Lisa's quotes

(showing 1-50 of 56)

"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

tags: moon, writing
121 people liked it

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

tags: action, change, inspirational, philosophy, wish
11,695 people liked it

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

tags: life
7,251 people liked it

"If you care about something you have to protect it – If you’re lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it."
— John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany)

tags: life
419 people liked it

"Life is serious but art is fun!"
— John Irving

tags: cynicism, humour, life, real
12 people liked it

""One place understood helps us understand all places better"
"
— Eudora Welty

1 person liked it

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

tags: love
2,243 people liked it

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

tags: love, poetry
1,070 people liked it

""The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.""
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

3 people liked it

"Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

tags: love
34 people liked it

"Any idiot can face a crisis; it's this day-to-day living that wears you out."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

tags: crisis, life
85 people liked it

"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."
— Groucho Marx

tags: books, humor, reading, television
2,902 people liked it

"Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole."
— Eudora Welty (One Writer's Beginnings)

tags: children, eudora, welty, writing
6 people liked it

"Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page."
— Eudora Welty

3 people liked it

"Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird,
That cannot fly."
— Langston Hughes

tags: dreams, hop, insperration, knolage, wisdom
197 people liked it

"Nothing happens unless first we dream."
— Carl Sandburg

tags: dream
16 people liked it

"Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty. Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale. Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal. Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness. Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation. Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway."
— Herman Melville

3 people liked it

"Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it."
— Flannery O'Connor (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose)

tags: art, craft, fiction, reading, writing
92 people liked it

"I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them--with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself."
— Eudora Welty

8 people liked it

"The woman doesn't look up. It's as if she's deaf. Maybe she is. Maybe she's like the Cambodian women I've read about, the ones who witnessed so many atrocities that they have willed themselves blind. Maybe that's what you have to do sometimes to survive. You kill off part of yourself, your hearing or eyesight, your capacity for hope. "
— Ron Rash (Chemistry and Other Stories)

3 people liked it

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

tags: better, empathy, life
355 people liked it

"Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.(Miss Maudie)"
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

26 people liked it

"...some things don't matter much. Like the color of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person's heart--now, that matters. The whole problem with people is...they know what matters, but they don't choose it...The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters."
— Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees)

tags: heart, love
69 people liked it

"Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here."
— Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees)

39 people liked it

"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.-Atticus Finch"
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

tags: courage
411 people liked it

"All my life I've thought I needed someone to complete me, now I know I need to belong to myself."
— Sue Monk Kidd (The Mermaid Chair: A Novel)

38 people liked it

"At forty-two, I had never done anything that took my own breath away, and I suppose now that was part of the problem--my chronic inability to astonish myself. I promise you, no one judges me more harshly than I do myself; I caused a brilliant wreckage. Some say I fell from grace; they're being kind. I didn't fall. I dove."
— Sue Monk Kidd (The Mermaid Chair: A Novel)

17 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
16,281 people liked it

"You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams."
— Dr. Seuss

tags: dreams, love, reality, sleep
10,598 people liked it

"So many books, so little time."
— Frank Zappa

tags: books, humor
9,498 people liked it

"Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend."
— Albert Camus

tags: friends, friendship
9,606 people liked it

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
— Mark Twain

tags: action, actions, disappointed, disappointment, discover, dream, dreams, explore, sail
7,891 people liked it

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

tags: activism, apathy, hate, indifference, love, opposite, philosophy
7,253 people liked it

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

tags: wisdom
6,474 people liked it

"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."
— Mark Twain

tags: literacy
6,188 people liked it

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

tags: inspirational, music, philosophy
5,751 people liked it

"You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts."
— Kahlil Gibrán

tags: philosophy, poetry
350 people liked it

"One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk."
— Charles Baudelaire

tags: drunk, poetry, virtue, wine
59 people liked it

"Always be a poet, even in prose."
— Charles Baudelaire

tags: poetry, prose, writing
167 people liked it

""To be fully alive is to feel that everything is possible. "
— Eric Hoffer

2 people liked it

"We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be."
— May Sarton

tags: authenticity, life, philosophy, self
883 people liked it

"Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!"
— John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany)

74 people liked it

"The thing that is most hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most wind up in parentheses."
— John Irving

tags: cider, house, irving, living, rules, sad, wtf
71 people liked it

"Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life."
— Pablo Picasso

tags: art
351 people liked it

"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up."
— Pablo Picasso

tags: art
828 people liked it

"Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not. "
— Pablo Picasso (Pablo Picasso: Metamorphoses of the Human Form : Graphic Works, 1895-1972)

tags: creativity, inspirational
231 people liked it

"The chief enemy of creativity is good sense."
— Pablo Picasso

tags: art, creativity
75 people liked it

"If I paint a wild horse, you might not see the horse... but surely you will see the wildness!
"
— Pablo Picasso

tags: vision
24 people liked it

"It is good to love many things, for therein lies strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done with love is well done."
— Vincent Van Gogh

tags: art, inspiration, love, strength
147 people liked it