"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

"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

"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away."
— Maya Angelou

"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

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

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

"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

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."
— Albert Einstein

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

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

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

"Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere."
— Albert Einstein

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it."
— Terry Pratchett (Diggers)

"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)

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."
— Maya Angelou

"Give a man a fire and he's warm for the day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life."
— Terry Pratchett (Jingo)

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
— Albert Einstein

"A day without laughter is a day wasted."
— Charlie Chaplin

"The difference between genius and stupidity is; genius has its limits."
— Albert Einstein

"To love would be an awfully big adventure."
— J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan)

"The cure for boredom is curiosity.
There is no cure for curiosity."
— Dorothy Parker

"The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."
— Robert Frost

"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"
— Albert Einstein

"To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone)

"In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them."
— Mark Twain

"[...] the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!' What did they call such young people in Goethe's Germany?"
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"You can never be overdressed or overeducated."
— Oscar Wilde

"If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."
— Toni Morrison

"The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be."
— Douglas Adams

"I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing."
— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones)

"She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain."
— Louisa May Alcott (Work: A Story of Experience)

"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it."
— W.C. Fields

"Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?"
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows)

"I am not young enough to know everything."
— Oscar Wilde

"Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

"You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up."
— Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides)

"The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking."
— Albert Einstein

"Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal."
— Neil Gaiman

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

"I solemnly swear that I am up to no good."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban)

"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."
— Albert Camus

"I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.

I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.

I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.

I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds.

I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.

I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.

I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.

I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too.

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it."
— Neil Gaiman (American Gods)

"Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious."
— Albert Einstein

"The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books"
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Wit beyond measure is a man's greatest treasure."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix)

"A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading."
— William Styron

"We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will."
— Chuck Palahniuk