We live on a little island of the articulable, which we tend to mistake for reality itself.

― Marilynne Robinson

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

— William Faulkner

The attainment of peace is not as easy as the desire for it

— Henry Kissinger in A World Restored

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

— Samuel Johnson in The Rambler

Whoever is versed in jargon does not have to say what he thinks

—Theodor Adorno

When it comes down to it, everything that is not a law of nature is just a shared belief.

— Shane Parrish (from here)

There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding.

— Mortimer Adler

When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.

— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.

— John Muir

You wanna be the guy? Then be the fuckin guy.

— The Bear

Intelligence is what you use when you don’t know what to do.

— Jean Piaget

Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation

— Alasdair Gray

…on the Internet, nothing feels truly esoteric.

— W. David Marx

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.

– Charles Kingsley

If I have seen one thing

It is the passing preciousness of dreams;

That aspects are within us; and who seems

Most kingly is the King.

— Thomas Hardy

Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.

— William James

She died before discovering what, if anything, she was afraid of.

— Caity Weaver (in the obit she wrote about her mother)

I think people are quick to trade off freedom for convenience.

— Matt Mullenweg (from here)

He was wonderful to travel with because he’d always get up early, case the joint, then come back and pick me up, and together we’d share what he’d found to see or do.

— Diana Vreeland about her husband Reed in her 1984 memoir

Modern physics and chemistry have reduced the complexity of the sensible world to an astonishing simplicity.

— Carl Sagan

You get to be clueless in a new place only briefly. Don’t waste the chance to have truths, great and small, burst upon you.

— Peter Schjeldahl (from The Art of Dying)

But I sometimes think of my journey through adulthood to date as one of incrementally discovering the truth that there is no institution, no walk of life, in which everyone isn’t just winging it, all the time. Growing up, I assumed the newspaper on the breakfast table must be assembled by people who truly knew what they were doing; then I got a job at a newspaper.”

— Oliver Burkeman

Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.

— Wally Lamb

Children are educated by what the grown up is and not by what he says.  The popular faith in words is a veritable disease of the mind.

— Carl Jung

Children are our most valuable natural resource.

— Herbert Hoover

No matter how far you go down the wrong road, you can always turn around.

— A Amstutz

Keep learning about the world. Use your mind to the hilt. Life passes quickly and, towards the end, gathers speed like a freight train running downhill. The more you know, the more you enrich yourself and others.

— Susan Trott

If I say it's going to be done, let's do it. Let's not put it in the hands of fate. Let's not put it in the hands of someone who doesn't know me. I know me best. Then take a breath and go ahead.

— Anita Baker

It is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Circumstance has no power over you. Your inner wealth is always and forever at your command.

— Olga Rosansmith

Friendship with oneself is all-important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.

— Eleanor Roosevelt

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers.

—Charles W. Eliot

Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life

—Susan David

Every year I live I am more convinced that the waste of life lies in the love we have not given, the powers we have not used, the selfish prudence that will risk nothing, and which shirking pain, misses happiness as well. No one ever yet was the poorer in the long run for having once in a lifetime 'let out all the length of all the reins'.

— Mary Cholmondeley 

I have learned that if you must leave a place

That you have lived in and loved,

And where all of your yesterdays are buried deep -

Leave it any way except slow;

Leave it the fastest way you can.

Never turn back and believe that an hour you remember

Is a better hour because it is dead.

Past years seem safe ones, vanquished ones,

While the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.

The cloud clears though, as you enter it.

I have learned this, but like everyone,

I learned it late.

— Beryl Markham 

To the question of your life, you are the only answer. To the problems of your life, you are the only solution.

— Jo Coudert 

No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore

— Sigmund Freud

If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change.

— Thich Nhat Hanh

There are more quarrels smothered by just shutting your mouth, and holding it shut, than by all the wisdom in the world.

— Henry Ward Beecher

People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing—refusing to participate in activities that make life bad.

— Tolstoy

A wise man sees as much as he ought, not as much as he can.

— Michel Eyquem de Montaigne 

The Mad Hatter: Have I gone mad?

Alice: I’m afraid so. You’re entirely bonkers. But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are.  

Alice: “Where should I go?" The Cheshire Cat: "That depends on where you want to end up."

Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. 

― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland  

I was only 70 - what was I supposed to do? Retire??

— Diana Vreeland

The majority of us lead quiet, unheralded lives as we pass through this world. There will most likely be no ticker-tape parades for us, no monuments created in our honor. But that does not lessen our possible impact, for there are scores of people waiting for someone just like us to come along; people who will appreciate our compassion, our unique talents. Someone who will live a happier life merely because we took the time to share what we had to give. Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have a potential to turn a life around. It's overwhelming to consider the continuous opportunities there are to make our love felt.

— Leo Buscaglia

All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself

— Gore Vidal 

It’s a funny business, marriage. One sees the whole of the other person - you see even that part of them that they don't see themselves, and, presumably, they see that hidden part of you. One ends up knowing more about one's partner than they know about themselves. And it can be pretty tough to keep quiet about it, so you have to come to an arrangement, a deal, to take the rough with the smooth. But the extraordinary thing is - down there in the rough, in the long days of difficulty and pain, it there is where you find the treasure.

– The Crown

The best parties are wild mixture of people. Take some corporation presidents, add a few lovely young actresses, a bearded painter, your visiting friends from Brussels, a politician, a hairdresser, and then toss them all together.  It's especially important to have all age groups. Of course I wouldn’t want to have hippies come crawling in with unwashed feet, but all the younger people I know are bright and attractive and they have something to say and they dress like human beings. Another important party secret is I always add a splash of vodka to everything. Nobody ever knows and everybody ends up having a wonderful time.

— Joan Crawford