Quotations

Have you read a quote on here recently that you liked and now it’s gone?

Well, lucky you!

This is my stash page for saving my sidebar quotations.  What you’re looking for should be here somewhere. I add the most recent ones at the top, oldest at the bottom.

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“No matter how bad things are, you can always make things worse.” ― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“Self-compassion is simply giving the same kindness to ourselves that we would give to others. ” – Christopher Germer

“Each of us has an inner room where we can visit to be cleansed of fear-based thoughts and feelings. This room, the holy of holies, is a sanctuary of light.” ~ Marianne Williamson

“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

FOG

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

~By Carl Sandburg

“Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a purpose.”  Garrison Keillor

“People of our time are losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating we seek to be amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state–it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or a spectacle…. Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one’s actions.” ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel

“There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.” ~ Sophia Loren

“If you have not touched the rocky wall of a canyon. If you have not heard a rushing river pound over cobblestones. If you have not seen a native trout rise in a crystalline pool beneath a shattering riffle, or a golden eagle spread its wings and cover you in shadow. If you have not seen the tree line recede to the top of a bare crested mountain. If you have not looked into a pair of wild eyes and seen your own reflection. Please, for the good of your soul, travel west.” ~ Daniel J. Rice, This Side of a Wilderness

“Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we’ve put it in an impossible situation.” ~ Margaret Mead

“Got no checkbooks, got no banks. Still I’d like to express my thanks – I’ve got the sun in the mornin’ and the moon at night.” ~ Irving Berlin

“There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.” ~ Sophia Loren

“You can close your eyes to the things you do not want to see, but you cannot close your heart to the things you do not want to feel.” – Johnny Depp

“A family is a little world created by love.”

“Time is an illusion.”  ~ Albert Einstein

“…she rejoiced as only mothers can in the good fortunes of their children.” ~ Louisa May Alcott

“Melancholy is incompatible with bicycling.” ~ James E. Starrs, The Literary Cyclist: Great Bicycling Scenes in Literature

“Most of us have trouble juggling. The woman who says she doesn’t is someone whom I admire but have never met.” ~ Barbara Walters 

“The simplest toy, one which even the youngest child can operate, is called a grandparent.”  ~ Sam Levenson

“Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived. The odors of fruits waft me to my southern home, to my childhood frolics in the peach orchard. Other odors, instantaneous and fleeting, cause my heart to dilate joyously or contract with remembered grief. Even as I think of smells, my nose is full of scents that start awake sweet memories of summers gone and ripening fields far away.” ~ Helen Keller

“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?” ~ Ernest Hemingway

“I know that it’s easier to look at death than it is to look at pain, because while death is irrevocable, and the grief will lessen in time, pain is too often merely relentless and irreversible.” ~ Robert Goolrick

“My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She’s ninety-seven now, and we don’t know where the heck she is.” ~ Ellen DeGeneres

“Dream as if you will live forever; Live as if you will die today.” ~ James Dean

“Some people see scars, and it is wounding they remember. To me they are proof of the fact that there is healing.”  ~ Linda Hogan

“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”  ~ Benjamin Franklin

“In fiction: we find the predictable boring. In real life: we find the unpredictable terrifying.”
~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Some days there won’t be a song in your heart. Sing anyway.”  ~ Emory Austin

“Play is the highest form of research.” ~ Albert Einstein

“The paper landed on the table, but the news was stapled to his chest. A tattoo.” ~ Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird,
That cannot fly.”
~ Langston Hughes

“Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day.” ~ Henri J. M Nouwen

“Time is a game played beautifully by children.” ~ Heraclitus

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the Earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.” ~  Rachel Carson

“If you get to thinking you’re a person of some influence, try ordering somebody else’s dog around.” ~ Will Rogers

“What day is it?”
“It’s today,” squeaked Piglet.
“My favorite day,” said Pooh.   ~ A.A. Milne

“Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, whispering ‘it will be happier'” ~ Tennyson

“I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.” ~Charles Dickens

“A sense of humor… is needed armor. Joy in one’s heart and some laughter on one’s lips is a sign that the person down deep has a pretty good grasp of life.” ~ Hugh Sidey

“Kids believe in Santa; adults believe in childhood.” ~ Cate Kennedy

“Ah, music,” he said, wiping his eyes. “A magic beyond all we do here!” ~ J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

“There are really only three things to learn in skiing:  how to put on your skis, how to slide downhill, and how to walk along the hospital corridor.”  ~Lord Mancroft

“Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet.” ~Roger Miller

Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmas-time.” ~ Laura Ingalls Wilder

“If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough.” ~ Meister Eckhart“

“The story of life is quicker than the wink of an eye, the story of love is hello and goodbye…until we meet again” ~ Jimi Hendrix

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight… [Breadmaking is] one of those almost hypnotic businesses, like a dance from some ancient ceremony. It leaves you filled with one of the world’s sweetest smells… there is no chiropractic treatment, no yoga exercise, no hour of meditation in a music-throbbing chapel that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread.” ~M.F. K. Fisher, The Art of Eating

“Doing something nice for myself is not selfish.” ~ Christine Morgan

“If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.” ~ Anne Bradstreet

“The only creatures that are evolved enough to convey pure love are dogs and infants.” ~ Johnny Depp

“There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.” ~Erma Bombeck

“If the road is easy, you’re likely going the wrong way.”
― Terry Goodkind

“Elections belong to the people. It’s their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.” ~Abraham Lincoln

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” ~Ray Bradbury

“Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.” ~  John Milton

“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.” ~ Edward Abbey

“Art is as natural as sunshine and as vital as nourishment.” ~ MaryAnn F. Kohl

“People could behave how they liked, but Allan considered that in general it was quite unnecessary to be grumpy if you had the chance not to.” ~ Jonas Jonasson

“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” ~John Steinbeck

“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

“An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.” ~ Henry David Thoreau

“Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers, but to be fearless in facing them. Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but for the heart to conquer it.” ~Rabindranath Tagore

“Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.” ~ Abraham Lincoln

“While we try to teach our children all about life, our children teach us what life is all about.” ~ Angela Schwindt

“Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.” ~ Plato 

“The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” ~Maya Angelou

“Most important thing in life is learning how to fall.” ~ Jeannette Walls, Half Broke Horses

“Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.” ~ Ambrose Bierce

“Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.” ~ C.S. Lewis

“The only gift is a portion of thyself.”  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

“There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

“At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.” ~ Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories

“The story of life is quicker than the wink of an eye, the story of love is hello and goodbye…until we meet again.” ~ Jimi Hendrix 

“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.” ~Marcel Proust

“There are three kinds of men. The ones that learn by readin’. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.” ~ Will Rogers

 “So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.” ~  Roald Dahl, Matilda

“For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.” ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“Everyone thinks that a girl’s dream is to find the perfect guy. That’s silly. Every girl’s dream is to get thin while eating cupcakes.” ~ Anonymous

“Like everyone else who makes the mistake of getting older, I begin each day with coffee and obituaries.” ~ Bill Cosby

“You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.” ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. 

“The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.” ~Leonardo da Vinci

“Bread, milk and butter are of venerable antiquity. They taste of the morning of the world.” ~ Leigh Hunt

“Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity.” ~Leonardo da Vinci

“You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.” ~ Franklin P. Jones

“Sometimes I wish that I was the weather, you’d bring me up in conversation forever. And when it rained, I’d be the talk of the day.” ~ John Mayer

“Men of ill judgment oft ignore the good
That lies within their hands, till they have lost it.” ~Sophocles

“I made myself a snowball
As perfect as can be.
I thought I’d keep it as a pet,
And let it sleep with me.
I made it some pajamas
And a pillow for its head.
Then last night it ran away,
But first – It wet the bed.”
~ Shel Silverstein

“Anybody can become angry — that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way — that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.” ~ Aristotle

“Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom.” ~ Francis Bacon

Each tiny move toward a more positive mindset can send ripples of positivity through our organizations our families and our communities.” ~ Shawn Achor

“There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” ~ Nelson Mandela

 “Anytime you see a turtle up on top of a fence post, you know he had some help.”~ Alex Haley

“Don’t worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.” ~Robert Fulghum

“…there ain’t no journey what don’t change you some.”
~ David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“The horse, with beauty unsurpassed, strength immeasurable and grace unlike any other, still remains humble enough to carry a man upon his back.” ~ Amber Senti

“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.” ~ Cicero

“Adversity draws men together and produces beauty and harmony in life’s relationships, just as the cold of winter produces ice-flowers on the window-panes, which vanish with the warmth.”  ~ Søren Kierkegaard

“In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.” ~Ansel Adams

“Oh yes I am wise
But it’s wisdom born of pain
Yes, I’ve paid the price
But look how much I gained
If I have to, I can do anything
I am strong
I am invincible
I am woman.” ~ Helen Reddy

“You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive. it.” ~ Bill Cosby

“Always be like a water. Float in the times of pain or dance like waves along the wind which touches its surface.” ~Santosh Kalwar

“I don’t mind making jokes, but I don’t want to look like one.” ~ Marilyn Monroe

“Mothers are all slightly insane.” ~ J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Variety’s the very spice of life, that gives it all its flavor.” ~ William Cowper

“A nail is driven out by another nail; habit is overcome by habit.” ~ Desiderius Erasmus

“Life is a dance of nature.”  ~ Toba Beta

“No chaos, no creation. Evidence: the kitchen at mealtime.” ~ Mason Cooley

“Life delivered me a catastrophe, but I found a richness of soul.” ~ Michael J. Fox

“While we try to teach our children all about life, our children teach us what life is all about.” ~ Angela Schwindt

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” ~ Terry Pratchett

“The mere telling of how a need was met is often like telling of a need, which is asking crookedly instead of straight out. But this much I will say–with every fresh need has come a fresh supply.” ~ Amy Carmichael
“If 50 million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.” ~Anatole France

“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” ~
Anne Frank

 “The wise man in the storm prays God not for safety from danger but for deliverance from fear.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson“What a feat of transmission: the emotive powers of the book, with no local habitation, pass safely from writer to reader, unmangled by printing and binding and shipping, renewed and available whenever we open it.” ~ Lynne Sharon Schwartz 

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life
 is rounded with a sleep.” 
~ William Shakespeare 

“Yes is like credit, No is like cash.”  ~ C.J. Langenhoven

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi

“Chocolate is a perfect food, as wholesome as it is delicious, a beneficent restorer of exhausted power…it is the best friend of those engaged in literary pursuits.” 
~ Justus von Liebig

“Not knowing when the dawn will come I open every door.” ~ Emily Dickinson

“Whatever you do, always give one hundred percent … unless you’re donating blood.” ~ Anonymous

“Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes,  but when you look back, everything is different.” ~ C.S. Lewis

 “When I say work I only mean writing. Everything else is just odd jobs.” —Margaret Laurence

“Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it.” ~Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“Spring shows what God can do with a drab and dirty world.” ~ Virgil Kraft

“You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.”  ~Anne Lamott

“I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures. …We tell the story to get them back, to capture the traces of footfalls through the snow.” ~ Gail Caldwell

“I’ve learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way (s)he handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights.” ~ Maya Angelou

“I am not young enough to know everything.” ~ Oscar Wilde

“Families are messy. Immortal families are eternally messy. Sometimes the best we can do is to remind each other that we’re related for better or for worse…and try to keep the maiming and killing to a minimum.” 🙂 ~ Rick Riordan

“Announcing your plans is a good way to hear god laugh” ~David Milch

A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men. ~ Roald Dahl

“Unrequited love is no more or less than a kidney stone. The size of a grain of sand, a pea, a marble or a golf ball — a crystallized chemical substance likely to cause a sharp, indeed unbearable, pain. But which always goes in the end.”
— Daphne de Vigan

“Take my love, take my land
Take me where I cannot stand
I don’t care, I’m still free
You can’t take the sky from me
Take me out to the black
Tell them I ain’t comin’ back
Burn the land and boil the sea
You can’t take the sky from me
There’s no place I can be
Since I found Serenity
But you can’t take the sky from me…”
~ Joss Whedon

“The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.” ~ M. Scott Peck

 “Today I choose life. Every morning when I wake up I can choose joy, happiness, negativity, pain… To feel the freedom that comes from being able to continue to make mistakes and choices – today I choose to feel life, not to deny my humanity but embrace it.” ~ Kevyn Aucoin

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Someone could cut through the mess in our house and look at it like one might look at rings on a tree or layers of sediment. They’d find the black-and-white hairs of a dog we had when I was six, the acid-washed jeans my mother once wore, the seven blood-soaked pillowcases from the time I skinned my knee. All our family secrets rest in endless piles.” ~ Holly Black

“Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.” ~ George Bernard Shaw

“People who say they sleep like a baby usually don’t have one.” — Leo J. Burke

“The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
— George Bernard Shaw

“Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best,” and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.”
— A.A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh)

“I would maintain that thanks is the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.” –G.K. Chesterton

“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.” — Epicurus

“Everyone should be able to do one card trick, tell two jokes, and recite three poems, in case they are ever trapped in an elevator.”—   Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid)

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”— G.K. Chesterton

 “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.”— Elie Wiesel

“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”—  John Muir

“Saying no can be the ultimate self-care.”
— Claudia Black in The 10 Women You’ll be Before You’re 35

“I am here to posit that it’s exactly in these moments of struggle and stress that we need books the most. There’s something in the pause to read that’s soothing in and of itself. A moment with a book is basic self-care, the kind of skill you pass along to your children as you would a security blanket or a churchgoing habit.” — Erin Blakemore (The Heroine’s Bookshelf: Life Lessons, from Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder)

“When anybody honks at me in traffic, I blush, wave, and shout, “Thanks for being a fan.” Being a celebrity is a 24/7 thing.”
— Jarod Kintz

“Age is a question of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” –Satchel Paige

“What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance.”
— Jane Austen

“Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion and the beginning of morality”
— Ian McEwan

“The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.”
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal Dreams)

“Happiness… she loves, to see men at work. She loves sweat, weariness, self sacrifice. She will be found not in places but lurking in cornfields and factories; and hovering over littered desks; she crowns the unconscious head of the busy child.”
– David Grayson

“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”
— Mark Twain

“In the story of Ugly Duckling, when did the Ugly Duckling stop feeling Ugly? When he realized that he was a Swan. Each of us has something Special, a swan of some sort, hidden inside somewhere. But until we recognize that it’s there, what can we do but splash around, treading water? The Wise are Who They Are. They work with what they’ve got and do what they can do.”
— Benjamin Hoff

“It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.” – John Steinbeck

“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall.”
— Mahatma Gandhi

“Be of good cheer. Do not think of today’s failures, but of the success that may come tomorrow. You have set yourselves a difficult task, but you will succeed if you persevere; and you will find a joy in overcoming obstacles. Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost.”
— Helen Keller

“You have a cough? Go home tonight; eat a whole box of Ex-Lax – tomorrow you’ll be afraid to cough.” – Pearl Williams

“I believe that parents, if they love you, will hold you up safely, above their swirling waters, and sometimes that means you’ll never know what they endured, and you may treat them unkindly, in a way you otherwise wouldn’t.” – Mitch Albom

“I’m not a bit changed–not really. I’m only just pruned down and branched out. The real ME–back here–is just the same.”  ~ L.M. Montgomery  from “Anne of Green Gables”

“It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.” ~ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

“You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.” ~ Maya Angelou

“A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.”
— C.S. Lewis

“Siblings that say they never fight are most definitely hiding something”
— Lemony Snicket

“Hanging laundry on a line is a very ordinary task. It is as ordinary as scraped knees and lost keys, as fixing the same simple dish for supper again, and again. Ordinary is most days, and Lord helps is if we overlook them.” ~ Jerusalem Jackson Greer

“A kind gesture can reach a wound that only compassion can heal.” ~ Steve Maraboli