Nobody Particular > Nobody's Quotes

“If you judge people, you have no time to love them.”
― Mother Teresa

“Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”
― Mother Teresa

“ 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

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Literary Remains

“I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.”
― Jean Giraudoux, Amphitryon 38

“Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.”
― Howard Nemerov

“To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.”
― Abraham Maslow

“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

“After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations.”
― Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

“It isn't what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it.”
― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence People

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
― William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

“A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“Sorrow is how we learn to love. Your heart isn't breaking. It hurts because it's getting larger. The larger it gets, the more love it holds.”
― Rita Mae Brown, Riding Shotgun

“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.”
― Mark Twain

“It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“They say when you are missing someone that they are probably feeling the same, but I don't think it's possible for you to miss me as much as I'm missing you right now”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Contradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up.”
― Wyndham Lewis

“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

“Grammar is a piano I play by ear.”
― Joan Didion, Joan Didion: Essays & Conversations

“The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.”
― Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

“Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“Not knowing when the dawn will come
I open every door.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“I want the following word: splendor, splendor is fruit in all its succulence, fruit without sadness. I want vast distances. My savage intuition of myself.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“Look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time: Thus is your time on earth filled with glory.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.”
― Jane Austen, Pride And Prejudice

“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.”
― Francis Bacon, The Oxford Francis Bacon IV: The Advancement of Learning