Jess > Jess's Quotes

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus

“When I look at my life and its secret colours, I feel like bursting into tears.”
― Albert Camus, A Happy Death

“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”
― Albert Camus, L'Étranger

“There is not love of life without despair about life.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything,”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“The more I see, the less I know for sure.”
― John Lennon

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”
― Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination.”
― John Keats

“Life is but a day;
A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way
From a tree’s summit.”
― John Keats, The Complete Poems

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”
― John Keats, Endymion: A Poetic Romance

“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”
― John Keats, Letters of John Keats

“When you read, don't just consider what the author thinks, consider what you think”
― Tom Schulman, Dead Poets Society: The Screenplay

“The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind
about nothing -- to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.”
― John Keats

“Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.”
― W.H. Auden, New Year Letter

“If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.”
― W.H. Auden

“You owe it to all of us to get on with what you're good at.”
― W.H. Auden

“I will love you forever" swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. "I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday" - Is that still as easy?”
― W.H. Auden

“Songs are as sad as the listener.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.”
― Ansel Adams

“You alone are enough. You have nothing to prove to anybody.”
― Maya Angelou

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
― William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

“Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”
― Franz Kafka

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
― W.B. Yeats

“We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.”
― Ray Bradbury

“I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.
It matters that you don't just give up.”
― Stephen Hawking

“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”
― Lao Tzu

“I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.”
― Edgar Allan Poe