• "Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit." - Aristotle
• "Finally, develop tenacity and an optimistic outlook. It doesn’t mean that everything will always work out or that you won’t suffer. But pessimism seems to be designed to force you to suffer before the fact!" - William Foege
• "You don't need a reason to help people." - Zidane, Final Fantasy IX
• “When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.” - Ernest Hemingway
• "Live High, Live Mighty, Live Righteously" -Jason Mraz
• "You asked me once how I write poetry, not knowing the greatest poetry goes unwritten. The best poetry is being here in your arms." - Virginia Cerenio
• "The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself… Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case." - Chuck Close
• "You are the music while the music lasts." - T.S. Eliot
• "Protection and power are overrated. I think you are very wise to choose happiness and love. There are reasons each of us are born. We have to find those reasons." - Uncle Iroh, Avatar: The Last Airbender
• "Not by might, not by power, but by my spirit." - Zechariah
• "The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn't stop each other on the street to say I love you." -Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
• “One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.” ― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
• Evelyn: You're inhuman. // Patrick: No... I'm in touch with humanity.
• Each of us bears the imprint of a friend met along the way; In each the trace of each." - Primo Levi
• V: What was done to me was monstrous. // Evey Hammond: And they created a monster.
• "We bear the sole, relentless tenderness." -Pablo Neruda, ‘In the wave-strike over unquiet stones’
• Don't go far off, not even for a day, because -- because -- I don't know how to say it: a day is long and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep." - Pablo Neruda, 'Don't Go Far Off'
• “Let us make one point, that we meet each other with a smile, when it is difficult to smile. Smile at each other, make time for each other in your family.” -Mother Teresa
• Today, if a smile comes to you, a happy smile that perhaps you can’t explain, it’s because in that moment I am thinking of you and smiling too.
• Do not let a moment go by that doesn’t remind you that your heart beats 900 times a day and that there are enough gallons of blood to make you an ocean. Do not settle for letting these waves settle and the dust to collect in your veins… Shake the dust. -Anis Mojgani, Shake the Dust
• In my adult life I've understood that if I put an enormous amount of love and honesty into something, usually that shows in the end. - Tom Ford
• For you, a thousand times over. -Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
• It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn't make everything all right. It didn't make ANYTHING all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. A leaf in the woods, shaking in the wake of a startled bird's flight. But I'll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting.(Amir) -Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
• Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could. - Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum
• I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. - Maya Angelou
• "And it follows that I am, because you are: it follows from ‘you are’, that I am, and we: and, because of love, you will, I will, we will, come to be." - Pablo Neruda, ‘Perhaps not to be is to be without your being.’
• I love you also means I love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else. - Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
• You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness. - Jonathan Safran Foer
• I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone. - Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
• If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does. - Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
• You know, sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage. Just literally twenty seconds of just embarrassing bravery. And I promise you, something great will come of it. - Benjamin Mee, We Bought a Zoo
• I thought I understood it, that I could grasp it, but I didn't, not really. Only the smudgeness of it; the pink-slippered, all-containered, semi-precious eagerness of it. I didn't realize it would sometimes be more than whole, that the wholeness was a rather luxurious idea. Because it's the halves that halve you in half. I didn't know, don't know, about the in-between bits; the gory bits of you, and the gory bits of me. - Anna, Like Crazy
• Life's a Climb, and the View's great. - Miley Cyrus, The Climb
• "When all the wild Summer was in her gaze." - William Butler Yeats, 'The Folly Of Being Comforted'
• I hated every minute of my training, but I said, "Don't quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion." - Muhammad Ali
• Live in the present. – Everyone
• Crush a coal to diamonds. – Nujabes
• Life is too short for all the nothings we want to do. - Anonymous
• It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves. - Edmund Hillary
• It's not true that nice guys finish last. Nice guys are winners before the game even starts. - Addison Walker
• Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Finish each 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; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Happiness comes more from loving than being loved; and often when our affection seems wounded it is only our vanity bleeding. To love, and to be hurt often, and to love again - this is the brave and happy life. - J. E. Buchrose
• Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. - Edgar Allan Poe
• Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind. - Henry James
• Feel, feel, I say - feel for all you're worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live, especially to live at this terrible pressure, and the only way to honour and celebrate these admirable beings who are our pride and our inspiration - Henry James
• Help others get ahead. You will always stand taller with someone else on your shoulders. - Bob Moawad
• The real champion is not someone who never fails, but someone who gets back up when he fails - Guy on the radio Johanne Boulat’s mom heard.
• I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness for it shows me the stars. – Og Mandino
• Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go. - T.S. Elliot
• Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength; loving someone deeply gives you courage. - Lao Tzu
• …the most courageous characters here are those with imagination, those who, through their imaginative faculty can empathize with others. - Azar Nafisi from Reading Lolita in Tehran
• It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one. - Azar Nafisi from Reading Lolita in Tehran
• I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt- and there is the story of mankind. - John Steinbeck, Lee in East of Eden
• Act out being alive, like a play. And after a while, a long while, it will be true. - John Steinbeck, Samuel in East of Eden
• When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else. - John Steinbeck, Samuel in East of Eden
• There’s more beauty in the truth even if it is dreadful beauty. - John Steinbeck, Lee in East of Eden
• In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. - John Steinbeck, East of Eden
• …in a story, which is kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world. - Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
• It was as if an angel, in his passage to the skies had shaken his bright wings over the people for an instant-at once a shadow and a splendor-and had shed down a shower of golden truths upon them. - Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
• Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been. - Edgar Allan Poe, Berenice
• I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living; it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities. – Dr. Seuss
• Why do we have to wait for special moments to say nice things or tell people we care about them? – Randy K. Millholland
• The secret of happiness is to make others believe they are the cause of it. – Al Batt
• We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give. – Sir Winston Churchull
• And dazzling memory revive.Refresh the faded tints, Recut the aged prints, And write my old adventures, with the pen Which, on the first day, drew Upon the tablets blue The dancing Pleiads, and the eternal men. - Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Bacchus
• Either you decide to stay in the shallow end of the pool or you go out in the ocean.* – Christopher Reeve
• Happiness is an attitude of mind, born of the simple determination to be happy under all outward circumstances. - J. Donald Walters
• Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag. - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
• A true friend knows your weaknesses but shows you your strengths; feels your fears but fortifies your faith; sees your anxieties but frees your spirit; recognizes your disabilities but emphasizes your possibilities. – William Arthur Ward
• I made a promise, Mr Frodo. A promise. *Don't you leave him Samwise Gamgee. *And I don't mean to. I don't mean to.* - Samwise Gamgee, Lord of the Rings
• The greatest gift is not being afraid to question. - Ruby Dee
• "Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life." - Pablo Picasso
• Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. - Alfred Lord Tennyson
• Things are only impossible until they're not. - Jean-Luc Picard, 'Star Trek: The Next Generation'
• How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. - Anne Frank
• No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another. – Charles Dickens
• The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone. – Harriett Beecher Stowe
• It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…And one fine morning – So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. - F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby
• Love, you know, seeks to make happy rather than to be happy.*- Ralph Connor
• I love life...Yeah, I'm sad, but at the same time, I'm really happy that something could make me feel that sad. It's like...It makes me feel alive, you know. It makes me feel human. The only way I could feel this sad now is if I felt something really good before. So I have to take the bad with the good. So I guess what I'm feeling is like a beautiful sadness. – Trey Parker and Matt Stone
• Every passion has its destiny. – Billy Mills
• The ultimate is not to win, but to reach within the depths of your capabilities and to compete against yourself to the greatest extent possible. When you do that, you have dignity. You have the pride. You can walk about with character and pride no matter in what place you happen to finish. – Billy Mills
• It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.
• It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dreams, for the adventure of being alive.
• It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon...I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain.
• I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it.
• I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with wildness, and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful; be realistic; to remember the limitations of being human.
• It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul. If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy. I want to know if you can see Beauty even when it is not pretty every day. And if you can source your own life from its presence.
• I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, "Yes."
• It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after a night of grief and despair weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children.
• It doesn't interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.
• It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away. I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments. - Oriah Mountain Dreamer
• Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile. – Albert Einstein
• A runners creed: I will win; if I cannot win, I shall be second; if I cannot be second, I shall be third; if I cannot place at all, I shall still do my best. – Ken Doherty
• Somewhere in the world, someone is training when you are not. When you race him, he will win. - A sign that marathoner Tom Fleming kept on his wall
• The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do. - Walter Bahegot
• Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks. Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle, but you shall be the miracle. – Phillips Brooks
• Always do what you are afraid to do. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Never let the fear of failure be an excuse for not trying. Society tells us that to fail is the most terrible thing in the world, but I know it isn't. Failure is part of what makes us human. – Amber Deckers
• A lizard in the spring – hear his darling sing. A bird with wings to fly – go back to his darling weep and moan till he dies. A mole in the ground – root a mountain down.* - Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain
• Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it. - Mahatma Gandhi
• The path to our destination is not always a straight one. We go down the wrong road, we get lost, we turn back. Maybe it doesn't matter which road we embark on. Maybe what matters is that we embark. – Barbara Hall
• We cannot really love anybody with whom we never laugh. – Agnes Repplier
• The best cure for worry, depression, melancholy, brooding, is to go deliberately forth and try to lift with one's sympathy the gloom of somebody else. – Arnold Bennett
• True humor is fun - it does not put down, kid, or mock. It makes people feel wonderful, not separate, different, and cut off. True humor has beneath it the understanding that we are all in this together. – Hugh Pranther
• You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering. - Henri-Frédéric Amiel
• What a beautiful, sunny morning. It makes you happy to be alive, doesn't it? We can't let the sun outshine us! We have to beam, too! - Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata
• She will forgo the most violent of sunsets, stars as fat as dinner plates and all the blood of autumn and settle for the palest yellow if it comes from her Beloved. - Toni Morrison, Beloved
• Treasure the love you have received above all. It will survive long after your gold and good health have vanished. - Og Mandino
• What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined... to strengthen each other... to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories. - George Eliot
• The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good. - Samuel Johnson
• Almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. - Steve Jobs
• "I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dryrot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time." - Jack London
• How many slams in an old screen door? Depends how loud you shut it. How many slices in a bread? Depends how thin you cut it. How much good inside a day? Depends how good you live 'em. How much love inside a friend? Depends how much you give 'em. - Shel Silverstein
• Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... Anything can happen, child. Anything can be. - Shel Silverstein
• Happy Ending? There are no happy endings. Endings are the saddest part, so just give me a happy middle, and a very happy start. - Shel Silverstein, Every Thing on It
• “If ever there is a tomorrow when we’re not together there is something you must always remember: You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smart than you think. But the most important thing is, even if we’re apart, I’ll always be with you.” - Winnie the Pooh
• “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” ― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
• “We don't inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.” - David Brower
• “I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.” - Frank Lloyd Wright

“The wild places are where we began. When they end, so do we.” ― David Brower