"It takes courage to push yourself to places that you have never been before... to test your limits... to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
— 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

"Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are."
— 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

"The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery."
— Anaïs Nin

"Someone told me the delightful story of the crusader who put a chastity belt on his wife and gave the key to his best friend for safekeeping, in case of his death. He had ridden only a few miles away when his friend, riding hard, caught up with him, saying 'You gave me the wrong key!'"
— Anaïs Nin

"There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don't work."
— Anaïs Nin (Henry and June)

"You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken."
— Anaïs Nin

"Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century:
Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others;
Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected;
Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it;
Refusing to set aside trivial preferences;
Neglecting development and refinement of the mind;
Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?"
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams."
— Dr. Seuss

"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."
— Maya Angelou

"Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something. "
— Robert A. Heinlein

"There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him."
— Robert A. Heinlein (The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress)

"An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life."
— Robert A. Heinlein (Beyond This Horizon)

"In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it."
— Robert A. Heinlein

"Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your dreams come true."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."
— George Eliot

"Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance."
— Confucius

"The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials."
— Confucius

"The superior man, when resting in safety, does not forget that danger may come. When in a state of security he does not forget the possibility of ruin. When all is orderly, he does not forget that disorder may come. Thus his person is not endangered, and his States and all their clans are preserved."
— Confucius (The Analects of Confucius, the Great Learning, Doctrine of the Mean)

"When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger."
— Confucius

"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)

"If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself."
— Albert Einstein

"There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds."
— Alfred Lord Tennyson

"my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset and the baths of all the Western stars until I die"
— Alfred Lord Tennyson

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
— Aristotle (Metaphysics)

"Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber."
— Aristotle

"A friend to all is a friend to none."
— Aristotle

"He is his own best friend and takes delight in privacy whereas the man of no virtue or ability is his own worst enemy and is afraid of solitude."
— Aristotle

"The least deviation from truth will be multiplied later. "
— Aristotle

"...happiness does not consist in amusement. In fact, it would be strange if our end were amusement, and if we were to labor and suffer hardships all our life long merely to amuse ourselves.... The happy life is regarded as a life in conformity with virtue. It is a life which involves effort and is not spent in amusement...."
— Aristotle

""It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain an idea without accepting it""
— Aristotle

"A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider to be God-fearing and pious."
— Aristotle

"Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be."
— Mark Twain

"If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there."
— Lewis Carroll

"I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution - then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise."
— Aldous Huxley

"Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry."
— Jack Kerouac

"What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?- it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies."
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world."
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"What's in store for me in the direction I don't take?"
— Jack Kerouac

"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)