"It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"There is never a time or place for true love. It happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment."
— Sarah Dessen (The Truth About Forever)

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"If it weren't for music, I would think that love is mortal."
— Mark Helprin (A Soldier of the Great War)

"To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already 3-parts dead."
— Bertrand Russell

"He dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of living each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs."
— Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)

"Life without pain has no meaning."
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants."
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"Everyone, at some point in their lives, wakes up in the middle of the night with the feeling that they are all alone in the world, and that nobody loves them now and that nobody will ever love them, and that they will never have a decent night's sleep again and will spend their lives wandering blearily around a loveless landscape, hoping desperately that their circumstances will improve, but suspecting, in their heart of hearts, that they will remain unloved forever. The best thing to do in these circumstances is to wake somebody else up, so that they can feel this way, too."
— Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

"These woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep."
— Robert Frost

"I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?"
— Ernest Hemingway

"Who said nights were for sleep?"
— Marilyn Monroe

"We can never judge the lives of others, because each person knows only their own pain and renunciation. It's one thing to feel that you are on the right path, but it's another to think that yours is the only path."
— Paulo Coelho

"I can choose either to be a victim of the world or an adventurer in search of treasure. It's all a question of how I view my life."
— Paulo Coelho (Eleven Minutes: A Novel)

"We are travelers on a cosmic journey,stardust,swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share.This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity."
— Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist)

"Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"I want you to be weak. As weak as I am."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful ... Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival. "
— C.S. Lewis

"The best mirror is an old friend."
— George Herbert

"I fall asleep with my friends around me, the only place i know. I'm going to call this home."
— Jimmy Eat World

"I think if I've learned anything about friendship, it's to hang in, stay connected, fight for them, and let them fight for you. Don't walk away, don't be distracted, don't be too busy or tired, don't take them for granted. Friends are part of the glue that holds life and faith together. Powerful stuff. "
— Jon Katz

"The process of falling in love at first sight is as final as it is swift in such a case, but the growth of true friendship may be a lifelong affair.

"
— Sarah Orne

"And I'll dance with you in Vienna,
I'll be wearing a river's disguise.
The hyacinth wild on my shoulder
my mouth on the dew of your thighs.
And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook,
with the photographs there and the moss.
And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty,
my cheap violin and my cross.

 "Take This Waltz", a
 translation by Leonard Cohen of
 the poem "Little Viennese Waltz"
 by Federico García Lorca.
"
— Leonard Cohen (Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs)

"Can miles truly separate you from friends... If you want to be with someone you love, aren't you already there?"
— Richard Bach

"The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain… Music expresses only the quintessence of life and its events, never these themselves."
— Arthur Schopenhauer

""Happiness is the longing for repetition." "
— Milan Kundera

"The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's very beautiful. But what would they nourish their intimate talk with? However contemptible the world may be, they still need it to be able to talk together."
— Milan Kundera (Identity: A Novel)

"When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. And Sabina - what had come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden, but the unbearable lightness of being."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."
— E.B. White

"The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also."
— Mark Twain

"I wrote the story myself. It's about a girl who lost her reputation and never missed it."
— Mae West

"It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it."
— Oscar Wilde

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

"The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame."
— Oscar Wilde

"I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there."
— Oscar Wilde

"A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world."
— Oscar Wilde

"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."
— Oscar Wilde

"Women are made to be loved not understood."
— Oscar Wilde (An Ideal Husband)

"The very essence of romance is uncertainty."
— Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays)

"The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last."
— Oscar Wilde

"Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays."
— Oscar Wilde

"Youth is wasted on the young."
— Oscar Wilde

"Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them."
— Oscar Wilde

"There are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman."
— Virginia Woolf

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

"Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men."
— Joseph Conrad

"People living deeply have no fear of death."
— Anaïs Nin