""Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there." "
— Henry Miller (Sexus)

"Be the change that you wish to see in the world."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"That is the principal thing-not to remain with the dream, with the intention, with the being-in-the-mood, but always forcibly to convert it all into things."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Cartas A Un Joven Poeta)

"I am a house gutted by fire where only the guilty sometimes sleep before the punishment that devours them hounds them out in the open. "
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God)

"It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart."
— Anne Frank (Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl)

"Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
Where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
As the curve of the body as it turns away."
— Rainier Maria Rilke

"Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn."
— Sylvia Plath (The Journals of Sylvia Plath)

"I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best."
— Marilyn Monroe

"It takes great deal of courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it."
— Oscar Wilde (An Ideal Husband)

"This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something. "
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal."
— a headstone in Ireland

""Heartache forces us to embrace God out of desparate, urgent need. God is never closer than when your heart is aching.""
— Joni Eareckson Tada

"Keep in mind, hurting people often hurt other people as a result of their own pain. If somebody is rude and inconsiderate, you can almost be certain that they have some unresolved issues inside. They have some major problems, anger, resentment, or some heartache they are trying to cope with or overcome. The last thing they need is for you to make matters worse by responding angrily."
— Joel Osteen (Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential)

"She knew that was not an honest prayer, and she did not linger over it. The right prayer would have been, Lord . . . I am miserable and bitter at heart, and old fears are rising up in me so that everything I do makes everything worse."
— Marilynne Robinson (Home: A Novel)

"We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke)

"For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Duino Elegies)

"But not you, O girl, nor yet his
mother,
stretched his eyebrows so fierce with
expectation.
Not for your mouth, you who hold him
now,
did his lips ripen into these fervent
contours.
Do you really think your quiet
footsteps
could have so convulsed him, you who
move like dawn wind?
True, you startled his heart; but older
terrors
rushed into him with that first jolt
to his emotions.
Call him . . . you'll never quite
retrieve him from those dark consorts.
Yes, he wants to, he escapes; relieved,
he makes a home
in your familiar heart, takes root
there and begins himself anew.
But did he ever begin himself?"
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Duino Elegies)

"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

"A person isn't who they are during the last conversation you had with them - they're who they've been throughout your whole relationship."
— 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

"No experience has been too unimportant, and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and supported by a hundred others"
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of.
"
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

"Whoever you are, in the evening step out of your room, where you know everything."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"She who reconciles the ill-matched threads
Of her life, and weaves them gratefully
Into a single cloth –
It’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall
And clears it for a different celebration."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow"
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

"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)

"All growth is a leap in the dark,
a spontaneous unpremeditated act without the benefit of experience."
— Henry Miller

"I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth."
— Henry Miller

"In each of us lie good and bad, light and dark, art and pain, choice and regret, cruelty and sacrifice. We’re each of us our own chiaroscuro, our own bit of illusion fighting to emerge into something solid, something real. We’ve got to forgive ourselves that. I must remember to forgive myself. Because there is a lot of grey to work with. No one can live in the light all the time."
— Libba Bray

"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."
— Sylvia Plath

"I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between."
— Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)

"If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating."
— Sylvia Plath (Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement)

"Out of the ash I rise with my red hair
and I eat men like air."
— Sylvia Plath (Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement)

"I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time..."
— Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)

"Character is fate."
— Sylvia Plath

"Mother of otherness,
Eat me."
— Sylvia Plath

"Live to the point of tears."
— Albert Camus

"I don't want to drive up to the pearly gates in a shiny sports car, wearing beautifully, tailored clothes, my hair expertly coiffed, and with long, perfectly manicured fingernails.
I want to drive up in a station wagon that has mud on the wheels from taking kids to scout camp.
I want to be there with a smudge of peanut butter on my shirt from making sandwiches for a sick neighbors children.
I want to be there with a little dirt under my fingernails from helping to weed someone's garden.
I want to be there with children's sticky kisses on my cheeks and the tears of a friend on my shoulder.
I want the Lord to know I was really here and that I really lived."
— Marjorie Pay Hinckley

"The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea"
— Isak Dinesen

"Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning do to do afterward."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before--more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle"
— Charles Dickens (Great Expectations)

"Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"Question: I am interested in so many things, and I have a terrible fear because my mother keeps telling me that I'm just going to be exploring the rest of my life and never get anything done. But I find it really hard to set my ways and say, "Well, do I want to do this, or should I try to exploit that, or should I escape and completely do one thing?"

Anaïs Nin: One word I would banish from the dictionary is 'escape.' Just banish that and you'll be fine. Because that word has been misused regarding anybody who wanted to move away from a certain spot and wanted to grow. He was an escapist. You know if you forget that word you will have a much easier time. Also you're in the prime, the beginning of your life; you should experiment with everything, try everything.... We are taught all these dichotomies, and I only learned later that they could work in harmony. We have created false dichotomies; we create false ambivalences, and very painful one's sometimes -the feeling that we have to choose. But I think at one point we finally realize, sometimes subconsciously, whether or not we are really fitted for what we try and if it's what we want to do.

You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a teacher anymore or you're not a painter anymore. It may happen. It has happened. I mean Gauguin decided at a certain point he wasn't a banker anymore; he was a painter. And so he walked away from banking. I think we have a right to change course. But society is the one that keeps demanding that we fit in and not disturb things. They would like you to fit in right away so that things work now."
— Anaïs Nin

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

"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

"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

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."
— Anaïs Nin

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."
— Anaïs Nin