"Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
— Douglas Adams

"You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal."
— Jane Austen

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

"My one regret in life is that I am not someone else."
— Woody Allen

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?"
— Mary Oliver (New and Selected Poems)

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

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (Self Reliance)

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"How nice--to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being."
— Tom Robbins (Jitterbug Perfume)

"We are our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves."
— Tom Robbins

"Just because you're naked doesn't mean you're sexy. Just because you're cynical doesn't mean you're cool."
— Tom Robbins

"There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for."
— Tom Robbins (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues)

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

"You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray and Three Stories)

"A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing."
— Oscar Wilde

"In heaven, all the interesting people are missing."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a person's sexual choice is the result and sum of their fundamental convictions. Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life. Show me the person they sleep with and I will tell you their valuation of themselves. No matter what corruption they're taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which they cannot perform for any motive but their own enjoyment - just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity! - an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exultation, only on the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces them to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and accept their real ego as their standard of value. They will always be attracted to the person who reflects their deepest vision of themselves, the person whose surrender permits them to experience - or to fake - a sense of self-esteem .. Love is our response to our highest values - and can be nothing else."
— Ayn Rand

"Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth...I swear- by my life and my love of it- that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"Women are like teabags; you never know how strong they are until they're put in hot water."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

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

"That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen."
— Charles Bukowski (Women: A Novel)

"Its not the men in your life that matters, its the life in your men."
— Mae West

"Life consists of what man is thinking about all day."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power."
— Oscar Wilde

"The difference between sex and love is that sex relieves tension and love causes it."
— Woody Allen

"...we accept the love we think we deserve."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment."
— Jane Austen

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."
— Robert Frost

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

"You cannot find peace by avoiding life."
— Virginia Woolf

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away."
— Henry David Thoreau

"What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us."
— Henry David Thoreau

"If you are going through hell, keep going."
— Winston S. Churchill

"Never give in, never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never Yield to a force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy."
— Winston S. Churchill

"Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
— Albert Einstein

"I love mankind, it's people I can't stand."
— Charles M. Schulz

"Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea."
— Robert A. Heinlein

"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

"Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead. "
— Charles Bukowski

"Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money."
— Virginia Woolf

"Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
— Dylan Thomas

"Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash."
— Leonard Cohen

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
— Oscar Wilde