"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 a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don't blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being "in love", which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident."
— Louis de Bernières (Captain Corelli's Mandolin)

"People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world."
— C.S. Lewis

"All that we are is the result of what we have thought. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him."
— Siddhārtha Gautama

"It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people."
— Neil Gaiman (Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch)

"I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love."
— Mother Teresa

"Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened."
— Dr. Seuss

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."
— Albert Einstein

"For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"It is our choices, Harry, that show us who we truly are, far more than our abilities."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets)

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

"You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body."
— C.S. Lewis

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."
— C.S. Lewis (The Four Loves)

"You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream."
— C.S. Lewis

"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained."
— C.S. Lewis

"People can only be found in what they do."
— Timothy Findley (The Wars)

"There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house. You can't know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you've reached it. I believe this."
— Alice Munro

"Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls... Even when they're being kind... especially when they're being kind."
— Alice Munro

"“People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.”"
— Milan Kundera

"The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.
"
— Milan Kundera, Immortality

"Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
It is up to you to give [life] a meaning."
— Jean-Paul Sartre

"Words are loaded pistols."
— Jean-Paul Sartre

"Man is what he wills himself to be."
— Jean-Paul Sartre

"Freedom is what we do with what is done to us."
— Jean-Paul Sartre

"We are our choices."
— Jean-Paul Sartre

"You only lose what you cling to."
— Siddhārtha Gautama

"If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher."
— Pema Chödrön

"What you think you become. "
— Buddhism

"Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found."
— Pema Chodron

"It is difficult, when faced with a situation you cannot control, to admit you can do nothing."
— Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

"Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion."
— Edward Abbey

"What is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage. The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down."
— Toni Morrison

"Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging."
— Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye)

"the hopelessnes that comes from knowing too little and feeling too much (so brittle, so dry he is in danger of the reverse: feeling nothing and knowing everything)"
— Toni Morrison (Jazz)

"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. "
— Leo Tolstoy

"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
— Ernest Hemingway

"The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off."
— Gloria Steinem

"Holding anger is a poison...It eats you from inside...We think that by hating someone we hurt them...But hatred is a curved blade...and the harm we do to others...we also do to ourselves."
— Mitch Albom (The Five People You Meet in Heaven)

"Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured."
— Mark Twain

"Anger is the prelude to courage."
— Eric Hoffer

"Anger ... it's a paralyzing emotion ... you can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling —- I don't think it's any of that —- it's helpless ... it's absence of control —- and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers ... and anger doesn't provide any of that —- I have no use for it whatsoever."
— Toni Morrison

"Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings."
— Anaïs Nin

"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always preserves."
— Anonymous (Holy Bible: The King James Bible)

"Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell."
— Joan Crawford

"Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"The human heart is a strange vessel. Love and hatred can exist side by side."
— Scott Westerfeld

"To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance."
— Oscar Wilde (An Ideal Husband)

"I have a history of making decisions very quickly about men. I have always fallen in love fast and without measuring risks. I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential. I have fallen in love more times than I care to count with the highest potential of a man, rather than with the man himself, and I have hung on to the relationship for a long time (sometimes far too long) waiting for the man to ascend to his own greatness. Many times in romance I have been a victim of my own optimism."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)