"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."
— Theodore Roosevelt

"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

"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

"Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
— Albert Einstein

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

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

"Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

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

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

"You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough"
— Mae West

"Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars."
— Kahlil Gibrán

"Love doesn't just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (The Lathe of Heaven)

"What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?"
— Ursula K. LeGuin

"What is more cheerful, now, in the fall of the year, than an open-wood-fire? Do you hear those little chirps and twitters coming out of that piece of apple-wood? Those are the ghosts of the robins and blue-birds that sang upon the bough when it was in blossom last Spring. In Summer whole flocks of them come fluttering about the fruit-trees under the window: so I have singing birds all the year round."
— Thomas Bailey Aldrich

"Ignore those that make you fearful and sad, that degrade you back towards disease and death."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature -- the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter."
— Rachel Carson

"Love is the absence of judgement"
— Dahli Llama

"To give pleasure to a single heart by a single act is better than a thousand heads bowing in prayer."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"The flower that blooms in adversity is the rarest and most beautiful of all."
— Walt Disney Company (Mulan)

"Do one thing everyday that scares you."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

"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

"Does something which exists on the edge have no true relevance to the stable center, or does it, by being on the edge, become a part of the edge and thus a part of the boundary, the definition which gives the whole its shape?"
— Lucy Grealy

"I am the most tired woman in the world. I am tired when I get up. Life requires an effort I cannot make. Please give me that heavy book. I need to put something heavy like that on top of my head. I have to place my feet under the pillows always, so as to be able to stay on earth. Otherwise I feel myself going away, going away at a tremendous speed, on account of my lightness. I know that I am dead. As soon as I utter a phrase my sincerity dies, becomes a lie whose coldness chills me. Don't say anything, because I see that you understand me, and I am afraid of your understanding. I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe. I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have to share my kingdom with you."
— Anaïs Nin

"We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them."
— Anaïs Nin

"Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it."
— Anaïs Nin

"What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny. One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry provided we have the courage to dissect the elements."
— Anaïs Nin

"Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously. For example now, I hate the bank and everything connected with it. I also hate Dutch paintings, penis-sucking, parties, and cold rainy weather. But I am much more preoccupied with loving."
— Anaïs Nin (Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love" - The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin)

"Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together."
— Anaïs Nin

"We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations."
— Anaïs Nin

"Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country."
— Anaïs Nin

"I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ"
— Anaïs Nin

"If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it."
— Anaïs Nin

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."
— Anaïs Nin

"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
— Anaïs Nin

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
— Anaïs Nin

"I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman."
— Anaïs Nin

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke)

"Deeply I go down into myself. My god is Dark and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been"
— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

"“I would like to beg you to have patience
With everything unresolved in your heart
And try to love the questions themselves…
Don’t search for answers
Which could not be given to you now
Because you would not be able to live them
And the point is to live everything.
Live the questions now
Perhaps then, someday in the future,
You will gradually, without even noticing it,
Live your way to the answer.” "
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"Do not assume that he who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find these words"
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"The necessary thing is after all but this; solitude, great inner solitude. Going into oneself for hours meeting no one - this one must be able to attain."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

"For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so,
because it serenely disdains to destroy us."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Duino Elegies)