Christina > Christina's Quotes

“The letter had been crumpled up and tossed onto the grate. It had burned all around the edges, so the names at the top and bottom had gone up in smoke. But there was enough of the bold black scrawl to reveal that it had indeed been a love letter. And as Hannah read the singed and half-destroyed parchment, she was forced to turn away to hide the trembling of her hand.

—should warn you that this letter will not be eloquent. However, it will be sincere, especially in light of the fact that you will never read it. I have felt these words like a weight in my chest, until I find myself amazed that a heart can go on beating under such a burden.

I love you. I love you desperately, violently, tenderly, completely. I want you in ways that I know you would find shocking. My love, you don't belong with a man like me. In the past I've done things you wouldn't approve of, and I've done them ten times over. I have led a life of immoderate sin. As it turns out, I'm just as immoderate in love. Worse, in fact.

I want to kiss every soft place of you, make you blush and faint, pleasure you until you weep, and dry every tear with my lips. If you only knew how I crave the taste of you. I want to take you in my hands and mouth and feast on you. I want to drink wine and honey from you.

I want you under me. On your back.

I'm sorry. You deserve more respect than that. But I can't stop thinking of it. Your arms and legs around me. Your mouth, open for my kisses. I need too much of you. A lifetime of nights spent between your thighs wouldn't be enough.

I want to talk with you forever. I remember every word you've ever said to me.

If only I could visit you as a foreigner goes into a new country, learn the language of you, wander past all borders into every private and secret place, I would stay forever. I would become a citizen of you.

You would say it's too soon to feel this way. You would ask how I could be so certain. But some things can't be measured by time. Ask me an hour from now. Ask me a month from now. A year, ten years, a lifetime. The way I love you will outlast every calendar, clock, and every toll of every bell that will ever be cast. If only you—

And there it stopped.”
― Lisa Kleypas, A Wallflower Christmas

“It's a lot more than mind over matter. It takes relentless self discipline to schedule suffering into your day, every day.”
― David Goggins, Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds

“Denial is the ultimate comfort zone.”
― David Goggins, Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds

“Pain unlocks a secret doorway in the mind, one that leads to both peak performance, and beautiful silence.”
― David Goggins, Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds

“Those who have not found their true wealth, which is the radiant joy of Being and the deep, unshakable peace that comes with it, are beggars, even if they have great material wealth. They are looking outside for scraps of pleasure or fulfillment, for validation, security, or love, while they have a treasure within that not only includes all those things but is infinitely greater than anything the world can offer.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“You mean stop thinking altogether? No, I can’t, except maybe for a moment or two. Then the mind is using you. You are unconsciously identified with it, so you don’t even know that you are its slave. It’s almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself. The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity — the thinker. Knowing this enables you to observe the entity. The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter — beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace — arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

“To wish to be well is a part of becoming well.”
― Seneca

“Your unhappiness cannot be blamed on your past or your environment. And it isn’t that you lack competence. You just lack courage. One might say you are lacking in the courage to be happy.”
― Ichiro Kishimi, The Courage to Be Disliked: How to Free Yourself, Change Your Life and Achieve Real Happiness

“To win true freeedom you must be a slave to philosophy.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“For many men, the acquisition of wealth does not end their troubles, it only changes them”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“Per aspera ad Astra.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“Being praised essentially means that one is receiving judgment from another person as 'good.' And the measure of what is good or bad about that act is that person's yardstick. If receiving praise is what one is after, one will have no choice but to adapt to that person's yardstick and put the brakes on one's own freedom.”
― Ichiro Kishimi, The Courage to Be Disliked: How to Free Yourself, Change Your Life and Achieve Real Happiness

“One needs to think not What will this person give me? but, rather, What can I give to this person? That is commitment to the community.”
― Ichiro Kishimi, The Courage to Be Disliked: How to Free Yourself, Change Your Life and Achieve Real Happiness

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Lord, protect me from my friends; I can take care of my enemies.”
― Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power

“Greatness comes from humble beginnings; it comes from grunt work. It means you’re the least important person in the room—until you change that with results.”
― Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy

“There’s no one to perform for. There is just work to be done and lessons to be learned, in all that is around us.”
― Ryan Holiday, Ego is the Enemy: The Fight to Master Our Greatest Opponent

“The future bears down upon each one of us with all the hazards of the unknown.” The only way out is through.”
― Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy

“If you start believing in your greatness, it is the death of your creativity.” Just”
― Ryan Holiday, Ego is the Enemy: The Fight to Master Our Greatest Opponent

“There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing that you are not the voice of the mind - you are the one who hears it.”
― Michael A. Singer, The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself

“To see and feel one's beloved naked for the first time is one of life's pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow. To make love to the one true person who deserves that love is one of the few absolute rewards of being a human being, balancing all of the pain, loss, awkwardness, loneliness, idiocy, compromise, and clumsiness that go with the human condition. To make love to the right person makes up for a lot of mistakes.”
― Dan Simmons, The Rise of Endymion

“Are you paralyzed with fear? That’s a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember one rule of thumb: the more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.”
― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

“Sadness of any sort is also seductive, particularly if it seems deep-rooted, even spiritual, rather than needy or pathetic—it makes people come to you.”
― Robert Greene, The Art of Seduction

“The key to such power is ambiguity. In a society where the roles everyone plays are obvious, the refusal to conform to any standard will excite interest. Be both masculine and feminine, impudent and charming, subtle and outrageous. Let other people worry about being socially acceptable; those types are a dime a dozen, and you are after a power greater than they can imagine.”
― Robert Greene, The Art of Seduction

“When you chase anything in life, you are affirming its lack in your life.”
― Ali Binazir, The Tao of Dating: The Smart Woman's Guide to Being Absolutely Irresistible

“You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live.”
― Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf

“One reason children are capable of joy is because they take almost nothing for granted.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“You like to imagine yourself in control of your fate, consciously planning the course of your life as best you can. But you are largely unaware of how deeply your emotions dominate you. They make you veer toward ideas that soothe your ego. They make you look for evidence that confirms what you already want to believe. They make you see what you want to see, depending on your mood, and this disconnect from reality is the source of the bad decisions and negative patterns that haunt your life. Rationality is the ability to counteract these emotional effects, to think instead of react, to open your mind to what is really happening, as opposed to what you are feeling. It does not come naturally; it is a power we must cultivate, but in doing so we realize our greatest potential.”
― Robert Greene, The Laws of Human Nature