Inspirational Quotes

Give up to grace. The ocean takes care of each wave 'til it gets to shore. You need more help than you know.

~ Jalaluddin Rumi

Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here.

~ Leo Tolstoy

There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow- that, in short, we are all going.

~ John Green

If you give up what you want most for what you think you should want more, you'll end up miserable.

~ Brandon Sanderson

You know, the mind is a remarkable thing. Just because you can't see the wound doesn't mean it isn't hurting. It scars all the time, but it heals.

~ Jodi Picoult

It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me. When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell. And of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.

~ Aldous Huxley

To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man.

~ Aristotle

It's just that in the Deep South, women learn at a young age that when the world is falling apart around you, it's time to take down the drapes and make a new dress.

~ Karen Marie Moning

To be in your children's memories tomorrow,You have to be in their lives today.

~ Barbara Johnson

If I must fall, may it be from a high place.

~ Paulo Coelho

My heart might be bruised, but it will recover and become capable of seeing beauty of life once more. It's happened before, it will happen again, I'm sure. When someone leaves, it's because someone else is about to arrive--I'll find love again.

~ Paulo Coelho

Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy —the joy of being Salvador Dalí— and I ask myself in rapture: What wonderful things is this Salvador Dalí going to accomplish today?

~ Salvador Dalí

Life is wasted on the living.

~ Douglas Adams

You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.

~ Merce Cunningham

It takes a huge effort to free yourself from memory

~ Paulo Coelho

It doesn't matter what you do...so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.

~ Ray Bradbury

...even a tiny bit of deceit is dishonorable when it's used for selfish or cowardly reasons.- Mr. Penderwick

~ Jeanne Birdsall

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,Or what's a heaven for?

~ Robert Browning

Life is painful. It has thorns, like the stem of a rose. Culture and art are the roses that bloom on the stem. The flower is yourself, your humanity. Art is the liberation of the humanity inside yourself.

~ Daisaku Ikeda

The best way to measure how much you've grown isn't by inches or the number of laps you can now run around the track, or even your grade point average-- though those things are important, to be sure. It's what you've done with your time, how you've chosen to spend your days, and whom you've touched this year. That, to me, is the greatest measure of success.

~ R.j. Palacio

People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.

~ Emma Goldman

The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.

~ Marcus Aurelius

I hate you.I love you.You're a freak, you know that? Everyone says so. They always have.I'm trying not to be.

~ Stephen Chbosky

When I was alive, I believed — as you do — that time was at least as real and solid as myself, and probably more so. I said 'one o'clock' as though I could see it, and 'Monday' as though I could find it on the map; and I let myself be hurried along from minute to minute, day to day, year to year, as though I were actually moving from one place to another. Like everyone else, I lived in a house bricked up with seconds and minutes, weekends and New Year's Days, and I never went outside until I died, because there was no other door. Now I know that I could have walked through the walls. (...) You can strike your own time, and start the count anywhere. When you understand that — then any time at all will be the right time for you.

~ Peter S. Beagle

Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships.

~ Zora Neale Hurston

Every time you do a good deed you shine the light a little farther into the dark. And the thing is, when you're gone that light is going to keep shining on, pushing the shadows back.

~ Charles De Lint

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

~ Elmore Leonard

Remind thyself, in the darkest moments, that every failure is only a step toward success, every detection of what is false directs you toward what is true, every trial exhausts some tempting form of error, and every adversity will only hide, for a time, your path to peace and fulfillment.

~ Og Mandino

The deepest secret is that life is not a process of discovery, but a process of creation. You are not discovering yourself, but creating yourself anew. Seek therefore, not to find out Who You Are, but seek to determine Who You Want to Be.

~ Neale Donald Walsch

Life is short. If you doubt me, ask a butterfly. Their average life span is a mere five to fourteen days.

~ Ellen Degeneres

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

~ Martin Luther

I want to continue being crazy; living my life the way I dream it, and not the way the other people want it to be.

~ Paulo Coelho

I've had it with being nice, understanding, fair and hopeful. I feel like being negative all day. The chip on my shoulder could sink the QE2. I've got an attitude problem and nobody better get in my way...I'm in a bad mood and the whole stupid little world is gonna pay!

~ John Waters

Passion is a feeling that tells you: this is the right thing to do. Nothing can stand in my way. It doesn't matter what anyone else says. This feeling is so good that it cannot be ignored. I'm going to follow my bliss and act upon this glorious sensation of joy.

~ Wayne W. Dyer

Children betrayed their parents by becoming their own people.

~ Leslye Walton

We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, handsome, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?

~ Marianne Williamson

What did you do?” I mumble. He is just a few feet away from me now, but not close enough to hear me. As he passes me he stretches out his hand. He wraps it around my palm and squeezes. Squeezes, then lets go. His eyes are bloodshot; he is pale. “What did you do?” This time the question tears from my throat like a growl. I throw myself toward him, struggling against Peter’s grip, though his hands chafe. “What did you do?” I scream. “You die, I die too” Tobias looks over his shoulder at me. “I asked you not to do this. You made your decision. These are the repercussions.

~ Veronica Roth

Your daughter is ugly.She knows loss intimately,carries whole cities in her belly.As a child, relatives wouldn’t hold her.She was splintered wood and sea water.They said she reminded them of the war.On her fifteenth birthday you taught herhow to tie her hair like rope and smoke it over burning frankincense.You made her gargle rosewaterand while she coughed, saidmacaanto girls like you shouldn’t smellof lonely or empty.You are her mother.Why did you not warn her,hold her like a rotting boatand tell her that men will not love herif she is covered in continents,if her teeth are small colonies,if her stomach is an islandif her thighs are borders?What man wants to lay down and watch the world burn in his bedroom? Your daughter’s face is a small riot,her hands are a civil war,a refugee camp behind each ear,a body littered with ugly thingsbut God, doesn’t she wearthe world well.

~ Warsan Shire

There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard. There are not more than five primary colours, yet in combinationthey produce more hues than can ever been seen.There are not more than five cardinal tastes, yet combinations ofthem yield more flavours than can ever be tasted.

~ Sun Tzu

No DifferenceSmall as a peanut,Big as a giant,We're all the same sizeWhen we turn off the light.Rich as a sultan,Poor as a mite,We're all worth the sameWhen we turn off the light.Red, black or orange,Yellow or white, We all look the sameWhen we turn off the light.So maybe the way, To make everything rightIs for god to just reach outAnd turn off the light!

~ Shel Silverstein