Historical/Real (based on their words & interviews):

Lao Tzu

• Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.
• Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.
• ...The mark of a moderate man is freedom from his own ideas.

Jeff Buckley

• Words are beautiful but restricted. They're very masculine, with a compact frame. But voice is over the dark, the place where there's nothing to hang on: it comes from a part of yourself that simply knows, expresses itself, and is.
• I know how that feels-to feel pressed down all the time; a lot of times I don’t feel like I belong here…I’m sick of the world. And sometimes when I talk, I just don’t make any sense.
• Asleep in the sand with the ocean washing over.
• Love brings us to who we need; a place where we can save a heart that beats as both siphon and reservoir.

Keanu Reeves

• Grief changes shape, but it never ends.
• It`s always wonderful to get to know women, with the mystery and the joy and the depth. If you can make a woman laugh, you`re seeing the most beautiful thing on God`s Earth.
• I'm Mickey Mouse. They don't know who's inside the suit.

Franz Kafka

• What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.
• We are as forlorn as children lost in the woods. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours. And if I were to cast myself down before you and weep and tell you, what more would you know about me than you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful? For that reason alone we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to Hell.
• Humility provides everyone, even him who despairs in solitude, with the strongest relationship to his fellow man, and this immediately, though, of course, only in the case of complete and permanent humility. It can do this because it is the true language of prayer, at once adoration and the firmest of unions. The relationship to one’s fellow man is the relationship of prayer, the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving; it is from prayer that one draws the strength for one’s striving.

Rainer Maria Rilke

• For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
• Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
• Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Vincent Van Gogh

• The more I think it over, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.
• Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.
• When I have a terrible need of — shall I say the word — religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.

Henry David Thoreau

• If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours ... In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.
• I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived...
• Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.

Ray LaMontagne

• There's nothin' in the world so sad as talking to a man who never knew his life was his for making.

St. Francis of Assissi

• Where there is charity and wisdom, there is neither fear nor ignorance. Where there is patience and humility, there is neither anger nor vexation. Where there is poverty and joy, there is neither greed nor avarice. Where there is peace and meditation, there is neither anxiety nor doubt.
  • Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
  • Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
  • where there is injury, pardon;
  • where there is doubt, faith;
  • where there is despair, hope;
  • where there is darkness, light;
  • and where there is sadness, joy.
  • O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
  • to be understood as to understand;
  • to be loved as to love.
  • For it is in giving that we receive;
  • it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
  • and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
• No one is to be called an enemy, all are your benefactors, and no one does you harm. You have no enemy except yourselves.

Nick Drake

• Life is but a memory, Happened long ago... Theater full of sadness For a long forgotten show.
• And I am ashamed to write here that I felt more alive than ever, even though my heart was broken glass in my chest.
• And I was strong, strong in the sun; I thought I'd see when day is done. Now I'm weaker than the palest blue... Oh, so weak in the need for you.

Khalil Gibran

• But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
• Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.
• Faith is an oasis in the heart which will never be reached by the caravan of thinking.

Christopher McCandless

• Some people feel like they don't deserve love. They walk away quietly into empty spaces, trying to close the gaps of the past.
• So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more dangerous to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.
• If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.

Jalaluddin Rumi

• We come spinning out of nothingness, scattering stars like dust.
• Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about language, ideas; even the phrase 'each other' doesn't make sense.
• Silence is an ocean. Speech is a river.

Jorge Luis Borges

• To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
• I have always imagined that Paradise will be a sort of library.
• Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

Hafiz Shirazi

• I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being.
• Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth,"You owe me." Look what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole sky.
• Now is the time to understand that all your ideas of right and wrong were just a child's training wheels to be laid aside when you could finally live with veracity and love.

Leonardo Da Vinci

• Though human ingenuity may make various inventions which, by the help of various machines answering the same end, it will never devise any inventions more beautiful, nor more simple, nor more to the purpose than Nature does; because in her inventions nothing is wanting, and nothing is superfluous, and she needs no counterpoise when she makes limbs proper for motion in the bodies of animals. But she puts into them the soul of the body, which forms them that is the soul of the mother which first constructs in the womb the form of the man and in due time awakens the soul that is to inhabit it.
• When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return.
• Where there is most feeling, there is the greatest martyrdom.

John Muir

• We all flow from one fountain— Soul. All are expressions of one love. God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and places, but He flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over creeds and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating all and fountainizing all.
• Earth has no sorrow that earth can not heal.
• When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.

Edgar Allen Poe

• They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
• Never to suffer would be to never have been blessed.
• There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.

Carl Jung

• The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
• I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.
• Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

• The darker the night, the brighter the stars; the deeper the grief, the closer is God!
• If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, don't bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, of seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you will get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he's a good man.
• I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.

Henri Nouwen

• Let us not underestimate how hard it is to be compassionate. Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely, and broken. But this is not our spontaneous response to suffering. What we desire most is to do away with suffering by fleeing from it or finding a quick cure for it.
• To pray, I think, does not mean to think about God in contrast to thinking about other things, or to spend time with God instead of spending time with other people. Rather, it means to think and live in the presence of God. As soon as we begin to divide our thoughts about God and thoughts about people and events, we remove God from our daily life and put him into a pious little niche where we can think pious thoughts and experience pious feelings. … Although it is important and even indispensable for the spiritual life to set apart time for God and God alone, prayer can only become unceasing prayer when all our thoughts — beautiful or ugly, high or low, proud or shameful, sorrowful or joyful — can be thought in the presence of God. … Thus, converting our unceasing thinking into unceasing prayer moves us from a self-centered monologue to a God-centered dialogue.
• When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate now knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.

Soren Kierkegaard

• The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.
• The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.
• What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music. …Of course, a critic resembles a poet to a hair, except he has no anguish in his heart, no music on his lips. So I tell you, I would rather be a swineherd at Amagebro and be understood by the swine, than a poet and misunderstood by people.

Joseph Merrick

• I sometimes think my head is so large because it is so full of dreams.

Fred Rogers

• You know, I think everybody longs to be loved, and longs to know that he or she is lovable. And, consequently, the greatest thing that we can do is to help somebody know that they're loved and capable of loving.
• Our world hangs like a magnificent jewel in the vastness of space. Every one of us is a part of that jewel. A facet of that jewel. And in the perspective of infinity, our differences are infinitesimal.
• If only you could sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to people you may never even dream of. There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person.

Sufjan Stevens

• All the time we spent in bed, counting miles before we said, fall in love and fall apart, things will end before they start.
• Art is... a reflection of a greater divine creation. There really is no separation.
• We live in community, and we're created in community. We're created out of the unity of two people, and then we're made into a family. It's just inherent in who we are.

Jim Henson

• As children, we all live in a world of imagination, of fantasy, and for some of us that world of make-believe continues into adulthood.
• Kids don't remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.
• Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.

Abraham Lincoln

• It is the eternal struggle between these two principles — right and wrong — throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity, and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, "You toil and work and earn bread, and I'll eat it." No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.
• I have always thought that all men should be free; but if any should be slaves, it should be first those who desire it for themselves, and secondly, those who desire it for others. When I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
• Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.

Heath Ledger

• If you just be safe about the choices you make, you don't grow.
• I wasn't prepared to expose stories about something so special and wonderfully private that is happening in my life. I guess a part of me wishes that I'd never have to and that maybe I could protect this special time. I was dreaming.
• Matilda is adorable, and beautifully observant and wise. Michelle and I love her so much. Becoming a father exceeds all my expectations. It`s the most remarkable experience I`ve ever had - it`s marvelous.

Kurt Cobain

• Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.
• Thank you for the tragedy. I need it for my art.
• If you die you’re completely happy and your soul somewhere lives on. I’m not afraid of dying. Total peace after death, becoming someone else is the best hope I’ve got.

Nick Vujicic

• We can't, and we should not, compare sufferings. We come together as a family of God, hand in hand. And then together coming and standing upon the promises of God, knowing that no matter who you are, no matter what you're going through, that God knows it, He is with you, He is going to pull you through.
• I believe in a God who can do all things, but if He chooses not to give me arms and legs, I know it's for the better. And I may not understand it, but all I need to know is that He's going to carry me through, that there is a purpose for it.
• I used to think that I needed my circumstance to change before I had any hope. I wanted to know that there was someone else out there in my position, to know that there is hope, that there is more than just the little box that I see in my life.

Bob Dylan

• I had ambitions to set out and find, like an odyssey or going home somewhere… set out to find… this home that I’d left a while back and couldn’t remember exactly where it was, but I was on my way there. And encountering what I encountered on the way was how I envisioned it all. I didn’t really have any ambition at all. I was born very far from where I’m supposed to be, and so, I’m on my way home, you know?
• Behind every beautiful thing there is some kind of pain.
• It's peculiar and unnerving in a way to see so many young people walking around with cellphones and iPods in their ears and so wrapped up in media and video games. It robs them of their self-identity. It's a shame to see them so tuned out to real life. Of course they are free to do that, as if that's got anything to do with freedom. The cost of liberty is high, and young people should understand that before they start spending their life with all those gadgets.

Stephen Colbert

• I would say laughter is the best medicine. But it’s more than that. It’s an entire regime of antibiotics and steroids. Laughter brings the swelling down on our national psyche, and then applies an antibiotic cream... Obviously, it’s a challenge to make light of the darkness but, um, it’s better than crying about it.
• Don’t be afraid to be a fool. Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying yes begins things. Saying yes is how things grow. Saying yes leads to knowledge. "Yes" is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say yes.
• Not living in fear is a great gift, because certainly these days we do it so much. And do you know what I like about comedy? You can’t laugh and be afraid at the same time—of anything. If you're laughing, I defy you to be afraid.

Christopher James Nolan

• Yes, to me that's one of the most compelling fears in film noir and the psychological thriller genre - that fear of conspiracy. It's definitely something that I have a fear of - not being in control of your own life. I think that's something people can relate to, and those genres are most successful when they derive the material from genuine fears that people have.
• We all wake up in the morning wanting to live our lives the way we know we should. But we usually don`t, in small ways. That`s what makes a character like Batman so fascinating. He plays out our conflicts on a much larger scale.
• Superheroes fill a gap in the pop culture psyche, similar to the role of Greek mythology. There isn`t really anything else that does the job in modern terms. For me, Batman is the one that can most clearly be taken seriously. He`s not from another planet, or filled with radioactive gunk. I mean, Superman is essentially a god, but Batman is more like Hercules: he`s a human being, very flawed, and bridges the divide.

Chris Carter

• The truth is out there.

Johnny Depp

• There are four questions of value in life... What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living "for, and what is worth dying for? The answer to each is same. Only love.
• The only creatures that are evolved enough to convey pure love are dogs and infants.
• I don't think anybody's necessarily ready for death. You can only hope that when it approaches, you feel like you've said what you wanted to say. Nobody wants to go out in mid-sentence.

Fictional:

Edward Scissorhands

• I am not complete.

Remus Lupin

• "Mr. Moony presents his compliments to Professor Snape and begs him to keep his abnormally large nose out of other people's business."
• I was happier than I had ever been in my life. For the first time ever, I had friends, three great friends. Sirius Black... Peter Pettigrew... and, of course, your father, Harry - James Potter.
• I was trying to make a world in which he could live a happier life.

Edmond Dantes

• There is neither happiness nor unhappiness in this world; there is only the comparison of one state with another. Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss. It is necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live.....the sum of all human wisdom will be contained in these two words: Wait and Hope.
• Tell the angel who will watch over your future destiny, Morrel, to pray sometimes for a man who, like Satan, thought himself, for an instant, equal to God; but who now acknowledges, with Christian humility, that God alone possesses supreme power and infinite wisdom.
• And now, farewell to kindness, humanity and gratitude… I have substituted myself for Providence in rewarding the good; may the God of vengeance now yield me His place to punish the wicked.

Kermit the Frog

• Who said that every wish will be heard and answered when wished on the morning star? Somebody thought of it, and someone believed it and look what it's done so far.
• Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection, the lovers, the dreamers and me.
• Well, you know, it's interesting being 50, ... You start to reflect on your life. And you look back over the years at everything you've ever done. And, with age, middle age, comes wisdom. But I have to say that I'm not sure that 50 for me is the same as 50 in people years.

Fitzwilliam Darcy

• Your retrospections must be so totally void of reproach, that the contentment arising from them is not of philosophy, but, what is much better, of innocence.
• You must know... surely, you must know it was all for you. You are too generous to trifle with me. I believe you spoke with my aunt last night, and it has taught me to hope as I'd scarcely allowed myself before. If your feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once. My affections and wishes have not changed, but one word from you will silence me forever. If, however, your feelings have changed, I will have to tell you: you have bewitched me, body and soul, and I love, I love, I love you. I never wish to be parted from you from this day on.
• I cannot be so easily reconciled to myself. The recollection of what I then said, of my conduct, my manners, my expressions during the whole of it, is now, and has been many months, inexpressibly painful to me. Your reproof, so well applied, I shall never forget: 'had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner.' Those were your words. You know not, you can scarcely conceive, how they have tortured me;— though it was some time, I confess, before I was reasonable enough to allow their justice.

The Beast

• I'm just fooling myself. She'll never see me as anything... but a monster. It's hopeless.
• She glanced this way, I thought I saw. And when we touched, she didn't shudder at my paw. No, it can't be. I'll just ignore. But then she's never looked at me that way before.
• You... You came back.

Prince Henry

• I kneel before you not as a prince, but as a man in love... But I would feel like a king if you, Danielle de Barbarac, would be my wife.
• In all my years of study, not one tutor ever demonstrated the passion you have shown me in the last two days. You have more conviction in one memory than I have... in my entire being.
• Then let's say... God... puts two people on Earth and they are lucky enough to find one another. But one of them gets hit by lightning. Well then what? Is that it? Or, perchance, you meet someone new and marry all over again. Is that the lady you're supposed to be with, or was it the first? And if so, when the two of them were walking side by side were they both the one for you and you just happened to meet the first one first or, was the second one supposed to be first? And is everything just chance or are some things meant to be?

x sunrise