Ritu > Ritu's Quotes

“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.”
― Charles W. Eliot

“If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it”
― David Foster Wallace

“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”
― Mortimer J. Adler

“The longest way must have its close - the gloomiest night will wear on to a morning.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

“To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality.”
― John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice

“When I die, Dublin will be written on my heart.”
― James Joyce

“I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

“There is only one good thing in life, and that is love.”
― Guy de Maupassant, The Complete Short Stories of de Maupassant

“Fortune is not on the side of the faint-hearted.”
― Sophocles

“Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”
― William Goldman, Four Screenplays with Essays: Marathon Man - Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid - The Princess Bride - Misery

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.”
― William Ernest Henley, Echoes of Life and Death

“To be content with little is difficult; to be content with much, impossible.”
― Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Aphorisms

“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck.”
― Dalai Lama XIV

“What's the good of living if you don't try a few things?”
― Charles M. Schulz

“But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.”
― Khaled Hosseini

“I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.”
― Marguerite Duras

“Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.”
― Anne Lamott

“Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“The bravest people are the ones who don’t mind looking like cowards.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”
― Herman Melville

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

“I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they're right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“Even if you are on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.”
― Will Rogers

“I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.”
― Michael Cunningham, A Home at the End of the World

“I suspect the most we can hope for, and it's no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man