"Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you've never been hurt and live like it's heaven on Earth."
— Mark Twain

"Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend."
— Albert Camus

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference."
— Elie Wiesel

"The most wonderful opportunity which life offers is to be human."
— Henry Miller

"Every day one should at least hear one little song, read one good poem, see one fine painting and -- if at all possible -- speak a few sensible words."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."
— Haruki Murakami

"Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they're also what tear you apart."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning."
— Haruki Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)

"Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That's why we call it 'The Present'."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up."
— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones)

"I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way."
— Pablo Neruda (100 Love Sonnets/Cien Sonetos De Amor)

"But I love your feet
only because they walked
upon the earth and upon
the wind and upon the waters,
until they found me."
— Pablo Neruda

"No medicine cures what happiness cannot."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"Love is so short, forgetting is so long."
— Pablo Neruda (Love: Ten Poems By Pablo Neruda)

"Fiction is the truth inside the lie."
— Truman Capote

"'Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell,' Holly advised him. 'That was Doc's mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they're strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That's how you'll end up, Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky.'"
— Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories)

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"Siempre imaginé que el Paraíso sería algún tipo de biblioteca."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned."
— James Joyce

"All Moanday, Tearday, Wailsday, Thumpsday, Frightday, Shatterday."
— James Joyce

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

"Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering..."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"What is hell? I still maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)

"Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground: with White Nights, The Dreams of a Ridiculous Man, and selections from The House of the Dead)

"Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment)

"To go wrong in one's own way is better then to go right in someone else's."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"The darker the night, the brighter the stars,
The deeper the grief, the closer is God!"
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment)

"Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased. However, I don't know beans about my disease, and I am not sure what is bothering me. I don't treat it and never have, though I respect medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, let's say sufficiently so to respect medicine. (I am educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am.) No, I refuse to treat it out of spite. You probably will not understand that. Well, but I understand it. Of course I can't explain to you just whom I am annoying in this case by my spite. I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "get even" with the doctors by not consulting them. I know better than anyone that I thereby injure only myself and no one else. But still, if I don't treat it, its is out of spite. My liver is bad, well then-- let it get even worse!"
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground: with White Nights, The Dreams of a Ridiculous Man, and selections from The House of the Dead)

"I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground)

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind."
— William Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night's Dream)

"Love can rebuild the world, they say, so everything's possible when it comes to love."
— Haruki Murakami

"We usually lost today because there has been a yesterday, and tomorrow is coming."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"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

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

"Dreams are necessary to life."
— Anaïs Nin

"We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come."
— Milan Kundera

"Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?
We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?"
— Haruki Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)