Shannon L. Alder

“Dignity," /ˈdignitē/ noun

1. The moment you realize that the person you cared for has nothing intellectually or spiritually to offer you, but a headache. 
2. The moment you realize God had greater plans for you that don’t involve crying at night or sad Pinterest quotes.
3. The moment you stop comparing yourself to others because it undermines your worth, education and your parent’s wisdom.
4. The moment you live your dreams, not because of what it will prove or get you, but because that is all you want to do. People’s opinions don’t matter. 
5. The moment you realize that no one is your enemy, except yourself

Never rearrange your life in order to meet Mr. Darcy half way. If he couldn’t see your worth at the moment you met then he won’t two years later. May the halls of Pemberly be filled with his regrets and your life filled with thankfulness because of this revelation.

There are no coincidences in life. What person that wandered in and out of your life was there for some purpose, even if they caused you harm. Sometimes, it doesn’t make sense the short periods of time we get with people, or the outcomes from their choices. However, if you turn it over to God he promises that you will see the big picture in the hereafter. Nothing is too small to be a mistake.

I have always found it odd that people who think passive aggressively ignoring a person is making a point to them. The only point it makes to anyone is your inability to articulate your point of view because deep down you know you can’t win. It’s better to assert yourself and tell the person you are moving on without them and why, rather than leave a lasting impression of cowardness on your part in a person’s mind by avoiding them.

Rob Bell

The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God.

What we do comes out of who we believe we are.

Our tendency in the midst of suffering is to turn on God. To get angry and bitter and shake our fist at the sky and say, "God, you don't know what it's like! You don't understand! You have no idea what I'm going through. You don't have a clue how much this hurts. The cross is God's way of taking away all of our accusations, excuses, and arguments. The cross is God taking on flesh and blood and saying, "Me too.”

It’s easy to take off your clothes and have sex. People do it all the time. But opening up your soul to someone, letting them into your spirit, thoughts, fears, future, hopes, dreams… that is being naked.

Why blame the dark for being dark? It is far more helpful to ask why the light isn’t as bright as it could be

Love is giving up control. It’s surrendering the desire to control the other person. The two—love and controlling power over the other person—are mutually exclusive. If we are serious about loving someone, we have to surrender all the desires within us to manipulate the relationship.

It takes quite a spine to turn the other cheek. It takes phenomenal fortitude to love your enemy. It takes firm resolve to pray for those who persecute you.

Daisaku Ikeda

Even if things don't unfold the way you expected, don't be disheartened or give up. One who continues to advance will win in the end.

It is impossible to build one's own happiness on the unhappiness of others. This perspective is at the heart of Buddhist teachings.

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.

Leave behind the passive dreaming of a rose-tinted future. The energy of happiness exists in living today with roots sunk firmly in reality's soil.

A person, who no matter how desperate the situation, gives others hope, is a true leader.

A great human revolution in just a single individual will help achieve a change in the destiny of a nation and, further, can even enable a change in the destiny of all humankind.

It is much more valuable to look for the strength in others. You can gain nothing by criticizing their imperfections.

Reality is harsh. It can be cruel and ugly. Yet no matter how much we grieve over our environment and circumstances nothing will change. What is important is not to be defeated, to forge ahead bravely. If we do this, a path will open before us.

Nikolai Gogol II

The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.

I am fated to journey hand in hand with my strange heroes and to survey the surging immensity of life, to survey it through the laughter that all can see and through the tears unseen and unknown by anyone.

I am who I am and that's who I am.

Two turtle doves will show thee
Where my cold ashes lie
And sadly murmuring tell thee
How in tears I did die

However stupid a fools words may be, they are sometimes enough to confound an intelligent man.

We have the marvelous gift of making everything insignificant.

Perfect nonsense goes on in the world. Sometimes there is no plausibility at all.

Always think of what is useful and not what is beautiful. Beauty will come of its own accord.

There are occasions when a woman, no matter how weak and impotent in character she may be in comparison with a man, will yet suddenly become not only harder than any man, but even harder than anything and everything in the world.

But wise is the man who disdains no character, but with searching glance explores him to the root and cause of all.

Parker J. Palmer

Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.

Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic self-hood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks--we will also find our path of authentic service in the world.

Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.

I want to learn how to hold the paradoxical poles of my identity together, to embrace the profoundly opposite truths that my sense of self is deeply dependent on others dancing with me and that I still have a sense of self when no one wants to dance.

By choosing integrity, I become more whole, but wholeness does not mean perfection. It means becoming more real by acknowledging the whole of who I am.

The highest form of love is the love that allows for intimacy without the annihilation of difference.

Like a wild animal, the soul is tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy, and self-sufficient: it knows how to survive in hard places. I learned about these qualities during my bouts with depression. In that deadly darkness, the faculties I had always depended on collapsed. My intellect was useless; my emotions were dead; my will was impotent; my ego was shattered. But from time to time, deep in the thickets of my inner wilderness, I could sense the presence of something that knew how to stay alive even when the rest of me wanted to die. That something was my tough and tenacious soul.

Mary Stewart

Every life has death and every light has shadow. Be content to stand in the light and let the shadow fall where it will.

It is not true that women cannot keep secrets. Where they love, they can be trusted to death and beyond, against all sense and reason. It is their weakness, and their great strength.

I doubt if there are many normal women who can resist looking at houses. I believe, in fact, that when a house is up for sale more than half the people who look over it are not prospective buyers, but merely ladies who cannot resist exploring someone else's house.

Perhaps loneliness had nothing to do with place or circumstance; perhaps it was in you; yourself. Perhaps, wherever you were, you took your little circle of loneliness with you...

To remember love after long sleep; to turn again to poetry after a year in the market place, or to youth after resignation to drowsy and stiffening age; to remember what once you thought life could hold, after telling over with muddied and calculating fingers what it has offered; this is music, made after long silence. The soul flexes its wings, and, clumsy as any fledgling, tries the air again.

The gods only go with you if you put yourself in their path. And that takes courage.

Marla Miniano

I would have done anything for him. But these days, I don't want to do anything. I don't want to get drunk or go to a wild party or make out with random boys-not that I've ever wanted to. I don't want to watch chick flicks or eat ice cream or get a haircut or buy out half of the mall. I don't want cold, cruel revenge. I don't want to see him suffer when karma catches up with him and kick his ass. I don't even want to talk to him right now, simply because it would be awkward and pathetic and I wouldn't know what to say to him.

I am done slowing down, giving people their time and space, letting them explore their options.

. . . falling in love and trying to make someone fall in love with you and working to stay in love and forcing yourself to fall out of love with someone who will never love you back is much, much more exhausting than being alone.

Matter occupies space, and you can only have space for what really matters.

When people say they don't want to get into a relationship, it should never be taken into face value because it is never really the whole truth. It is usually a vast collection of issues and fears and complications, forced to conceal one tiny hope lurking underneath it all: that someday, somebody will come along to discover, accept and understand and strengthen that feeble hope.

Tom Hiddleston

Every villain is a hero in his own mind.

This generation has lost the true meaning of romance. There are so many songs that disrespect women. You can’t treat the woman you love as a piece of meat. You should treat your love like a princess. Give her love songs, something with real meaning. Maybe I’m old fashioned but to respect the woman you love should be a priority.

You never know what's around the corner. It could be everything. Or it could be nothing. You keep putting one foot in front of the other, and then one day you look back and you've climbed a mountain.

Never, ever, let anyone tell you what you can and can't do. Prove the cynics wrong. Pity them for they have no imagination. The sky's the limit. Your sky. Your limit. Now. Let's dance.

We all have two lives. The second one starts when we realize that we only have one.

Stay hungry, stay young, stay foolish, stay curious, and above all, stay humble because just when you think you got all the answers, is the moment when some bitter twist of fate in the universe will remind you that you very much don't.

Make love, not war. Unless you’re Loki, in which case: do what you want.

I try not to make plans. God always laughs at your plans. I’m going to keep the door open, and keep the page blank, and see what gets painted upon it.

Love your life. Because your life is what you have to give.

Orhan Pamuk

I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.

Happiness is holding someone in your arms and knowing you hold the whole world.

I don't want to be a tree; I want to be its meaning.

How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known?

The first thing I learned at school was that some people are idiots; the second thing I learned was that some are even worse.

Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow.

Tell me then, does love make one a fool or do only fools fall in love?

Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.

My unhappiness protects me from life.

Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.

Any intelligent person knows that life is a beautiful thing and that the purpose of life is to be happy," said my father as he watched the three beauties. "But it seems only idiots are ever happy. How can we explain this?

For if a lover's face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home.

Stephanie Klein

Tell the truth, or someone will tell it for you.

What we wait around a lifetime for with one person, we can find in a moment with someone else.

Stop caring what other people think. How? Understand that this is your life, not theirs, and you'll have no one to blame but yourself if things don't work out the way you'd hoped...their opinion shouldn't matter more than your own.

I was on a mission. I had to learn to comfort myself, to see what others saw in me and believe it. I needed to discover what the hell made me happy other than being in love. Mission impossible. 

Don't be so damn hard on yourself. Yeah, you screwed up. You're not perfect, fine. Learn from it. But don't punish yourself. Be kind to you, even when you screw up. You'll bounce back eventually. You'll make up for it.

If someone wants to lead a double life, they will find a way to do it. And they can promise you things until your nerves unfold and you can finally put up your feet. But it can all be a lie. There are no guarantees, even when people mean what they say at the time. People change their minds. People die. And the hurt is as real as a baseball bat.

I had no one to hold. What if this was my life, attending weddings, sitting in pews, listening to I do's, perpetually wishing for someone to share my life with? Where the fuck was the alcohol?