"The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off."
— Gloria Steinem

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."
— Maya Angelou

"If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain."
— Maya Angelou

"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways: the point, however, is to change it."
— Karl Marx

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
— Margaret Mead

"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

"There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost. "
— Martha Graham

"The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play)."
— Michel Foucault

"I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"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

"To be nobody but
yourself in a world
which is doing its best day and night to make you like
everybody else means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight and never stop fighting."
— e.e. cummings

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"That which does not kill us makes us stronger."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"[...] 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)

"Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring."
— Marilyn Monroe (Marilyn: Her Life in Her Own Words)

"When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained."
— Mark Twain

"Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes... the ones who see things differently -- they're not fond of rules... You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but 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 ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do."
— Jack Kerouac

"Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness."
— Allen Ginsberg

"The whole series of my life appeared to me as a dream; I sometimes doubted if indeed it were all true, for it never presented itself to my mind with the force of reality."
— Mary Shelley (Frankenstein)

"Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful."
— Mary Shelley (Frankenstein)

"Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye."
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

"The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me."
— Ayn Rand

"The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see."
— Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)

"If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"Why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want."
— Ayn Rand

"The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone."
— Ayn Rand (The Virtue of Selfishness)

"I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals and I loathe humanity for its failure to live up to these possibilities."
— Ayn Rand

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

"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
— Anaïs Nin

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."
— Anaïs Nin

"We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations."
— Anaïs Nin

"you don't find love, it finds you. it's got a little bit to do with destiny, fate, and what's written in the stars."
— Anaïs Nin

"'Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.'

'Does it hurt?' asked the Rabbit.

'Sometimes,' said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. 'When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.'

'Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,' he asked, 'or bit by bit?'

'It doesn't happen all at once,' said the Skin Horse. 'You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.'"
— Margery Williams Bianco (The Velveteen Rabbit)

"We are travelers on a cosmic journey,stardust,swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share.This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity."
— Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist)

"One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often."
— Erich Fromm

""The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers""
— Erich Fromm

"Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
"
— Erich Fromm

"Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final"
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other. "
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"Think... of the world you carry within you."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"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 faithless and 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 (L'Invitation)

"You will lose someone you can’t live without,and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp."
— Anne Lamott

"listen: there’s a hell
of a good universe next door; let’s go"
— e.e. cummings