"Hearts with one purpose alone/Through summer and winter seem/Enchanted to a stone/To trouble the living stream."
— William Butler Yeats

"there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average
human being to supply any given army on any given day and the best at murder are those who preach against it
and the best at hate are those who preach love and the best at war finally are those who preach peace"
— Charles Bukowski

"Any asshole can chase a skirt, art takes discipline."
— Charles Bukowski

"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
— Mark Twain

"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

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
— Mark Twain

"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."
— Mark Twain

"Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow."
— Mark Twain

"Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint."
— Mark Twain

"It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."
— Mark Twain

"Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it."
— Mark Twain

"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't."
— Mark Twain

"Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company."
— Mark Twain

"Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life."
— Mark Twain

"The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found."
— Calvin Trillin

"Who knows how to make love stay?

1. Tell love you are going to Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if loves stays, it can have half. It will stay.

2. Tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a moustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay.

3. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning."
— Tom Robbins (Still Life with Woodpecker)

"Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business."
— 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

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

"Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words "make" and "stay" become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free."
— Tom Robbins (Still Life with Woodpecker)

"There are only two mantras, yum and yuck, mine is yum."
— Tom Robbins

"What difference does it make if the Gospel is mostly a lie? It's an engrossing story and the words of its hero are excellent words to live by, even today."
— Tom Robbins

"A sense of humor...is superior to any religion so far devised."
— Tom Robbins (Jitterbug Perfume)

"Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it."
— Herman Melville (Moby Dick)

"I would prefer not to."
— Herman Melville (Bartleby The Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street)

"Introduction To Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means."
— Billy Collins

"One of these days I'm-a make me a book out of you."
— Billy Collins

"Take up and read, take up and read."
— Augustine of Hippo

"Complete abstinence is easier than perfect moderation."
— Augustine of Hippo

"Resentment is like taking poison and hoping the other person dies."
— Augustine of Hippo

""Good writin' ain't necessarily good readin'.""
— Ken Kesey, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"

"No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself."
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"Don't make everyone knows about your sadness."
— John Steinbeck

"When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you've got two new people."
— John Steinbeck

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

"Poetry is what gets lost in translation."
— Robert Frost

"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness."
— Robert Frost

"If we couldnt laugh we would all go insane"
— Robert Frost

"We dance round in a ring and suppose, / But the Secret sits in the middle and knows."
— Robert Frost

"The best way out is always through."
— Robert Frost

"My goal in life is to unite my avocation with my vocation, as my two eyes make one sight."
— Robert Frost

"A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool."
— William Shakespeare (As You Like It)

"Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none."
— William Shakespeare (All's Well That Ends Well)

"You speak an infinite deal of nothing."
— William Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice)

"Books, the children of the brain."
— Jonathan Swift (A Tale of a Tub and Other Writings)

"I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed."
— Jonathan Swift

"He was a bold man that first ate an oyster."
— Jonathan Swift

"Vision is the art of seeing things invisible."
— Jonathan Swift

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

"It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson