Alma's quotes

(showing 1-50 of 96)

"And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is."
— Paul Auster

tags: books, writing
18 people liked it

"You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky."
— Paul Auster

7 people liked it

"Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within...By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. (City of Glass)
"
— Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy: City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room)

tags: feel, how, i, scotland
11 people liked it

"All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are."
— Paul Auster (The Brooklyn Follies: A Novel)

12 people liked it

"(...) when a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists."
— Paul Auster (The Brooklyn Follies: A Novel)

21 people liked it

"Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you've never been hurt and live like it's heaven on Earth."
— Mark Twain

tags: dance, heaven, hurt, inspirational, life, love, sing
15,900 people liked it

"I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best."
— Marilyn Monroe

tags: best, life, love, mistakes, out-of-control, truth, worst
10,565 people liked it

"Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up."
— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones)

tags: love
2,630 people liked it

"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 (Where the Sidewalk Ends)

tags: how, many, much
445 people liked it

"Where there is love there is life."
— Mahatma Gandhi

tags: life, love
1,099 people liked it

"Not only will we have to repent for the sins of bad people; but we also will have to repent for the appalling silence of good people."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

111 people liked it

"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

tags: ignorance
358 people liked it

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind."
— Dr. Seuss

tags: be-yourself, confidence, individuality, those-who-matter
18,014 people liked it

"Be the change that you wish to see in the world."
— Mahatma Gandhi

tags: action, change, inspirational, philosophy, wish
11,415 people liked it

"Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

tags: confidence, inspirational, wisdom
10,316 people liked it

"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away."
— Maya Angelou

tags: life
11,114 people liked it

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

tags: wisdom
9,183 people liked it

"Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
— Albert Einstein

tags: humor, insanity, life
9,443 people liked it

"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."
— Miss Piggy

tags: humor
5,651 people liked it

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square hole. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."
— Apple Computer Inc.

tags: advertising, apple, change, commercial, computers, different, misfits, nonconformity, quo, rebels, status, think
6,913 people liked it

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
— Mark Twain

tags: education
3,083 people liked it

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."
— Robert Frost

tags: life
7,032 people liked it

"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)

tags: fear, inspirational
2,896 people liked it

"It is never too late to be what you might have been."
— George Eliot

tags: inspirational
3,132 people liked it

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
— Anaïs Nin

tags: life, philosophy
3,611 people liked it

"I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity."
— Paul Auster (Moon Palace)

tags: friendship, love
40 people liked it

"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams."
— Arthur O'Shaughnessy (Poems of Arthur O'Shaughnessy)

tags: dreams, music
794 people liked it

"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

tags: angelou, maya
4,940 people liked it

"[...] the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!' What did they call such young people in Goethe's Germany?"
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

tags: freethinker, inspirational, mad
1,106 people liked it

"A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: cynicism
572 people liked it

"An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind."
— Mahatma Gandhi (GANDHI: An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth)

tags: conflict, fighting, peace, revenge, trial, violence
1,789 people liked it

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

479 people liked it

"You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

tags: confidence
1,246 people liked it

"Life's hard. It's even harder when you're stupid."
— John Wayne

755 people liked it

"Get busy living or get busy dying."
— Stephen King (Shawshank Redemption)

tags: life
849 people liked it

"I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.
Delicious Ambiguity."
— Gilda Radner

tags: ambiguity, life, stories, uncertainty, unpredictability
1,019 people liked it

"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everyone."
— Bill Cosby

tags: failure, inspirational, success
2,302 people liked it

"The first time someone shows you who they are, believe them."
— Maya Angelou

tags: people
850 people liked it

"The unexamined life is not worth living."
— Socrates

tags: inspiration, truth, wisdom
520 people liked it

"The trouble with being in the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat."
— Lily Tomlin

tags: humor, life, race, rat
476 people liked it

"Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all."
— Emily Dickinson

tags: feathers, hope, inspirational, souls
704 people liked it

"This too shall pass..."
— Abraham Lincoln

339 people liked it

"I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way."
— Pablo Neruda (100 Love Sonnets/Cien Sonetos De Amor)

tags: love, poetry
2,470 people liked it

"Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

tags: life
613 people liked it

"Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly."
— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman Vol. 6: Fables and Reflections)

tags: inspiration
487 people liked it

"Whatever you are, be a good one."
— Abraham Lincoln

1,052 people liked it

"The road to hell is paved with adverbs."
— Stephen King

tags: -on, from, writing-
306 people liked it

"We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down."
— Kurt Vonnegut

tags: creativity, invention, quip, wings, writing
388 people liked it

"People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.

A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave.

A soul mates purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master..."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

tags: love
1,753 people liked it