"'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all."
— Alfred Lord Tennyson (In Memoriam)

"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Act 5, scene 5, 19–28 "
— William Shakespeare (Macbeth)

"Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you."
— Publius Ovidius Naso

"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 dreams,
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,
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,
or to remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn't interest me if the story you're 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.
I want to know if you can be faithful and therefore be trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see beauty even when its not pretty every day,
and if you can source your life from God's presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine,
and still stand on the edge of a 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 for the children.
It doesn't interest me who you are,
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.

"
— Orion Mountain Dreamer, Indian Elder

"Without music, life would be a mistake."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"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

"I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world."
— Albert Camus (L'etranger)

"Happy is the man who has broken the chains which hurt the mind, and has given up worrying once and for all."
— Publius Ovidius Naso

"We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.
"
— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

"there is [...]
a last even of last times of saying
if you do not love me I shall not be loved
if I do not love you I shall not love"
— Samuel Beckett (Cascando and Other Short Dramatic Pieces)

"We love the things we love for what they are."
— Robert Frost

"He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same."
— Emily Brontë

"Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of being."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"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

"Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness."
— Kahlil Gibrán

"When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight."
— Kahlil Gibrán

"
How shall my heart be unsealed
unless it be broken?"
— Kahlil Gibrán

"A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world."
— Oscar Wilde

"I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"A person hears only what they understand."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Everybody wants to be somebody,but nobody wants to grow... "
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art."
— Maya Angelou

"We are like roses that have never bothered to
bloom when we should have bloomed and
it is as if
the sun has become disgusted with
waiting"
— Charles Bukowski

"purple does something strange to me"
— Charles Bukowski (The People Look Like Flowers At Last: New Poems)

"Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen."
— Leonardo da Vinci

"To hold, you must first open your hand. Let go"
— Tao Te Ching

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

"I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"We all need someone to look at us. we can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under. the first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public. the second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. they are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. they are happier than the people in the first category, who, when they lose their public, have the feeling that the lights have gone out in the room of their lives. this happens to nearly all of them sooner or later. people in the second category, on the other hand, can always come up with the eyes they need. then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. their situation is as dangerous as the situation of people in the first category. one day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the room will go dark. and finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. they are the dreamers."
— Milan Kundera

"When the heart speaks, the mind finds it disrespectful to argue."
— Milan Kundera

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

"I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better."
— Maya Angelou

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

"You are . . . well, not exactly the love of my life, because I expect to love you for much longer than that. The love of my existence."
-Edward"
— Stephenie Meyer (Eclipse)

""You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed"

"
— ~ Antoine de Saint Exupery

""The stars are beautiful because of a flower you don't see..."
...
"What makes the desert beautiful," the little prince said, "is that it hides a well somewhere..."
"
— from "Little Prince" of Antoine De Saint-Exupery

"You are, and always have been, my dream."
— Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook)

"He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)

"Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Collected Stories)

"The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain… Music expresses only the quintessence of life and its events, never these themselves."
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain.
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain."
— Emily Dickinson

"This is your life and its ending one moment at a time."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

"You have to give up! you have to give up!
You have to realize that someday you will die,
Until you know that, you are useless!"
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"i'm not sure what we're running from. nobody. or the future. fate. growing up. getting old. picking up the pieces. as if running we won't have to get on with our lives."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"Dreams are necessary to life."
— Anaïs Nin

"Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they're also what tear you apart."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"You know what I think?" she says. "That people's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn't matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They're all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed 'em to the fire, they're all just paper. The fire isn't thinking 'Oh, this is Kant,' or 'Oh, this is the Yomiuri evening edition,' or 'Nice tits,' while it burns. To the fire, they're nothing but scraps of paper. It's the exact same thing. Important memories, not-so-important memories, totally useless memories: there's no distinction--they're all just fuel."
— Haruki Murakami (After Dark)