Mary > Mary's Quotes

“ The Paradoxical Commandments

People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.

If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.

If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.

The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.

Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.

The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.

People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.

What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.

People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway.

Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway.”
― Kent M. Keith, The Silent Revolution: Dynamic Leadership in the Student Council

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

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

“But the penciled sheets did not seem like nor smell like the library book so she had given it up, consoling herself with the vow that when she grew up, she would work hard, save money and buy every single book that she liked.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Earth is the insane asylum of the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.”
― Franz Kafka

“If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Essays, Letters and Miscellanies

“If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“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 went to collect the few personal belongings which...I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.”
― Colette

“Not all those who wander are lost.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
― Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature

“A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.”
― Simone de Beauvoir , La vieillesse

“Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Critic As Artist: With Some Remarks on the Importance of Doing Nothing and Discussing Everything

“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.”
― Raymond Carver

“‎Though nobody can go back and make a new beginning... Anyone can start over and make a new ending.”
― Chico Xavier

“Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.”
― Italo Calvino

“Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“We all have our time machines, don't we. Those that take us back are memories...And those that carry us forward, are dreams.”
― H.G. Wells

“Perhaps the future belongs to magic, and it's we women who control magic.”
― J. G. Ballard, Rushing to Paradise

“One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others.”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“In times of storm and tempest, of indecision and desolation, a book already known and loved makes better reading than something new and untried ... nothing is so warming and companionable.”
― Elizabeth Goudge

“She thought of the library, so shining white and new; the rows and rows of unread books; the bliss of unhurried sojourns there and of going out to a restaurant, alone, to eat.”
― Maud Hart Lovelace, Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown

“How I wish I lived in a Jane Austen novel!”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“The reading of a fine book is an uninterrupted dialogue in which the book speaks and our soul replies.”
― Andre Maurois

“Money can't buy happiness, but it can make you awfully comfortable while you're being miserable.”
― Clare Boothe Luce

“There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you.”
― Beatrix Potter