepo

"There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want."

• Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes

"To be an artist is to fail."

• Samuel Beckett *

"So plant your own gardens and decorate your soul instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers."

• Jorge Luis Borges

"Use what talent you possess; the woods would be very silent if no bird sang except those that sang best."

• Henry van Dyke

"You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the question now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

• Rainer Maria-Rilke, letter to Franz Xaver Kappus, 16 July 1903

"They say what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. I say what doesn’t kill me better run faster than me. Real fast."

• Drita d’Avanzo

"It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt."

• Abraham Lincoln

"It's not what the world holds for you it's what you bring to it."

• Anne Shirley of Anne of Green Gables *

"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."

• Oscar Wilde

"What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?"

• John Green

"I want a life that sizzles and pops and makes me laugh out loud. And I don’t want to get to the end, or to tomorrow, even, and realize that my life is a collection of meetings and pop cans and errands and receipts and dirty dishes. I want to eat cold tangerines and sing out loud in the car with the windows open and wear pink shoes and stay up all night laughing and paint my walls the exact color of the sky right now. I want to sleep hard on clean white sheets and throw parties and eat ripe tomatoes and read books so good they make me jump up and down, and I want everyday to make God belly laugh, glad that he gave life to someone who loves the gift."

• Shauna Niequist

"You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred."

• Woody Allen

"Once in a while it really hits people that they don't have to experience the world in the way they have been told."

• Alan Keightley

"You are a victim of the rules you live by."

• unknown

"We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children."

• Native American proverb

"The roses bloom so beautifully because they are not trying to become lotuses, and the lotuses bloom so beautifully because they have not heard legends of other flowers. Everything in nature goes so beautifully in accord because nobody is trying to compete with anybody, nobody is trying to become anyone else. Everything is the way it is."

• somewhere

"Attempt to live in this world, not let the world live inside you. Because when the boat sits on the water it sails perfectly, but when the water enters the boat, it sinks."

• Imam Ali

"When people say, 'She's got everything,' I've got one answer - I haven't got tomorrow."

• Elizabeth Taylor

"There is thunder in our hearts."

• unknown

"May the sun, bring you new energy by day. May the moon, soulfully restore you by night. May the rain, wash away your worries. May the breeze, blow new strength into your being. May you walk, gently through the world and know its beauty all the days of your life."

• Apache blessing

"Perhaps if we saw what was ahead of us, and glimpsed the follies, and misfortunes that would befall us later on, we would all stay in our mother’s wombs, and then there would be nobody in the world but a great number of very fat, very irritated women."

• Lemony Snicket

"Every night I look up at the freckled sky and fall in love with the universe all over again. I will be counting the stars for the rest of my life."

• here

"People will kill you over time, and how they’ll kill you is with tiny, harmless phrases, like: be realistic."

• Dylan Moran

"Some of us think holding on makes us strong, but sometimes it is letting go."

• Herman Hesse

"The happiest people are those who think the most interesting thoughts. Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good conversation, are the happiest people in the world. And they are not only happy in themselves, they are the cause of happiness in others."

• William Phelps

"Live in the sunshine. Swim the sea. Drink the wild air."

• Emerson

"You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the entire ocean in a drop."

• Rumi

"No one should ever ask themselves that: Why am I unhappy? The question carries within it the virus that will destroy everything. If we ask that question, it means we want to find out what makes us happy. If what makes us happy is different from what we have now, then we must either change once and for all or stay as we are, feeling even more unhappy."

• Paulo Coelho

"I love old things. They make me feel sad."

"What's good about sad?"

"It's happy for deep people."

• Blink, Doctor Who

"Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart."

• Kahlil Gibran

"The cure for anything is salt water—sweat, tears, or the sea."

• Isak Dinesen

"And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair."

• Kahlil Gibran

"When people walk away from you, let them go. Your destiny is never tied to someone who leaves you and it doesn't mean they are bad people. It just means that their part in your story is over."

• this

"A certain darkness is needed to see the stars."

• this

"When someone cries so hard that it hurts their throat, it is out of frustration or knowing that no matter what you can do or attempt to do can change the situation. When you feel like you need to cry, when you want to just get it out, relieve some of the pressure from the inside - that is true pain. Because no matter how hard you try or how bad you want to, you can't. That pain just stays in place. Then, if you are lucky, one small tear may escape from those eyes that water constantly. That one tear, that tiny, salty, droplet of moisture is a means of escape. Although it's just a small tear, it is the heaviest thing in the world. And it doesn't do a damn thing to fix anything."

• Chase Brooks

"Ugly is irrelevant. It is an immeasurable insult to a woman, and then supposedly the worst crime you can commit as a woman. But ugly, as beautiful, is an illusion. A matter of taste, a whim, an eye, a beholder, an opinion, a spin, light crossing the frame, paint, projection. The moment. Context."

• Margaret Cho

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."

• Aristotle

"Loneliness is black coffee and late-night television; solitude is herb tea and soft music. Solitude, quality solitude, is an assertion of self-worth, because only in the stillness can we hear the truth of our own unique voices."

• Pearl Cleage

"Loners, if you catch them, are well worth the trouble. Not dulled by excess human contact, nor blasé or focused on your crotch while jabbering about themselves, loners are curious, vigilant, full of surprises. They do not cling. Separate wherever they go, awake or asleep, they shimmer with the iridescence of hidden things seldom seen."

• Anneli Rufus

"Anyone can get dressed up and glamourous but it is how people dress in their days off that are the most intriguing."

• Alexander Wang

"When you do something noble and beautiful and nobody noticed, do not be sad. For the sun every morning is a beautiful spectacle and yet most of the audience still sleeps."

• John Lennon

"This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."

• Walt Whitman

"The prettiest smiles hide the deepest secrets. The prettiest eyes have cried the most tears. And the kindest hearts have felt the most pain."

• here

"Some people are just born with tragedy in their blood."

• Donnie Darko

"No snowflake in an avalanche ever felt responsible."

• Voltaire

"Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts."

• Charles Dickens

"We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie"

• Boston Marriage by David Mamet

"Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel."

• The Children of Men by P.D. James

"Why are you stingy with yourselves? Why are you holding back? What are you saving for — for another time? There are no other times. There is only now. Right now."

• George Balanchine

"For each person there is a sentence - a series of words - which has the power to destroy them."

• Philip K. Dick

"Don't let someone dim your light simply because it is shining in their eyes."

• here

"Nothing like a woman with a brilliant mind and a filthy mouth."