"You only lose what you cling to."
— Siddhārtha Gautama

"There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair."
— Haruki Murakami

"I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all."
— Kurt Vonnegut (The Sirens of Titan)

"Women should be respected as well! Generally speaking, men are held in great esteem in all parts of the world, so why shouldn't women have their share? Soldiers and war heroes are honored and commemorated, explorers are granted immortal fame, martyrs are revered, but how many people look upon women too as soldiers?...Women, who struggle and suffer pain to ensure the continuation of the human race, make much tougher and more courageous soldiers than all those big-mouthed freedom-fighting heroes put together!"
— Anne Frank (The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition)

"Life is a long lesson in humility."
— James M. Barrie

"the greatest Americans
have not been born yet
they are waiting patiently
for the past to die"
— Saul Williams

"I love children, especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away."
— Nancy Mitford

"'Know thyself'? If I knew myself, I'd run away!"
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on."
— Richard P. Feynman

"The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!"
— Larry Niven

"Because we have for millenia made moral, aesthetic, religious demands on the world, looked upon it with blind desire, passion or fear, and abandoned ourselves to the bad habits of illogical thinking, this world has gradually become so marvelously variegated, frightful, meaningful, soulful, it has acquired color - but we have been the colorists: it is the human intellect that has made appearances appear and transported its erroneous basic conceptions into things."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Love is the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth... Love is as love does. Love is an act of will -- namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love."
— M. Scott Peck

"If you believe something will make the world better, then it's always worth a try, even if you fail."
— Sierra St. James (Masquerade)

"A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it."
— Zora Neale Hurston

"Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified. To know love we have to invest time and commitment...'dreaming that love will save us, solve all our problems or provide a steady state of bliss or security only keeps us stuck in wishful fantasy, undermining the real power of the love -- which is to transform us.' Many people want love to function like a drug, giving them an immediate and sustained high. They want to do nothing, just passively receive the good feeling."
— bell hooks

"Since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring--not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive... If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds."
— Carl Sagan

"Leave your excuses and live your dreams!"
— Paul F. Davis

"The final enemy to be defeated is Death "
— Albus Dumbledore

"The world is not magic — and that’s the most magical thing about it."
— Sean Carroll

"Adversity is only yet another means to remind us of 'How Truly Awsome We All Are'!"
— W. O. Wainwright (The Adventures of Joey Zee)

"The final enemy to be defeated is Death

"
— Albus Dumbledore (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows)

"'I used to think the world was broken down by tribes,' I said. 'By Black and White. By Indian and White. But I know this isn't true. The world is only broken into two tribes: the people who are assholes and the people who are not.'"
— Sherman Alexie

"Ask yourself, If not now, When?
If not by me, By whom?"
— Daryle Hoole

"At that moment, he was meaner and madder than he’d ever been, but mainly at himself, which is the worst kind of mean and mad to be, because the only thing to do about it is to take it out on someone else."
— Victoria Forester

"Sadly, schools deal in the sale and exchange of knowledge, not wisdom."

~ "The Hole"
— Guy Burt

"Eclipsing power is, at times, not only the instrument of demons, but also of gods."
— Wolfgang Buchner

"Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

'That's some catch, that Catch-22,' he observed.

'It's the best there is,' Doc Daneeka agreed.

Yossarian saw it clearly in all its spinning reasonableness. There was an elliptical precision about its perfect pairs of parts that was graceful and shocking, like good modern art, and at times Yossarian wasn't quite sure he saw it at all, just the way he was never quite sure about good modern art or about the flies Orr saw in Appleby's eyes. he had Orr's word to take for Appleby's eyes."
— Joseph Heller (Catch-22)

""Here then at long last is my darkness. No cry of light, no glimmer, not even the faintest shard of hope to break free across the hold.""
— Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves)

"He was a complicated man, my father; a man of great mental capacity who was driven to succeed yet humbled into mediocrity by his own emotional limitations."
— Jordan Belfort (The Wolf of Wall Street)

"People lose sight of their dreams, only to hold tight their fears."
— Gustave Geyer