"You've seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks in the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself every time that it's an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it?"
— John Steinbeck (Sweet Thursday)

"After the bare requisites to living and reproducing, man wants most to leave some record of himself, a proof, perhaps, that he has really existed. He leaves his proof on wood, on stone or on the lives of other people. This deep desire exists in everyone, from the boy who writes dirty words in a public toilet to the Buddha who etches his image in the race mind. Life is so unreal. I think that we seriously doubt that we exist and go about trying to prove that we do."
— John Steinbeck (The Pastures of Heaven)

"What are men to rocks and mountains?"
— Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

"For after all, the best thing one can do when it is raining is let it rain."
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."
— Oscar Wilde

"Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future."
— Oscar Wilde

"Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!"
— George Bernard Shaw

"Those who can not change their minds can not change anything."
— George Bernard Shaw

"Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk."
— Dalai Lama XIV

"Choose to be optimistic, it feels better."
— Dalai Lama XIV

"Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any."
— Mark Twain (The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain: A Book of Quotations)

"I had rather do and not promise than promise and not do"
— Arthur Warwick

"Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit."
— Aristotle

"In prosperity our friends know us; in adversity we know our friends."
— John Churton Collins

"Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

"I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened."
— Mark Twain

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

"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

"Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!"
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe