"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

"Give people a break. It's not easy doing a life."
— Joshua Halberstam

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Be the change that you wish to see in the world."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
— Oscar Wilde

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

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

"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

"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

"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so."
— Douglas Adams

"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."
— Douglas Adams

"People who don't read are brutes."
— Eugène Ionesco

"There are days when solitude is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall."
— Colette (Oeuvres complètes en seize volumes)

"God warns us not to love any earthly thing above Himself, and yet He sets in a mother's heart such a fierce passion for her babes that I do not comprehend how He can test us so."
— Geraldine Brooks (Year of Wonders)

"Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them--if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"Lines

I die but when the grave shall press
The heart so long endeared to thee
When earthy cares no more distress
And earthy joys are nought to me.

Weep not, but think that I have past
Before thee o'er the sea of gloom.
Have anchored safe and rest at last
Where tears and mouring can not come.

'Tis I should weep to leave thee here
On that dark ocean sailing drear
With storms around and fears before
And no kind light to point the shore.

But long or short though life may be
'Tis nothing to eternity.
We part below to meet on high
Where blissful ages never die."
— Emily Brontë

"Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love."
— John Steinbeck

"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)

"Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry."
— Terry Pratchett (Thief of Time)

"No man is an island, entire of itself
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main
if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were
any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls
it tolls for thee."
— John Donne

"Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those, whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy picture[s] be,
Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou'rt slave to Fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke ; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die."
— John Donne (The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne)

""you can tell the deepest truths with the lies of fiction"
"
— Isabel Allende

"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You too? I thought I was the only one."
— C.S. Lewis

""We should always aim to read something different=not only the writers with whom we agree, but those with whom we are ready to do battle. Their point of view challenges us to examine the truth and to test their views...and let us not comment on nor criticize writers of whom we have heard only second-hand, or third-hand without troubling to read their works for ourselves...Don't be afraid of new ideas." "
— J. Oswald Sanders (Spiritual Leadership)