"Respect for self is the beginning of cultivating virtue in men and women."
— Gordon B. Hinckley

"You have brains in your head.
Feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose."
— Dr. Suess

"You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not. The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid. "
— Proverbs 30:19

"...every time you make a decision to be less than what God wants for you, you're denying yourself some of God's blessings. It's up to you. You can live a life with God's blessings, or just exist with all the consequences of choosing wrong."
— Terri Blackstock (Last Light)

"...And we all must breathe until our dying breath."
— Regina Spektor

"Sometimes, what people choose to write down on paper is more important than what they say."

Caleb didn't know what Sarah meant. But I knew. I wrote in my journal every night. And when I read what I had written, I could see myself there, clearer than when I looked in the mirror. I could see all of us: Papa, who couldn't always say the things he felt; Caleb, who said everything; and Sarah, who didn't know that she had changed us all."
— Patricia MacLachlan (Skylark)

"The light was leaving
in the west it was blue
The children's laughter sang
and skipping just like the stones they threw
the voices echoed across the way
its getting late

It was just another night
with the sun set
and the moon rise not so far behind
to give us just enough light
to lay down underneath the stars
listen to papas translations
of the stories across the sky
we drew our own constellations"
— Jack Johnson

"…time wasted is not always a waste of time."
— Terri Blackstock (Seaside)

"Curiosity can bring guts out of hiding at times, maybe even get them going. But curiosity usually evaporates. Gust have to go for the long haul. Curiosity's like a fun friend you can't really trust. It turns you on and then it leaves you to make it on your own - with whatever guts you can muster"
— Haruki Murakami

" 'What is man—and of course the writer means all of us puny little insignificant creatures—what is a mere human being that God who made the immense universe should ever notice?' She chuckled. 'The sky does take you down to size.'

'Not even big as bugs. Not even a speck of dust to the nearest star,' Angel agreed.

'But the psalmist answers his own question. "Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor..." '

'What?' Angel asked, not sure she had heard right.

'A little lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honor.'

'The real angels? Do you believe that?'

'Yes, Angel, I do. When people look down on me, and these days'—she laughed shortly—'these days everyone over the age of five does. When people look down on me, I remember that God looks at this pitiful, twisted old thing that I have become and crowns me with glory.' "
— Katherine Paterson (The Same Stuff as Stars)

"He has his chin on his chest and his eyes down. He is thinking of his new baby, his new novel, tomorrow's dance contest. He is thinking of everything except what he is thinking about. "
— John le Carré (Absolute Friends)

"... who's to say that just because something lasts only a short time, it has little value?"
— Alice Steinbach

"A brain is only capable of what it could conceive, andit couldnt concieve what it hasnt experienced"
— Graham Greene (Brighton Rock)

"Who needs a face when the masks in life are endless?"
— Diliana Ovtcharova (On the Way to Imaginarium)

"The world's a headmaster who works on your faults. I don't mean in a mystical or Jesus way. More how you'll keep tripping over a hidden step, over and over, till you finally understand: Watch out for that step! Everything that's wrong with us, if we're too selfish or too Yessir, Nosir, Three bags full sir or too anything, that's a hidden step. Either you suffer the consequences of not noticing your fault forever or, one day, you do notice it, and fix it. Joke is, once you get it into your brain about that hidden step and think, Hey, life isn't such a shithouse after all again, then BUMP! Down you go, a whole new flight of hidden steps.
There are always more."
— David Mitchell

"But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but i laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me."
— 1 Corinthians 15:10

"Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container."
— Wallace Stevens

"I'm going to do something bigger and better,
bigger and better
and bolder, but first,
I'm going to do something
smaller and worse."
— JonArno Lawson

"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not no ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."
— George Eliot (final lines - Middlemarch)