Mel > Mel's Quotes

“Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head.”
― Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The greatest temptations are not those that solicit our consent to obvious sin, but those that offer us great evils masking as the greatest goods.”
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

“La sincérité toujours surmonte les obstacles.”
― Vercors, Le Silence de la mer

“What makes me myself rather than anyone else is the very fact that I am poised between two countries, two or three languages, and several cultural traditions. It is precisely this that defines my identity. Would I exist more authentically if I cut off a part of myself”
― Amin Maalouf, In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong

“Never give up on what you really want to do. The person with big dreams is more powerful than one with all the facts.”
― H. Jackson Brown Jr., Life's Little Instruction Book: 511 Suggestions, Observations, and Reminders on How to Live a Happy and Rewarding Life

“You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”
― Sharon Salzberg

“There is no pretending," Jace said with absolute clarity. "I love you, and I will love you until I die, and if there is life after that, I'll love you then.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Glass

“Do not apologize for crying. Without this emotion, we are only robots.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“Not everyone can be a fairy-tale hero.” He pauses a moment, then adds, “The world needs villains too.”
― Belle Aurora, Raw

“What did he mean by "society"? The plural of human beings?”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“Monsters don't always lurk in the shadows. Sometimes they hide in plain sight.”
― Belle Aurora, Raw

“Who were you before people started telling you who you should be?”
― Belle Aurora, Raw

“Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.”
― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

“Everyone had something to offer and nobody appeared to have much money. Even the successful seemed to have just enough to live like extravagant bums.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“What, I wondered, did he mean by “society”? The plural of human beings? Where was the substance of this thing called “society”? I had spent my whole life thinkng that society must certainly be something powerful, harsh and severe, but to hear Horiki talk made the words “Don’t you mean yourself?” come to the tip of my tongue. But I held the words back, reluctant to anger him.
‘Society won’t stand for it.’
‘It’s not society. You’re the one who won’t stand for it - right?’
‘If you do such a thing society will make you suffer for it’
‘It’s not society. It’s you, isn’t it?’
‘Before you know it, you’ll be ostracized by society.’
‘It’s not society. You’re going to do the ostracizing, aren’t you?’
Words, words of every kind went flitting through my head. “Know thy particular fearsomeness, thy knavery, cunning and witchcraft!” What I said, however, as I wiped the perspiration from my face with a handkerchief was merely, “You’ve put me in a cold sweat!” I smiled.
From then on, however, I came to hold, almost as a philosophical conviction, the belief: What is society but an individual?”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretchedly timid and am forever trying to read the expression on people's faces.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“The modern fitness scene is largely defined by the presence of pumped up, muscle-bound bodybuilders, expensive exercise machines, and steroids.

It's wasn't always this ways.

There was a time when men trained to become inhumanly strong using nothing but their own bodyweight. No weights. No machines. No drugs. Nothing”
― Paul "Coach" Wade, Convict Conditioning: How to Bust Free of All Weakness Using the Lost Secrets of Supreme Survival Strength

“The average gym junkie today is all about appearance, not ability. Flash, not function. These men may have big, artificially pumped up limbs, but all that the size is in the muscle tissue; their
tendons and joints are weak . Ask the average muscleman to do a deep one-leg squat-ass-to-floor-style-and his knee ligaments would probably snap in two. What strength most bodybuilders do have, they cannot use in a coordinated way; if you asked them to walk on their hands they'd fall flat on their faces.”
― Paul "Coach" Wade, Convict Conditioning: How to Bust Free of All Weakness Using the Lost Secrets of Supreme Survival Strength

“I understood that what matters is the work: the string of words propelled by God becoming a poem, the weave of color and graphite scrawled upon the sheet that magnifies His motion. To achieve within the work a perfect balance of faith and execution. From this state of mind comes a light, life-changed.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“The human being is designed for many things. Loneliness is not one of them. We are not meant to go through this life alone.”
― Liz Tucillo

“Our time is so precious. You're holding out for someone who you really want to spend all your time with. Otherwise, there's no point to it.”
― Liz Tucillo

“The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded even by happiness”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“I believe that there is an equality to all humanity. We all suck.”
― Bill Hicks

“People talk of “social outcasts.” The words apparently denote the miserable losers of the world, the vicious ones, but I feel as though I have been a “social outcast” from the moment I was born. If ever I meet someone society has designated as an outcast, I invariably feel affection for him, an emotion which carries me away in melting tenderness.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“Let children learn about different faiths, let them notice their incompatibility, and let them draw their own conclusions about the consequences of that incompatibility. As for whether they are ‘valid,’ let them make up their own minds when they are old enough to do so.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“If you don't understand how something
works, never mind: just give up and say God did it. You don't
know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don't understand
how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis
a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don't go
to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“1. Everyone is entitled to their opinion about the things they read (or watch, or listen to, or taste, or whatever). They’re also entitled to express them online.

2. Sometimes those opinions will be ones you don’t like.

3. Sometimes those opinions won’t be very nice.

4. The people expressing those may be (but are not always) assholes.

5. However, if your solution to this “problem” is to vex, annoy, threaten or harrass them, you are almost certainly a bigger asshole.

6. You may also be twelve.

7. You are not responsible for anyone else’s actions or karma, but you are responsible for your own.

8. So leave them alone and go about your own life."

[Bad Reviews: I Can Handle Them, and So Should You (Blog post, July 17, 2012)]”
― John Scalzi

“If you achieve good results using a poor method, isn't that a much greater achievement than starting from better methods.”
― Gen Urobuchi 虚淵 玄