Chris > Chris's Quotes

“He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“A friend should always underestimate your virtues and an enemy overestimate your faults”
― Mario Puzo, The Godfather

“He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“To define is to limit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Ethics and morals do, in reality, have a place in law—although not in jurisprudence. It is morals that help us make the laws, but morals do not help us apply them.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“SETH: But don’t you understand, Amy? You’re wrong. Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all the things you want from a person—sexual chemistry, let’s say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty—and you get to pick three of those things. Three—that’s it. Maybe four, if you’re very lucky. The rest you have to look for elsewhere. It’s only in the movies that you find someone who gives you all of those things. But this isn’t the movies. In the real world, you have to identify which three qualities you want to spend the rest of your life with, and then you look for those qualities in another person. That’s real life. Don’t you see it’s a trap? If you keep trying to find everything, you’ll wind up with nothing.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Isn't wine prohibited here?" the boy asked. "It's not what enters men's mouths that's evil," said the alchemist. "It's what comes out of their mouths that is.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“I'm going away," he said. "And I want you to know that I'm coming back. I love you because...."

"Don't say anything," Fatima interrupted. "One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“Never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person's point of view.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“For although a man is judged by his actions, by what he has said and done, a man judges himself by what he is willing to do, by what he might have said, or might have done—a judgment that is necessarily hampered, not only by the scope and limits of his imagination, but by the ever-changing measure of his doubt and self-esteem.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“It is a feature of human nature to give what we most wish to receive.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“The difference between duty that is dreaded and duty that comes from love.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“True feeling is always circular - either circular, or paradoxical - simply because its cause and its expression are tow halves of the very same thing! Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love. Any man who disagrees with me has never been in love - not truly.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“If each of us takes personal responsibility for managing our heart’s energy (not someone else’s), imagine how the world might change.”
― Eben Alexander, Living in a Mindful Universe: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Heart of Consciousness

“The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Avarice over-rates the difference between poverty and riches: ambition, that between a private and a public station: vain-glory, that between obscurity and extensive reputation. The person under the influence of any of those extravagant passions, is not only miserable in his actual situation, but is often disposed to disturb the peace of society, in order to arrive at that which he so foolishly admires. The slightest observation, however, might satisfy him, that, in all the ordinary situations of human life, a well-disposed mind may be equally calm, equally cheerful, and equally contented. Some of those situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others: but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardour which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice; or to corrupt the future tranquillity of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse from the horror of our own injustice.”
― Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments