"Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?" Mo had said..."As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells...and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower...both strange and familiar."
— Cornelia Funke (Inkspell)

"The mind is not a book, to be opened at will and examined at leisure. Thoughts are not etched on the inside of skulls, to be perused by an invader. The mind is a complex and many-layered thing."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix)

"You're only a man! You've not our gifts! I can tell you! Why, a woman can think of a hundred different things at once, all them contradictory!"
— Georgette Heyer (Powder and Patch)

"If there were two guys named Hambone and Flippy, which one would you think liked dolphins more? I bet you'd say Flippy, wouldn't you?

But you would be wrong. It's Hambone."
— Jack Handey

"I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line."
— Jeanette Winterson (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit)

"There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under the jurisdiction. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with. I can select what I can read and eat and study. I can choose how I'm going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life-whether I will see them as curses or opportunities. I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"Sometimes I wonder if I'm patriotic enough. Yes, I want to kill people, but on both sides."
— Jack Handey (Deep Thoughts)

"What we do comes out of who we believe we are."
— Rob Bell (Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality And Spirituality)

"I think there probably should be a rule that if you're talking about how many loaves of bread a bullet will go through, it's understood that you mean lengthwise loaves. Otherwise, it makes no sense."
— Jack Handey

"People who don’t think probably don’t have brains;
rather, they have grey fluff that’s blown into their heads by mistake."
— A.A. Milne

"Humans were constantly desperate to feel normal, to fit in. To blend in with everyone else around them, like a featureless flock of sheep.
"
— Stephenie Meyer (Midnight Sun)

"The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I'm a failure... I'm lonely... I'm a failure... I'm lonely...) and we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"Oh! you are a great deal too apt, you know, to like people in general. You never see fault in any body. All the world are good and agreeable in your eyes. I never heard you speak ill of a human being in my life."
"I would wish not to be hasty in censuring any one; but I always speak what I think."
— Jane Austen

"Real life is physical. Give me books instead. Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book. . . . an intertextual being: a book cyborg, or, considering that books aren't cybernetic, perhaps a bibliorg."
— Scarlett Thomas (The End of Mr. Y)

"We experience ourselves our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us."
— Albert Einstein

"We'd start slow, the way we always did, because the run, and the game, could go on for awhile. Maybe even forever.

That was the thing. You just never knew. Forever was so many different things. It was always changing, it was what everything was really all about. It was twenty minutes, or a hundred years, or just this instant, or any instant I wished would last and last. But there was only one truth about forever that really mattered, and that was this: it was happening. Right then, as I rant with West into that bright sun, and every moment afterwards. Look, there. Now. Now. Now."
— Sarah Dessen (The Truth About Forever)

"If you realized how powerful your thoughts are, you would never think a negative thought."
— Peace Pilgrim

"The fish dies because he opens his mouth."
— Spanish Proverb

"They say you’re meant to live everyday as if it were your last, which I’ve always thought was daft, since no one would ever pay the gas bill if that was the case, but what if it were your first?"
— Amy Jenkins (Funny Valentine)

" "Everybody has a soul." I turn to Pelly. "And that means you, too."
"I'm not so sure of that," he says. "What does it feel like?"
"Having a soul?" I look at Maxine, but she only shrugs. "I don't know," I tell Pelly. "I don't have anything to compare it to- you know, what not having a sould would feel like."
We fall into a kind of awkward silence. I don't know about the others, but I'm working on what a soul is and not coming up with a whole lot. I mean, I just always thought of it as me- what I feel like being me. But surely Pelly feels like himself, so that means he's got a soul right? But if that's not your soul, then what is?
It's weird and not something you really think about, is it?
"
— Charles de Lint (The Blue Girl)

"Strength is incomprehensible by weakness, and, therefore, the more terrible."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne (The House of the Seven Gables)

"Thoughts are divine."
— Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

"The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Breakfast of Champions)

"All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"When it comes to books and friends, it is best to have only a few but all good ones."
— Guillaume Musso (Will You Be There?)

"In comparison with capitalism, which reconstituted man as an economic animal; in comparison with Marxism, which found man an object made up of organized matter; in comparison with catholicism, which saw him as the unwitting plaything of an imperious unseen power (the Divine Will); in comparison with dialectical materialism, which saw him as unwitting plaything of the deterministic evolution of the means of production- existentialism made man a god"
— Ali Shariati

"Politeness is the art of choosing among your thoughts."
— Madame de Staël

"Trippers and askers surround me,
People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and
city I live in, or the nation,
The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old
and new,
My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues,
The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,
The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss
or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations,
Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news,
the fitful events;
These come to me days and nights and go from me again,
But they are not the Me myself.

Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.

Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with
linguists and contenders,
I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait. "
— Walt Whitman (Song of Myself)

"What Uncle Leo XIII never suspected was that his nephew's courage did not come from the need to survive or from a brute indifference inherited from his father, but from a driving need for love, which no obstacle in this world or the next would ever break."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)

"'Do not forget, do not ever forget, that you have promised me to use the money to make yourself an honest man.'

Valjean, who did not recall having made any promise, was silent. The bishop had spoken the words slowly and deliberately. He concluded with a solemn emphasis:

'Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to what is evil but to what is good. I have bought your soul to save it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.'"
— Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)

"Thoughts are slippery fish in a cold shallow stream.

If you are intent on capturing a worthwhile one, you need to stand very still, focus very hard on somewhere outside yourself, and then simply ignore it until it gets so close that it tickles your ankles.

Then, pounce."
— Vera Nazarian

"But thoughts they change and times they rearrange, I don't know who you are anymore."
— Anberlin

"Taber, William. Pamphlet: “Four Doors to Meeting for Worship.” Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Publications, 1992.

“In a somewhat different way moments of pain or frustration can be converted into brief times of secret prayer for ourselves and blessing for the problem (especially if the problem seems to be another person). In time, when we have learned to dip into the stream, even the secret words are unnecessary; we can simply reach out to touch the Living Presence while we are engaged in active business or conversation, similar to the way biofeedback techniques enable some people to alter physical functions in the midst of stressful activity.” (pages 7-8)

“Another kind of new perception in the Light is that a person may be led to explore old memories in a dramatically new way, seeing the protecting, guiding hand . . . in what had seemed an unconnected chain of circumstances, disappointments, disasters, relationships and small successes. In a similar way, this special state of consciousness sometimes opens up a whole new understanding of cause and effect, or, we might say, it develops and reinforces a whole new range of spiritual common sense.” (page 21)

“It is also true that we may leave the hush of the meeting with a heightened sensitivity to the injustice, violence, and pain all around us. Yet we can hope (and Quaker history seems to bear this out) that the same Power which allows us to suffer increased sensitivity to social evil also empowers us to reach out more creatively to touch the right spot or to pull the right handle to begin healing in lives and situations around us and to start of process of social change. Fortunately, the same Power which makes us more sensitive to evil and pain also makes us more open to an increasing awareness of beauty and spiritual resources which can enable us to be faithful followers. . . .” (pages 26-27"
— William Taber

"Kelly, Thomas R. Quaker Spirituality: Selected Writings. Edited by Douglas V. Steere. New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1984.

“To you I speak with much hesitation about suffering. . . . But there is an introduction to suffering which comes with the birthpains of Love. And in such suffering one finds for the first time how deep and profound is the nature and meaning of life. And in such suffering one sees, as if one’s eye were newly opened upon a blinding light, . . . And there too is suffering, but there, above all, is peace and victory.” (page 309)

“We are men of double personalities. We have slumbering demons within us. . . . But the case is that our surface potentialities are for selfishness and greed, for tooth and claw. . . . Surface living has brought on the world’s tragedy. . . . In the clamor and din of the day, the press of Eternity’s warm love still whispers in each of us, as our truest selves. Attend to the Eternal that he may create you and sow you deep into the furrows of the world’s suffering.” (page 310)

“In each of us the amazing and dangerous Seed of Christ is present. It is only a Seed. It is very small, like the grain of mustard seed. The Christ that is formed in us is small indeed, but he is great with eternity. But if we dare to take this awakened Seed of Christ into the midst of the world’s suffering, it will grow. That’s why the Quaker work camps are important. Take a young man or young woman in whom Christ is only dimly formed, but one in whom the Seed of Christ is alive. Put him into a distressed area, into a refugee camp, into a poverty region. Let him go into the world’s suffering, bearing this Seed with him, and in suffering it will grow, and Christ will be more and more fully formed in him. As the grain of mustard seed grew so large that the birds found shelter in it, so the man who bears an awakened Seed into the world’s suffering will grow until he becomes a refuge for many.” (pages 310-311)
"
— Thomas Kelly

"I, on the other hand, interrupt people because my thoughts fly out of my mouth. My handbag's full of rubbish. And I want to do something that matters with my life. Right now I'd like to write plays, sing in musicals, and/or rid the world of poverty, violence, cruelty, and right-wing conservative politics."
— Alison Larkin (The English American: A Novel)

"It is funny how mortals always picture us putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out. "
— C.S. Lewis (Screwtape Letters)

""Le bonheur n'est pas une chose aisee, Il est tres difficile de le trouver dans nous, et impossible de le trouver ailleurs."
TRANSLATION:
"Happiness is not easy to come by, it is hard to find it within ourselves, and impossible to find it anywhere else.""
— Nicholas Chamfort

"Places draw us to them for reasons beyond the feelings derived from the five senses...some deeper recognition is at work, felt throough an unextinguishable animal sensibility."
— Peter & Alison Smithson

"Then took the quilt out of its linen wrapper for the pleasure of the brilliant colors and the feel of the velvet. The needlework was very fine and regular. Adair hated needlework and she could not imagine sitting and stitching the fine crow’s-foot seams.
Writing was the same, the pinching of thoughts into marks on paper and trying to keep your cursive legible, trying to think of the next thing to say and then behind you on several sheets of paper you find you have left permanent tracks, a trail, upon which anybody could follow you. Stalking you through your deep woods of private thought.
"
— Paulette Jiles (Enemy Women: A Novel)

"Where thoughts go energy flows. . . "
— Melissa Lenee

"I Can't Think Properly At Night! I Reserve All My Philisophical Thoughts For When I Can Put Them To Good Use. AFTER My Morning Coffee"
— hjdehd