"A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

Politics and the English Language, 1946"
— George Orwell

"The morning opens, a mist of innocence appears across the countryside that tells each one of us the day is new. That feeling of hope, love and the humble awareness of our duty becomes clear if even for a moment. It is that experience of inspiration that follows us into a small town woken by a cool frost on this Sunday morning and the laughter of children playing.
"
— Kris Courtney

"I'll put on my happy face, pretend everything will be okay, you substitute me for your next best thing, I'll always be your next best thing."
— A Beautiful Silence

""You can't force love, I realized. It's there or it isn't. If it's not there, you've got to be able to admit it. If it is there, you've got to do whatever it takes to protect the ones you love." "
— Richelle Mead

"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 dream, 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, to 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 faithlessand therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see beauty even when it's 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 the 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

"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

"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)

"What it means to be human is to bring up your children in safety, educate them, keep them healthy, teach them how to care for themselves and others, allow them to develop in their own way among adults who are sane and responsibile, who know the value of the world and not its economic potential. It means art, it means time, it means all the invisibles never counted by the GDP and the census figures. It means knowing that life has an inside as well as an outside. And I think it means love."
— Jeanette Winterson (The Stone Gods)

"In dreams and in love, there are no imposibilities"
— János Arany

""One sacred memory fro childhood is perhaps the best education.""
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"By seeking and blundering we learn."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Doubt not without hoping, hope not without doubting (free after Seneca)"
— Marcus Annaeus Seneca

"All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others."
— George Orwell (Animal Farm)

"And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better."
— George Eliot (Middlemarch)

"Una passione non si può esprimere pacatamente, disciplinatamente, morigeratamente, e nessuno può definirne la forma al posto di un altro."
— Magda Szabó (The Door)

"I like men who have a future and women who have a past."
— Oscar Wilde

"Now is the time to become a myth."
— Diane Von Furstenberg

"Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age."
— Gloria Steinem

"A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
— Thomas Mann

"There is a folk-tale about a shoemaker and his wife who were so poor that they had to send their many children out into the world to make a living. The lads went through many a perilous adventure but came home in the end, unscathed, to help their mother. They had always remembered their mother's advice and wise words; they often quoted them when they were in trouble, and in fact they recognized one another by them in foreign lands.
The countless peoples of the world may be looked upon as so many children sent out into the world. They have gone through many adventures and hardships. They have drifted apart and fallen out with one another, on many occasions. They have failed to realize soon enough that they are brothers.
But now it seems that they are beginning to realize this -- at least to the extent that they are able to get acquainted with each other's fundamental natures -- through their stories and songs."
— Gyula Illyés (Once Upon a Time: Forty Hungarian Folk-Tales)

"These tales, without exception, express the truth that justice triumphs in the end. They all contain the idea that it is worth while to fight for the truth, in any situation.
In this fight man is assisted by more powerful beings than ordinary mortals. And the triumph of justice is the only sense and consolation in this world. Indeed, the world itself started out with this hope. The human race received it long, long ago as a cradle-song."
— Gyula Illyés (Once Upon a Time: Forty Hungarian Folk-Tales)

"Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not seek or conjecture either of them as if they were veiled obscurities or extravagances beyond the horizon of my vision; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence."
"
— Immanuel Kant

"For a writer, life is always too short to write. I will just try my best during what remains of my life."
— Cao Yu

"Happiness is excitement that has found a settling down place, but there is always a little corner that keeps flapping around."
— E.L. Konigsburg (From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler)

"Happiness is a place between too little and too much."
— Finnish Proverb

"try and expect nothing,
but be OPEN for anything.
Don't look far for happiness,
but never settle for anything less.
"
— C. S

"It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"No medicine cures what happiness cannot."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness."
— Bertrand Russell

"You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life."
— Albert Camus

"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"Success is getting what you want, happiness is wanting what you get"
— W.P. Kinsella

"Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy."
— Guillaume Apollinaire

"With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy."
— Max Ehrmann (Desiderata: A Poem for a Way of Life)

"Happiness depends upon ourselves."
— Aristotle

"Happiness consists in frequent repetition of pleasure"
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"Really high-minded people are indifferent to happiness, especially other people's."
— Bertrand Russell (The Impact of Science on Society)

"People are often unreasonable and self-centered. Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives. Be kind anyway.

If you are honest, people may cheat you. Be honest anyway.

If you find happiness, people may be jealous. Be happy anyway.

The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough. Give your best anyway.

For you see, in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway."
— Mother Teresa

"Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened."
— Dr. Seuss

"7 DEADLY SINS

Wealth without work

Pleasure without conscience

Science without humanity

Knowledge without character

Politics without principle

Commerce without morality

Worship without sacrifice."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted."
— John Lennon

"The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground: with White Nights, The Dreams of a Ridiculous Man, and selections from The House of the Dead)

"I've got nothing to do today but smile."
— Simon and Garfunkel

"...the only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"Rules for Happiness:
something to do,
someone to love,
something to hope for."
— Immanuel Kant

""There are random moments - tossing a salad, coming up the driveway to the house, ironing the seams flat on a quilt square, standing at the kitchen window and looking out at the delphiniums, hearing a burst of laughter from one of my children's rooms - when I feel a wavelike rush of joy. This is my true religion: arbitrary moments of of nearly painful happiness for a life I feel privileged to lead.

-The Art of Mending"


"
— Elizabeth Berg

"Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort."
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever."
— John Keats

"You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestation of your own blessings."
— Elizabeth Gilbert