"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares."
— Henri J.M. Nouwen (The Road to Daybreak: A Spiritual Journey)

"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget."
— Arundhati Roy

"Sometimes people are beautiful.
Not in looks.
Not in what they say.
Just in what they are."
— Markus Zusak (I Am the Messenger)

"In the end
these things matter most:
How well did you love?
How fully did you live?
How deeply did you let go?"
— Siddhārtha Gautama

"I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship."
— Louisa May Alcott (Little Women)

"The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first."
— Jim Morrison

"To the world you may be one person but to one person you may be the world."
— Bill Wilson

"You should never be surprised when someone treats you with respect, you should expect it."
— Sarah Dessen (Keeping the Moon)

"When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be."
— Laozi

"So tonight I reach for my journal again. This is the first time I’ve done this since I came to Italy. What I write in my journal is that I am weak and full of fear. I explain that Depression and Loneliness have shown up, and I’m scared they will never leave. I say that I don’t want to take the drugs anymore, but I’m frightened I will have to. I am terrified that I will never really pull my life together.
In response, somewhere from within me, rises a now-familiar presence, offering me all the certainties I have always wished another person would say to me when I was troubled. This is what I find myself writing on the page:

I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long. I will stay with you. If you need the medication again, go ahead and take it—I will love you through that, as well. If you don’t need the medication, I will love you, too. There’s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than Depression and Braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.

Tonight, this strange interior gesture of friendship—the lending of a hand from
me to myself when nobody else is around to offer solace—reminds me of something that happened to me once in New York City. I walked into an office building one afternoon in a hurry, dashed into the waiting elevator. As I rushed in, I caught an unexpected glance of myself in a security mirror’s reflection. In that moment, my brain did an odd thing—it fired off this split-second message: “Hey! You know her! That’s a friend of yours!” And I actually ran forward toward my own reflection with a smile, ready to welcome that girl whose name I had lost but whose face was so familiar. In a flash instant of course, I realized my mistake and laughed in embarrassment at my almost doglike confusion over how a mirror works. But for some reason that incident comes to mind again tonight during my sadness in Rome, and I find myself writing this comforting reminder at the bottom of the page.

Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a FRIEND…

I fell asleep holding my notebook pressed against my chest, open to this most recent assurance. In the morning when I wake up, I can still smell a faint trace of depression’s lingering smoke, but he himself is nowhere to be seen. Somewhere during the night, he got up and left. And his buddy loneliness beat it, too."
— Elizabeth Gilbert

"Words can never fully say what we want them to say, for they fumble, stammer, and break the best porcelain. The best one can hope for is to find along the way someone to share the path, content to walk in silence, for the heart communes best when it does not try to speak."
— Margaret Weis (Dragons of a Lost Star)

"Remember that everyone you meet is afraid of something, loves something and has lost something."
— H. Jackson Brown Jr.

"Often, it’s not about becoming a new person, but becoming the person you were meant to be, and already are, but don’t know how to be.
"
— Heath L. Buckmaster (Box of Hair: A Fairy Tale)

"I believe when life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade...and try to find someone whose life has given them vodka, and have a party.
"
— Ron White

"There are times to stay put, and what you want will come to you, and there are times to go out into the world and find such a thing for yourself."
— Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

"Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud..."
— Yann Martel (Life of Pi)

"When you see a good person, think of becoming like her/him. When you see someone not so good, reflect on your own weak points."
— Confucius

"To be wronged is nothing, unless you continue to remember it."
— Confucius

"Forget injuries, never forget kindnesses."
— Confucius

"The only time you truly become an adult is when you finally forgive your parents for being just as flawed as everyone else."
— Douglas Kennedy (Pursuit of Happiness)

"You're never as good as everyone tells you when you win, and you're never as bad as they say when you lose."
— Lou Holtz

"The things you do for yourself are gone when you are gone, but the things you do for others remain as your legacy."
— Kalu Iche Kalu

"Someday everything will make perfect sense. So for now, laugh at all the confusion, smile through the tears and keep reminding yourself... everything happens for a reason."
— Kami Dawn Asay

"Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant with the weak and wrong. Sometime in your life, you will have been all of these."
— Siddhārtha Gautama

"No human relation gives one possession in another—every two souls are absolutely different. In friendship or in love, the two side by side raise hands together to find what one cannot reach alone."
— Kahlil Gibrán

"Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity."
— Henry Van Dyke

"To keep your marriage brimming, with love in the wedding cup, whenever you're wrong, admit it; whenever you're right, shut up."
— Ogden Nash

"Perhaps our eyes need to be washed by our tears once in a while, so that we can see life with a clearer view again."
— Alex Tan

"An eye is meant to see things.
The soul is here for its own joy.

A head has one use: For loving a true love.
Feet: To chase after.

Love is for vanishing into the sky. The mind,
for learning what men have done and tried to do.

Mysteries are not to be solved: The eye goes blind
when it only wants to see why.

A lover is always accused of something.
But when he finds his love, whatever was lost
in the looking comes back completely changed."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi (Night and Sleep)

"I am who I am; no more, no less."
— Terry Goodkind (Wizard's First Rule)

"Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me."
— Emily Dickinson

"The Paradoxical Commandments

People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.

If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.

If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.

The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.

Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.

The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.

People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.

What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.

People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway.

Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway."
— Kent M. Keith (Paradoxical Commandments)

""It's been said that love finds you when you're ready." "
— James Patterson

"Girl, if you don't go after what you want, you'll never have it. If you don't ask, the answer's always no. If you don't step forward, you're always in the same place."
— Nora Roberts (Tears of the Moon)

"I've found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more
chances, Be more active, Show up more often."
— Brian Tracy

"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."
— Oscar Wilde

"I've learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way (s)he handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights."
— Maya Angelou

"Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne

"There comes a time when you have to stand up and shout: This is me damn it! I look the way I look, feel the way I feel, love the way I love! I am a whole package. Take me...or leave me. Accept me. Accept me-or walk away! Do not try to make me feel less of a person , just becasue I don't fit you're idea of who I should be and don't try to change me to fit your mold. If I need to change, I alone will make the decision. When you are strong enough to love yourslef 100% good and bad, you will be amazed at the opportunities life presents you."
— Stacey Charter

"Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and a richness to life that nothing else can bring."
— Oscar Wilde

"“Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.”"
— Thich Nhat Hanh