Arthur Miller II

Everything we are is at every moment alive in us.

Just remember, kid, you can quicker get back a million dollars that was stole than a word that you gave away.

Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.

Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.

Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.

Until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven.

Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!

Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be … when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am.

The two most common elements in the world are hydrogen and stupidity.

I realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life has been.

Niccolo Machiavelli II

Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.

If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.

Never was anything great achieved without danger.

The lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves.

There is no other way to guard yourself against flattery than by making men understand that telling you the truth will not offend you

The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.

It is much safer to be feared than loved because ...love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.

I'm not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it.

People should either be caressed or crushed. If you do them minor damage they will get their revenge; but if you cripple them there is nothing they can do. If you need to injure someone, do it in such a way that you do not have to fear their vengeance.

Patrick Ness

You do not write your life with words...You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do.

We are the choices we make./It's not that you should never love something so much that it can control you./It's that you need to love something that much so you can never be controlled./It's not a weakness./It's your best strength.

There is not always a good guy. Nor is there always a bad one. Most people are somewhere in between.

Without a filter, a man is just chaos walking.

Your mind will believe comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary. And your mind will punish you for believing both.

To say you have no choice is to relieve yourself of responsibility.

It's not how we fall. It's how we get back up again.

Brandon Sanderson II

By now, it is probably very late at night, and you have stayed up to read this book when you should have gone to sleep. If this is the case, then I commend you for falling into my trap. It is a writer's greatest pleasure to hear that someone was kept up until the unholy hours of the morning reading one of his books. It goes back to authors being terrible people who delight in the suffering of others. Plus, we get a kickback from the caffeine industry..

The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.

It's easy to believe in something when you win all the time...The losses are what define a man's faith.

My behavior is nonetheless, deplorable. Unfortunately, I'm quite prone to such bouts of deplorability--take for instance, my fondness for reading books at the dinner table.

Expectations were like fine pottery. The harder you held them, the more likely they were to crack.

A man can only lead when others accept him as their leader, and he has only as much authority as his subjects give to him. All of the brilliant ideas in the world cannot save your kingdom if no one will listen to them.

Men rarely see their own actions as unjustified.

To lack feeling is to be dead, but to act on every feeling is to be a child.

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

Never throw the first punch. If you have to throw the second, try to make sure they don't get up for a third.

In the end, all men die. How you lived will be far more important to the Almighty than what you accomplished.

e. e. cummings II

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.

I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart)I am never without it (anywhere
I go you go,my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing,my darling)
I fear no fate (for you are my fate,my sweet)I want no world (for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you

To be nobody but 
yourself in a world 
which is doing its best day and night to make you like 
everybody else means to fight the hardest battle 
which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.

Unbeing dead isn't being alive.

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me),
It's always our self we find in the sea.

Trust your heart if the seas catch fire, live by love though the stars walk backward.

Whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.

Haruki Murakami II

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking

Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.

I think you still love me, but we can’t escape the fact that I’m not enough for you. I knew this was going to happen. So I’m not blaming you for falling in love with another woman. I’m not angry, either. I should be, but I’m not. I just feel pain. A lot of pain. I thought I could imagine how much this would hurt, but I was wrong.”

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting.

And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.

What happens when people open their hearts?
They get better.

If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets.

Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?

Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment. 

Don't feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that.

Listen up - there's no war that will end all wars.

David Mitchell II

My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?

A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.

Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.

I believe there is another world waiting for us. A better world. And I'll be waiting for you there.

Travel far enough, you meet yourself.

You say you're 'depressed' - all i see is resilience. You are allowed to feel messed up and inside out. It doesn't mean you're defective - it just means you're human.

Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.

Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.

Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud's blowed from or who the soul'll be 'morrow? Only Sonmi the east an' the west an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' clouds.

We are only what we know, and I wished to be so much more than I was, sorely.

Robert Louis Stevenson II

Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.

I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.

I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.

There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.

We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.

Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.

You think those dogs will not be in heaven! I tell you they will be there long before any of us.

So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.

There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.

You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving.

Anais Nin II

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself

I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.

Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.

Charles Bukowski II

Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.

"Do you hate people?”
I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around.

For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.

Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you've felt that way.

I've never been lonely. I've been in a room -- I've felt suicidal. I've been depressed. I've felt awful -- awful beyond all -- but I never felt that one other person could enter that room and cure what was bothering me...or that any number of people could enter that room. In other words, loneliness is something I've never been bothered with because I've always had this terrible itch for solitude. It's being at a party, or at a stadium full of people cheering for something, that I might feel loneliness. I'll quote Ibsen, "The strongest men are the most alone." I've never thought, "Well, some beautiful blonde will come in here and give me a fuck-job, rub my balls, and I'll feel good." No, that won't help. You know the typical crowd, "Wow, it's Friday night, what are you going to do? Just sit there?" Well, yeah. Because there's nothing out there. It's stupidity. Stupid people mingling with stupid people. Let them stupidify themselves. I've never been bothered with the need to rush out into the night. I hid in bars, because I didn't want to hide in factories. That's all. Sorry for all the millions, but I've never been lonely. I like myself. I'm the best form of entertainment I have. Let's drink more wine!