Karen Chung > Karen's Quotes

“This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude.”
― William James

“Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“A word to the wise ain't necessary, it's the stupid ones who need advice.”
― Bill Cosby

“I would always rather be happy than dignified.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup,
They slither wildly as they slip away across the universe
Pools of sorrow, waves of joy are drifting through my open mind,
Possessing and caressing me.
Images of broken light which dance before me like a million eyes,
They call me on and on across the universe,
Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letter box
They tumble blindly as they make their way
Across the universe
Sounds of laughter shades of love are
Ringing through my open ears inciting and inviting me
Limitless undying love which shines around me like a
Million suns, and calls me on and on
Across the universe”
― John Lennon

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“it’s true that frequency doesn’t have to be a daily frequency; what’s most important is consistency. The more widely spaced your work times, however, the less you reap all of these benefits.”
― Jocelyn K. Glei, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

“Love is pretty much a decision anyway. Just like happiness. You can decide to either love someone or not, be happy or not. The rest is just commitment to the idea.”
― Caprice Crane, Stupid and Contagious

“Frequency keeps the pressure off. If you’re producing just one page, one blog post, or one sketch a week, you expect it to be pretty darned good, and you start to fret about quality.”
― Jocelyn K. Glei, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

“I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.”
― Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

“I have never known any distress that an hour’s reading did not relieve.”
― Montesquieu

“The best teachers impart knowledge through sleight of hand, like a magician.”
― Kate Betts, My Paris Dream: An Education in Style, Slang, and Seduction in the Great City on the Seine

“You will never change your life until you change something you do daily.”
― John C. Maxwell, The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth: Live Them and Reach Your Potential

“Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it—not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right.”
― J.D. Vance

“I remember watching an episode of The West Wing about education in America, which the majority of people rightfully believe is the key to opportunity. In it, the fictional president debates whether he should push school vouchers (giving public money to schoolchildren so that they escape failing public schools) or instead focus exclusively on fixing those same failing schools. That debate is important, of course—for a long time, much of my failing school district qualified for vouchers—but it was striking that in an entire discussion about why poor kids struggled in school, the emphasis rested entirely on public institutions. As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, “They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.”
― J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

“What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault.”
― J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

“It may well be that individuals who are attracted into linguistics have a certain talent for metalinguistic reflection—a delight in constructing ungrammatical sentences, finding curious ambiguities and implicatures, hearing and imitating accents, and the like—and that professional training as a linguist only amplifies this proclivity. It would then be no surprise that linguists’ sense of what is interesting in language is different from that of our friends in biology, economics, and dentistry. It is just that we linguists have made the mistake of assuming everyone else is like us.”
― Ray S. Jackendoff, Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution

“One day you will ask me which is more important? My life or yours? I will say mine and you will walk away not knowing that you are my life.”
― Khalil Gibran

“The difference between genius and stupidity is: genius has its limits.”
― Alexandre Dumas-fils

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
― Buckminster Fuller

“If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree. ”
― Michael Crichton

“Why do we write?
"To make suffering endurable
To make evil intelligible
To make justice desirable
and . . . to make love possible”
― Roger Rosenblatt, Unless It Moves the Human Heart: The Craft and Art of Writing

“Each thinking mind is a political mind.”
― Zaman Ali, HUMANITY Understanding Reality and Inquiring Good

“It is by now proverbial that every proverb has its opposite. For every Time is money there is a Stop and smell the roses. When someone says You never stand in the same river twice someone else has already replied There is nothing new under the sun. In the mind's arithmetic, 1 plus -1 equals 2. Truths are not quantities but scripts: Become for a moment the mind in which this is true.”
― James Richardson, Interglacial: New and Selected Poems & Aphorisms