V > V's Quotes

“To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced
life.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything

“A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.”
― Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel

“I would gladly have climbed out of my skin and into his that night, because I believed that was what love meant.”
― Paula McLain, The Paris Wife

“Things like that happen all the time in this great big world of ours. It's like taking a boat out on a beautiful lake on a beautiful day and thinking both the sky and the lake are beautiful. So stop eating yourself up alive. Things will go where they're supposed to go if you just let them take their natural course.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted .”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“When you're frustrated with people, when they've made you angry, it just may be because you haven't given them enough time.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“So that's how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that's stolen from us--that's snatched right out of our hands--even if we are left completely changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“He didn't know how love managed to be a garden one moment and war the next.”
― Paula McLain

“You make your life with someone and you love that person and you think it's enough. But it's never enough, is it?
I couldn't say. I don't know anything about love anymore.”
― Paula McLain, The Paris Wife

“Someday you're gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You'll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing...”
― Elizabeth Gilbert

“The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.”
― Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel

“There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. 'How much do you love me?' And, 'Who's in charge?' Everything else is somehow manageable. But these two questions of love and control undo us all, trip us up and cause war, grief, and suffering.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert , Eat, Pray, Love

“I keep remembering one of my Guru's teachings about happiness. She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you're fortunate enough. But that's not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don't you will eat away your innate contentment. It's easy enough to pray when you're in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“But whenever I see it happen, I always want to say the same thing. Good luck. Because you still have a woman in front of you, my friend. And you are still a man. It’s still two human beings trying to get along, so it’s going to become complicated. And love is always complicated. But still humans must try to love each other, darling. We must get our hearts broken sometimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“One thing I do know about intimacy is that there are certain natural laws which govern the sexual experience of two people, and that these laws cannot be budged any more than gravity can be negotiated with. To feel physically comfortable with someone else's body is not a decision you can make. It has very little to do with how two people think or act or talk or even look. The mysterious magnet is either there, buried somewhere deep behind the sternum, or it is not. When it isn't there (as I have learned in the past, with heartbreaking clarity) you can no more force it to exist than a surgeon can force a patient's body to accept a kidney from the wrong donor. My friend Annie says it all comes down to one simple question: "Do you want your belly pressed against this person's belly forever --or not?”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“It all comes down to one simple question: "Do you want your belly pressed against this person's belly forever--or not?”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“I wonder if I am capable of being somebody’s sun, somebody’s everything. Am I centered enough now to be the center of somebody else’s life?”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“When asked how he could tell the difference, the saint said that you can only tell which is which by the way you feel after the creature has left your company. If you are appalled, he said, then it was a devil who had visited you. If you feel lightened, it was an angel.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“SPIT ALL OVER SOMEONE WITH A MOUTHFUL OF MILK IF YOU WANT TO FIND OUT SOMETHING ABOUT THEIR PERSONALITY FAST.”
― Jenny Holzer

“Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.”
― Alain de Botton, The Romantic Movement: Sex, Shopping, and the Novel

“Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped ... We suffer, therefore we think.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“Happiness is good for the body, but it is grief which develops the strengths of the mind.”
― Marcel Proust

“Though we sometimes suspect that people are hiding things from us, it is not until we are in love that we feel an urgency to press our inquiries, and in seeking answers, we are apt to discover the extent to which people disguise and conceal their real lives.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“It’s as simple as that. Simple and complicated, as most true things are.”
― David Levithan, Every Day