Beth's quotes

(showing 1-50 of 62)

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

tags: action, change, inspirational, philosophy, wish
11,523 people liked it

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: intelligence, self-deprecation
7,565 people liked it

"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: life
4,296 people liked it

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

tags: books, classic, humor
5,547 people liked it

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
— Douglas Adams

tags: deadlines, humor, work
5,336 people liked it

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

tags: books, soul
11,147 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
7,738 people liked it

"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You too? I thought I was the only one."
— C.S. Lewis

tags: friendship
7,420 people liked it

"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."
— Albert Einstein

tags: imagination, inspirational
5,688 people liked it

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

tags: accomplishment, be-yourself, conformity, individuality, world
6,870 people liked it

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

tags: inspirational, music, philosophy
5,636 people liked it

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be."
— Douglas Adams

tags: life
3,721 people liked it

"We read to know that we are not alone."
— C.S. Lewis

tags: reading
3,030 people liked it

"It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: books, reading
2,672 people liked it

"'So, Pan,' said Hook at last, 'this is all your doing.'
'Ay, James Hook,' came the stern answer, 'it is all my doing.'
'Proud and insolent youth,' said Hook, 'prepare to meet thy doom.'
'Dark and sinister man,' Peter answered, 'have at thee.'"
— J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan)

41 people liked it

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn to the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
— Frank Herbert (Dune)

tags: motivational, scifi
378 people liked it

"The gift of words is the gift of deception and illusion."
— Frank Herbert (Children of Dune)

17 people liked it

"Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: art, life, paradox
168 people liked it

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

tags: life
7,131 people liked it

"War is what happens when language fails."
— Margaret Atwood

tags: war
334 people liked it

"Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die."
— Herbert Hoover

tags: age, death, fighting, old, war, youth
199 people liked it

"It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather, we should thank God that such men lived."
— George S. Patton Jr.

tags: philosophy, war
55 people liked it

"A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. "
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

tags: war
34 people liked it

""We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war."
- All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 5"
— Erich Maria Remarque

tags: war
8 people liked it

"But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony--Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?
- All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 9
"
— Erich Maria Remarque

tags: war
8 people liked it

"If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that."
— Stephen King

tags: reading, writing
933 people liked it

"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

tags: books, morality, reading, writing
752 people liked it

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."
— Robert Frost

tags: reading, writing
553 people liked it

"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live."
— Henry David Thoreau

tags: writing
470 people liked it

"If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster."
— Isaac Asimov

tags: humor, writing
421 people liked it

"I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?"
— J.R.R. Tolkien

tags: fantasy, fiction, tolkien, writing
162 people liked it

"After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world."
— Philip Pullman

tags: books, stories, writing
144 people liked it

"You can make anything by writing."
— C.S. Lewis

tags: writing
156 people liked it

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

tags: moon, writing
122 people liked it

"That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories)

tags: life, writing
101 people liked it

"Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like."
— Lemony Snicket

tags: fate, humor
1,053 people liked it

"I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: creation, god, humor, man
798 people liked it

"Always do what you are afraid to do."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

tags: inspirational
1,074 people liked it

"It is never too late to be what you might have been."
— George Eliot

tags: inspirational
3,166 people liked it

"Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous."
— Albert Einstein (The World As I See It)

tags: coincidence, god, religion
1,226 people liked it

"Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live."
— Gustave Flaubert

tags: books, inspirational, life, reading
936 people liked it

"The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: books, morality, reading
962 people liked it

"Reading is one form of escape. Running for your life is another."
— Lemony Snicket

tags: humor, reading
813 people liked it

"It's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party."
— Nick Hornby

tags: music
497 people liked it

"Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: music, sinister
142 people liked it

"A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

tags: art, beauty, music
110 people liked it

"It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted."
— George Eliot (Middlemarch)

tags: music, poetry
43 people liked it

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

tags: art
344 people liked it

"Nature is a haunted house--but Art--is a house that tries to be haunted."
— Emily Dickinson (The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson)

tags: art, haunted, house, nature
66 people liked it