"Passion makes a person stop eating, sleeping, working, feeling at peace. A lot of people are frightened because, when it appears, it demolishes all the old things it finds in its path.

No one wants their life thrown into chaos. That is why a lot of people keep that threat under control, and are somehow capable of sustaining a house or a structure that is already rotten. They are the engineers of the superseded.

Other people think exactly the opposite: they surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find in passion the solutions to all their problems. They make the other person responsible for their happiness and blame them for their possible unhappiness. They are either euphoric because something marvelous has happened or depressed because something unexpected has just ruined everything.

Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it - which of these two attitudes is the least destructive?

I don't know."
— Paulo Coelho (Eleven Minutes: A Novel)

""I know you love me. The question is, how much?"
"
— Jodi Picoult

"I'm lonely. Why do you think I had to learn to act so independent? I also get mad too quickly, and I hog the covers, and my second toe is longer than my big one. My hair has it's own zip code. Plus, I get certifiably crazy when I've got PMS. You don't love someone because they're perfect. You love them in spite of the fact that they're not."
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"How could he convey to someone who'd never even met her the way she always smelled like rain, or how his stomach knotted up every time he saw her shake loose her hair from its braid? How could he describe how it felt when she finished his sentences, turnec the mug they were sharing so that her mouth landed where his had been? How did he explain the way they could be in a locker room, or underwater, or in the piney woods of Maine, bus as long as Em was with him, he was at home?"
— Jodi Picoult (The Pact: A Love Story)

""Loving is easy. It's finding someone to love you back that is hard.""
— Sabrina Jeffries

"Being right is based upon knowledge and experience and is often provable. Knowledge comes from the past, so it's safe. It is also out of date. It's the opposite of originality. Experience is built from solutions to old situations and problems. The old situations are probably different from the present ones, so that old solutions will have to be bent to fit new problems (and possibly fit badly). Also the likelihood is that, if you've got the experience, you'll probably use it. This is lazy. Experience is the opposite of being creative. If you can prove you're right you're set in concrete. You cannot move with the times or with other people. Being right is also being boring. Your mind is closed. You are not open to new ideas. You are rooted in your own rightness, which is arrogant. Arrogance is a valuable tool, but only if used very sparingly. Worst of all, being right has a tone of morality about it. To be anything else sounds weak or fallible, and people who are right would hate to be thought fallible. So: it's wrong to be right, because people who are right are rooted in the past, rigid-minded, dull and smug. There's no talking to them."
— Paul Arden (It's Not How Good You Are, Its How Good You Want to Be: The World's Best Selling Book)

""Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them - if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry."
~Mr. Antolini"
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood."
— George Orwell (1984)

"Everybody can be great...because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

"I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world."
— Mary Anne Radmacher

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."
— Anne Frank

"If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary."
— David Sedaris (Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays)

"It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."
— John Lennon

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

"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

"Liberty of thought is the life of the soul.""
— Voltaire

"Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded."
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"The time for action is now. It's never too late to do something."
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it."
— André Gide

"Work and struggle and never accept an evil that you can change."
— André Gide

"A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free.

"
— nikos kazantakis

"Everything in the world has a hidden meaning. . . . Men, animals, trees, stars, they are all hieroglyphics. When you see them you do not understand them. You think they are really men, animals, trees, stars. It is only years later that you understand."
— Nikos Kazantakis

"The highest point a man can obtain is not Knowledge, or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory, but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred Awe!

"
— nikos kazantakis

"There are many ways of breaking a heart. Stories were full of hearts broken by love, but what really broke a heart was taking away its dream -- whatever that dream might be."
— Pearl Buck

"When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen."
— Ernest Hemingway

"Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"Never bend your head. Hold it high. Look the world straight in the eye."
— Helen Keller

"I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy"
— J.D. Salinger

"With affection beaming out of one eye, and calculation shining out of the other. "
— Charles Dickens

"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."
— Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)

"Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it."
— Salvador Dali

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change"
— Charles Darwin

"The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

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

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

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

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference."
— Elie Wiesel

"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.

"A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool."
— William Shakespeare (As You Like It)

"If you don't stand for something you will fall for anything."
— Malcolm X

"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by frost."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends. To appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."
— Bessie Anderson Stanley

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

"I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal."
— Jane Austen

"Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere."
— Albert Einstein

"If you judge people, you have no time to love them."
— Mother Teresa

"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage."
— Laozi