George Bernard Shaw II

Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.

You see things; you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.

There is no love sincerer than the love of food.

People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them.

H. L. Mencken II

The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.

Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.

If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.

I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.

Rene Descartes II

I think; therefore I am.

The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.

Common sense is the most widely shared commodity in the world, for every man is convinced that he is well supplied with it.

I suppose therefore that all things I see are illusions; I believe that nothing has ever existed of everything my lying memory tells me. I think I have no senses. I believe that body, shape, extension, motion, location are functions. What is there then that can be taken as true? Perhaps only this one thing, that nothing at all is certain.

And thus, the actions of life often not allowing any delay, it is a truth very certain that, when it is not in our power to determine the most true opinions we ought to follow the most probable.

Doubt is the origin of wisdom.

Conquer yourself rather than the world.

It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well.

Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.

The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.

G. K. Chesterton II

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.

There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.

Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.

There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.

The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.

Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

Elie Wiesel II

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.

To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.

Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.

When a person doesn’t have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity. A person can almost be defined by his or her attitude toward gratitude.

One person of integrity can make a difference.

I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions.

No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.

Which is worse? Killing with hate or killing without hate?

Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking and loving and dreaming. At night everything is more intense, more true. The echo of words that have been spoken during the day takes on a new and deeper meaning. The tragedy of man is that he doesn't know how to distinguish between day and night. He says things at night that should only be said by day.

Jay Asher

You don’t know what goes on in anyone’s life but your own. And when you mess with one part of a person’s life, you’re not messing with just that part. Unfortunately, you can’t be that precise and selective. When you mess with one part of a person’s life, you’re messing with their entire life. Everything. . . affects everything.

No one knows for certain how much impact they have on the lives of other people. Oftentimes, we have no clue. Yet we push it just the same.

You can't stop the future
You can't rewind the past
The only way to learn the secret
...is to press play.

But you can't get away from yourself. You can't decide not to see yourself anymore. You can't decide to turn off the noise in your head.

If my love were an ocean,
there would be no more land.
If my love were a desert,
you would see only sand.
If my love were a star-
late at night, only light.
And if my love could grow wings,
I'd be soaring in flight.

Sometimes we have thoughts that even we don't understand. Thoughts that aren't even true—that aren't really how we feel—but they're running through our heads anyway because they're interesting to think about.

You can't go back to how things were. How you thought they were. All you really have is...now.

Everything...affects everything.

Eoin Colfer

Confidence is ignorance. If you're feeling cocky, it's because there's something you don't know.

It's like learning to ride a unicorn. You never forget.

If I win, I'm a prodigy. If I lose, then I'm crazy. That's the way history is written.

If you were me, then I'd be you, and if I were you, then I'd hide somewhere far away.

I never tell anyone exactly how clever I am. They would be too scared.

Trust me. I'm a genius.

Being in command means making tough decisions. Not being in command means shutting up and doing what you're told.

Let us proceed under the assumption that the fairy folk do exist, and that I am not a gibbering moron.

You know you're in trouble when your own imagination starts punishing you.

Good. Illegal is always faster.

Listen to me, goblin. You're stupid, let's accept that and move on.

Lana Del Ray

When you’re an introvert like me and you’ve been lonely for a while, and then you find someone who understands you, you become really attached to them. It’s a real release.

Live fast. Die young. Be wild. Have fun.

We have nothing to lose, nothing to gain, nothing we desired anymore- except to make our lives into a work of art.

Every time I close my eyes, it's like a dark paradise. No one compares to you, but there's no you, except in my dreams tonight.

No one compares to you, but there's no you, except in my dreams tonight.

I was always an unusual girl. My mother told me I had a chameleon soul, no moral compass pointing due north, no fixed personality; just an inner indecisiveness that was as wide and as wavering as the ocean.

I've got a war in my mind.

I used to wonder if it was God's plan that I should be alone for so much of my life. But I found peace. I found happiness within people and the world.

Gretchen Rubin

The days are long, but the years are short.

Never start a sentence with the words 'No offense'.

Laughter is more than just a pleasurable activity...When people laugh together, they tend to talk and touch more and to make eye contact more frequently.

One of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy. One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy yourself.

What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while.

Nothing,' wrote Tolstoy, 'can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.

Look for happiness under your own roof.

The belief that unhappiness is selfless and happiness is selfish is misguided. It's more selfless to act happy. It takes energy, generosity, and discipline to be unfailingly lighthearted, yet everyone takes the happy person for granted. No one is careful of his feelings or tries to keep his spirits high. He seems self-sufficient; he becomes a cushion for others. And because happiness seems unforced, that person usually gets no credit.

When I find myself focusing overmuch on the anticipated future happiness of arriving at a certain goal, I remind myself to 'Enjoy now'. If I can enjoy the present, I don't need to count on the happiness that is (or isn't) waiting for me in the future".

Irène Némirovsky

Waiting is erotic.

Deep within everyone's heart there always remains a sense of longing for that hour, that summer, that one brief moment of blossoming. For several weeks or months, rarely longer, a beautiful young woman lives outside ordinary life. She is intoxicated. She feels as if she exists beyond time, beyond its laws; she experiences not the monotonous succession of days passing by, but moments of intense, almost desperate happinness.

“How sad the world is, so beautiful yet so absurd...

Important events — whether serious, happy or unfortunate — do not change a man's soul, they merely bring it into relief, just as a strong gust of wind reveals the true shape of a tree when it blows off all its leaves. Such events highlight what is hidden in the shadows, they nudge the spirit towards a place where it can flourish.

All the light of the day, fleeing the earth, seemed for one brief moment to take refuge in the sky; pink clouds spiralled round the full moon that was as green as pistachio sorbet and as clear as glass; it was reflected in the lake.

When you love someone as much as that, you don't believe they can die. You think your love protects them.

Paris had its sweetest smell, the smell of chestnut trees in bloom and of petrol with a few grains of dust that crack under your teeth like pepper. In the darknes the danger seemed to grow. You could smell the suffering in the air, in the silence. Everyone looked at their house and thought, "Tomorrow it will be in ruins, tomorrow I'll have nothing left.