Robin > Robin's Quotes

“To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”
― Mary Oliver

“If your plan is for one year plant rice. If your plan is for ten years plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years educate children. ”
― Confucius

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.”
― United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights

“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.”
― Pema Chodron

“A guy walks up to me and asks, "What's Punk?". So I kick over a garbage can and say. "That's punk!". So he kicks over the garbage can and says, "That's Punk?", and I say, "No that's trendy!”
― Billie Joe Armstrong

“Do you know how to pick a lock?'
'Not in the least, I'm afraid.'
'I often wonder what we go to school for,' said Wimsey.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

“When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.”
― Julian Barnes, A Life with Books

“You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.”
― Woodrow Wilson

“Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”
― Reinhold Niebuhr, The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses

“Mom says each of us has a veil between ourselves and the rest of the world, like a bride wears on her wedding day, except this kind of veil is invisible. We walk around happily with these invisible veils hanging down over our faces. The world is kind of blurry, and we like it that way. But sometimes our veils are pushed away for a few moments, like there's a wind blowing it from our faces. And when the veil lifts, we can see the world as it really is, just for those few seconds before it settles down again. We see all the beauty, and cruelty, and sadness, and love. But mostly we are happy not to. Some people learn to lift the veil themselves. Then they don't have to depend on the wind anymore.”
― Rebecca Stead, When You Reach Me

“There was a red button on the wall labelled EMERGENCY, but no button labelled BEWILDERMENT.”
― Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things

“Lamentably, it is a historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait

“If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it's not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That's why it's your path.”
― Joseph Campbell

“The optimist sees the glass half full. The pessimist sees the glass half empty. The chemist sees the glass completely full, half in liquid state and half in gaseous, both of which are probably poisonous.”
― Weike Wang, Chemistry

“We are much too much inclined in these days to divide people into permanent categories, forgetting that a category only exists for its special purpose and must be forgotten as soon as that purpose is served.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human? Penetrating, Sensible and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
― Howard Thurman, The Living Wisdom of Howard Thurman: A Visionary for Our Time