Dianne Alvine > Dianne's Quotes

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”
― Aldous Huxley, Collected Essays

“You know, my young friend, I will be ninety years old next year, and life is still a constant surprise to me. We never know what will happen next, what we will see, and what important person will come into our life, or what important person we will lose. Life is change, constant change, and unless we are lucky enough to find comedy in it, change is nearly always a drama, if not a tragedy. But after everything, and even when the skies turn scarlet and threatening, I still believe that if we are lucky enough to be alive, we must give thanks for the miracle of every moment of every day, no matter how flawed.”
― Mark T. Sullivan, Beneath a Scarlet Sky

“Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.”
― Mark Strand, Selected Poems of Mark Strand

“Gratitude sets in, the moment we pause to appreciate all the goodness in our lives, today and everyday.”
― Cyndee Melzow

“I've learned a lot this year.. I learned that things don't always turn our the way you planned, or the way you think they should. And I've learned that there are things that go wrong that don't always get fixed or get put back together the way they were before. I've learned that some broken things stay broken, and I've learned that you can get through bad times and keep looking for better ones, as long as you have people who love you.”
― Jennifer Weiner, Good in Bed

“… nobody loves you the way your dog loves you. When you’re with your dog, you may mentally be elsewhere, but your dog is not; your dog is always right there with you. When you’re gone, your dog is waiting for you to come back, so it can be with you again. Because being with you makes your dog happier than anything else.”
― Dave Barry, Lessons From Lucy: The Simple Joys of an Old, Happy Dog

“There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren’t even a memory, you’re only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, 'There now, hang on, you'll get over it.' Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees

“Most of us are not raised to actively encounter our destiny. We may not know that we have one. As children, we are seldom told we have a place in life that is uniquely ours alone. Instead, we are encouraged to believe that our life should somehow fulfill the expectations of others, that we will (or should) find our satisfactions as they have found theirs. Rather than being taugh to ask ourselves who we are, we are schooled to ask others. We are, in effect, trained to listen to others' versions of ourselves. We are brought up in our life as told to us by someone else! When we survey our lives, seeking to fulfill our creativity, we often see we had a dream that went glimmering because we believed, and those around us believed, that the dream was beyond our reach. Many of us would have been, or at least might have been, done, tried something, if...
If we had known who we really were.”
― Julia Cameron

“The ability to keep your mouth shut is usually a sign of intelligence”
― Holly Goldberg Sloan, Counting by 7s

“O Divine Master, grant that
I may not so much seek
To be consoled, as to console;
Not so much to be understood as
To understand; not so much to be
Loved as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning, that we are pardoned”
― Saint Francis of Assisi

“I can stop wasting the dwindling minutes of the only life I'll ever have obsessing over past events I can't do anything about, and future events that might never happen. I can teach myself to focus on the only time that matters, which is this moment right now, and use this precious time to appreciate, to cherish, the people I love.”
― Dave Barry, Lessons From Lucy: The Simple Joys of an Old, Happy Dog

“Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations that've long since bought and paid for, the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pocket, and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and the information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them.”
― George Carlin

“Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.”
― Adrienne Rich

“human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others. These values are considered "intrinsic" to human happiness and far outweigh "extrinsic" values such as beauty, money and status.”
― Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

“Feminism means having a choice. And feminism doesn't care which choices you make, either. Just that you have them. The point has never been to establish some principled refusal to give yourself to another human being. The point is to make sure you can give yourself--or not give yourself--of your free will.”
― Rachel Kadish

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”
― Pablo Picasso

“What is your legacy? "Never measure your life by possessions, numbers and materialism. Measure it by the hearts you touch, the smiles you create, and the love you share." L.C. Tang”
― L.C. Tang

“The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved.”
― Mother Teresa

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”
― John Donne, No man is an island – A selection from the prose

“loving friendship is able to endure everything; it refuses no burden.”
― Francesco Petrarca, Die Besteigung des Mont Ventoux

“The thing that eventually strikes you about the death of someone you love is the permanence. When that hits, there is an overpowering sense of loneliness and aloneness. Those wounds do not remain raw, not forever, but they do remain.”
― Peter Gethers, The Cat Who'll Live Forever: The Final Adventures of Norton, the Perfect Cat, and His Imperfect Human

“He hesitated then, anticipating the panic that came when there was nothing left to read”
― Donna Leon, Earthly Remains

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

“If someone tried to take control of your body and make you a slave, you would fight for freedom. Yet how easily you hand over your mind to anyone who insults you. When you dwell on their words and let them dominate your thoughts, you make them your master.”
― Epictetus, The Manual: A Philosopher's Guide to Life

“The best portion of a good man's life: his little, nameless unremembered acts of kindness and love.”
― William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads

“Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.”
― Kahlil Gibran

“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov