"Mithorden: 'We become what we do, Zalos.'"
— Robert Fanney

"'You know what?' said Vimes aloud. 'This is going to be the world's first democratically killed dragon. One man, one stab.'
'Then you've got to stop them. You can't let them kill it!' said Lady Ramkin.
Vimes blinked at her.
'Pardon?' he said.
'It's wounded!'
'Lady, that was the intention, wasn't it? Anyway, it's only stunned,' said Vimes.
'I mean you can't let them kill it like this,' said Lady Ramkin insistently. 'Poor thing!'
'What do you want to do, then?' demanded Vimes, his temper unravelling. 'Give it a strengthening dose of tar oil and a nice comfy basket in front of the stove?'
'It's butchery!'
'Suits me fine!'
'But it's a dragon! It's just doing what a dragon does! It never would have come here if people had left it alone!'
Vimes thought: it was about to eat her, and she can still think like this. He hesitated. Perhaps that did give you the right to an opinion..."
— Terry Pratchett (Guards! Guards!)

"Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being."
— Albert Camus (The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt)

"Be — don't try to become"
— Osho

"Any group that includes Charlemagne, Rock Hudson, Paul McCartney, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Jack the Ripper, and the Boston Strangler must be select, if not elite."
— James De Kay

"We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams."
— Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy

"Dr. Armonson stitched up her wrist wounds. Within five minutes of the transfusion he declared her out of danger. Chucking her under her chin, he said, "What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets."
And it was then Cecilia gave orally what was to be her only form of a suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: "Obviously, Doctor," she said, "You've never been a thirteen-year-old girl.""
— Jeffrey Eugenides

"Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am."
— Parker J. Palmer (Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation)

"What I want is to live of that initial and primordial something that was what made some things reach the point of aspiring to be human."
— Clarice Lispector (The Passion According to G.H.)

"It’s hard being left behind. I wait for Henry, not knowing where he is,
wondering if he’s okay. It’s hard to be the one who stays.
I keep myself busy. Time goes faster that way.
I go to sleep alone, and wake up alone. I take walks. I work until I’m tired. I watch
the wind play with the trash that’s been under the snow all winter. Everything seems
simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by absence?
Long ago, men went to sea, and women waited for them, standing on the edge of
the water, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now I wait for Henry. He vanishes
unwillingly, without warning. I wait for him. Each moment that I wait feels like a
year, an eternity. Each moment is as slow and transparent as glass. Through each
moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting. Why has he gone where I
cannot follow?"
— Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife)

"The object is to keep busy being something...as opposed to doing something. We are all sent here to bring more gratitude, more kindness, more forgiveness and more love into this world. That is too big a job to be accomplished by just a few."
— Richard Nelson Bolles

"I am always busy, which is perhaps the chief reason why I am always well."
— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

"The mind creates those things that exist."
— Terry Tempest Williams (Pieces of White Shell)

"Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.


"
— Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment)

"We all deserve the love we think we deserve."
— Chbosky

"Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else"
— Judy Garland

"The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person."
— P.J. O'Rourke

"Like a child standing in a beautiful park with his eyes shut tight, there's no need to imagine trees, flowers, deer, birds, and sky; we merely need to open our eyes and realize what is already here, who we already are - as soon as we stop pretending we're small or unholy."
— Bo Lozoff

"(M)aybe we too busy being flowers or fairies or strawberries instead of something honest and worthy of respect . . . you know . . . like being people."
— Toni Cade Bambara (Raymond's Run)

"I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in the kindness of human beings. I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels."
— Pearl S. Buck

"To say "all that which does not exist" is to introduce, effectively, a new concept, but it does not bring into existence anything more than that very concept which it introduces. That is, a certain entity about which we know nothing except that it bears the name of "all that which does not exist.""
— Pablo Tusset (The Best Thing That Can Happen to a Croissant)

""Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said to-day,""
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Our tears are precious, necessary, and part of what make us such endearing creatures."
— David Richo (The Five Things We Cannot Change: And the Happiness We Find by Embracing Them)

"Standing on the fringes of life offers a unique experience, but there's a time to see what it looks like from the dance floor."
— Chbosky

"And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition."
— Milan Kundera

"even a broken watch is right twice a day"
— hayden scott behner

"Well, I don't like your clothes. You look perfectly ridiculous in them. Why on earth don't you go up and change? It's perfectly childish to be in mourning for a man who is actually staying a whole week with you in your house as a guest. I call it grotesque." "
— Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest: And Other Plays)

"Je suis partout où je suis."
— Nicole Brossard (La Capture du sombre)

"Nevertheless, no matter how much they killed themselves with work, no matter how much money they eked out, and no matter how many schemes they thought of, their guardian angels were asleep with fatigue while they put in coins and took them out trying to get just
enough to live with.
"
— Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)

"They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming."
— Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)

"The noblest study of mankind is Man, says Man."
— James Thurber (Further Fables for Our Time)

"Today you are you, Which makes you better to be with around.
Don't change anything about yourself....I think you're perfect just the way you are. "
— Jane Michelle Park

""Somewhere in the rough and tumble, the Lego dinosaurs, the funny-voiced bedtime stories, the kidding and joking and dancing and hugs and tickling, fatherhood takes place.""
— Scott Dunlop

"This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You've got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you've got."
— Toni Morrison

"Breathing for her, praying for her, thinking for her, my entire being revolved around her.
--Brae"
— Alysha Speer (Sharden)

"Being is not an idea in philosophy, but a wordless experience we have from time to time."
— Charles Simic (The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs)