“It is astonishing how short a time it takes for very wonderful things to happen.”
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
“Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering — because you can’t take it all in at once.”
“Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different?”
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
“I never felt the urge to jump off a bridge, but there are times I have wanted to jump out of my life, out of my skin.”
“Don’t be yourself. Be someone a little nicer.”
“Each second we live is a new and unique moment of the universe, a moment that will never be again. And what do we teach our children? We teach them that two and two make four, and that Paris is the capital of France. When will we also teach them what they are? We should say to each of them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are unique. In all the years that have passed, there has never been another child like you. Your legs, your arms, the way you move. You may become a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, a Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything. Yes, you are a marvel. And when you grow up, can you then harm another who is, like you, a marvel? You must work, we must all work, to make the world worthy of its children.”
- Pablo Picasso
“You can tell how smart people are by what they laugh at.”
“We think we know what we are doing. We have always thought so. We never seem to acknowledge that we have been wrong in the past, and so might be wrong in the future. Instead, each generation writes off earlier errors as the result of bad thinking by less able minds - and then confidently embarks on fresh errors of its own.”
- Michael Crichton
“There is neither happiness nor unhappiness in this world; there is only the comparison of one state with another. Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss. It is necessary to have wished for death in order to know good it is to live…the sum of all human wisdom will be contained in these two words: Wait and Hope.”
- Alexandre Dumas
“Procrastination is my sin. It brings me naught but sorrow. I know that I should stop it. In fact, I will—tomorrow.”
“For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him.”
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I wonder how many people I’ve looked at all my life and never seen.”
