Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.

Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen.

Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.

The moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you've already stopped loving that person forever.

Silence makes idiots seem wise even for a minute.

I could tell you it's the heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets.

Making money isn't hard in itself... What's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one's life to.

A secret's worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept.

People talk too much. Humans aren't descended from monkeys. They come from parrots.

There are no second chances in life, except to feel remorse.

Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.

Envy is the religion of the mediocre. It comforts them, it soothes their worries, and finally it rots their souls, allowing them to justify their meanness and their greed until they believe these to be virtues. Such people are convinced that the doors of heaven will be opened only to poor wretches like themselves who go through life without leaving any trace but their threadbare attempts to belittle others and to exclude - and destroy if possible - those who, by the simple fact of their existence, show up their own poorness of spirit, mind, and guts. Blessed be the one at whom the fools bark, because his soul will never belong to them.

Bill Bryson II

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.

But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking about. I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.

Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe.

I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted, or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored.

It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.

Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.

Coming back to your native land after an absence of many years is a surprisingly unsettling business, a little like waking up from a long coma.

Isn´t it strange how wealth is always wasted on the rich?

Amit Ray

It does not matter how long you are spending on the earth, how much money you have gathered or how much attention you have received. It is the amount of positive vibration you have radiated in life that matters.

If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment, live in the breath.

Looking at beauty in the world, is the first step of purifying the mind.

Self-observation is the first step of inner unfolding.

Meditation is a way for nourishing and blossoming the divinity within you.

We all are so deeply interconnected; we have no option but to love all. Be kind and do good for any one and that will be reflected. The ripples of the kind heart are the highest blessings of the Universe.

Have love for your inner Self and everything else is done for you.

Enjoy the limitless bliss consciousness here and now. The reality of you lies much beyond your sensory perceptions and boundaries.

Truth is neither in the scripture nor in the words of prophets. It is in your heart, feel it, discover it and expand with it.

Beauty is the purest feeling of the soul. Beauty arises when soul is satisfied.

No one is to blame because there is no one other than you. Nothing is to disrespect because there is nothing other than you.

Oscar Levant

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.

I was once thrown out of a mental hospital for depressing the other patients.

The only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats allow the poor to be corrupt, too.

What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left.

Happiness isn't something you experience, it's something you remember.

Underneath this flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character.

A pun is the lowest form of humor—when you don't think of it first.

So little time and so little to do.

Once I make up my mind, I'm full of indecision.

In some situations I was difficult, in odd moments impossible, in rare moments loathsome, but at my best unapproachably great.

I'm controversial. My friends either dislike me or hate me.

There are two sides to every question: my side and the wrong side.

Blaise Pascal II

The heart has its reasons which reason knows not.

Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

You always admire what you really don't understand.

Kind words don't cost much. Yet they accomplish much.

I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise.

Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.

Il n'est pas certain que tout soit incertain.
(Translation: It is not certain that everything is uncertain.)

All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.

When one does not love too much, one does not love enough.

Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too; this is why a great and clear mind loves ardently and sees distinctly what it loves.

Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?

Richard P. Feynman

Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.

Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.

Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation.

You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing.

I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

I, a universe of atoms, an atom in the universe.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.

Physics isn't the most important thing. Love is.

Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.

I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding, they learn by some other way — by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile

I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.

Judy Blume

My only advice is to stay aware, listen carefully, and yell for help if you need it.

Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won't have as much censorship because we won't have as much fear.

Thats not a bad word, hate and war are bad words, fuck isn't.

Not everything has to have a point. Some things just are.

You can't deny they ever happened. You can't deny you ever loved them, love them still, even if loving them causes you pain.

Like my mother said, you can't go back to holding hands.

Some changes happen deep down inside of you. And the truth is, only you know about them. Maybe that's the way it's supposed to be.

Each of us must confront our own fears, must come face to face with them. How we handle our fears will determine where we go with the rest of our lives. To experience adventure or to be limited by the fear of it.

Fear is often disguised as moral outrage.

We are friends for life. When we’re together the years fall away. Isn’t that what matters? To have someone who can remember with you? To have someone who remembers how far you’ve come?

Alexandre Dumas II

There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must of felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.

Woman is sacred; the woman one loves is holy.

I am not proud, but I am happy; and happiness blinds, I think, more than pride.

All human wisdom is contained in these two words--"Wait and Hope."

Moral wounds have this peculiarity - they may be hidden, but they never close; always painful, always ready to bleed when touched, they remain fresh and open in the heart.

As a general rule...people ask for advice only in order not to follow it; or if they do follow it, in order to have someone to blame for giving it.

Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes. You must look into that storm and shout as you did in Rome. Do your worst, for I will do mine! Then the fates will know you as we know you.

Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory and the second philosophy.

For all evils there are two remedies - time and silence.

All generalizations are dangerous, even this one.

I have always had more dread of a pen, a bottle of ink, and a sheet of paper than of a sword or pistol.

Ludwig Wittgenstein II

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

The limits of my language means the limits of my world.

I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself.

The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.

Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.

I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again 'I know that that’s a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.

The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

How small a thought it takes to fill a life.

It is a dogma of the Roman Church that the existence of God can be proved by natural reason. Now this dogma would make it impossible for me to be a Roman Catholic. If I thought of God as another being like myself, outside myself, only infinitely more powerful, then I would regard it as my duty to defy him.

T. S. Eliot II

For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice

To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time

Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.

Do I dare 
Disturb the universe? 
In a minute there is time 

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.

April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.

For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons