Emma > Emma's Quotes

“It is dreadful when something weighs on your mind, not to have a soul to unburden yourself to. You know what I mean. I tell my piano the things I used to tell you.”
― Frédéric Chopin

“So this is how a person can come to despise himself-knowing he's doing the wrong thing and not being able to stop.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.”
― Alan Watts

“The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to be important.”
― John Dewey

“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

“You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meanings of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales.”
― Alan W. Watts, Wisdom Of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience.”
― John Dewey

“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.”
― John Keats

“I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Your body does not eliminate poisons by knowing their names. To try to control fear or depression or boredom by calling them names is to resort to superstition of trust in curses and invocations. It is so easy to see why this does not work. Obviously, we try to know, name, and define fear in order to make it “objective,” that is, separate from “I.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“Problem #1: Winners and losers have the same goals.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

“May you live every day of your life.”
― Jonathan Swift

“There are perhaps many causes worth dying for, but to me, certainly, there are none worth killing for.”
― Albert Dietrich, Army GI, Pacifist CO: The World War II Letters of Frank Dietrich and Albert Dietrich

“I am not upset that you lied to me, I am upset that from now on I cannot believe you.”
― Fredrich Nietzche

“You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.”
― Terence McKenna

“What really ruins our character is the fact that none of us looks back over his life.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
― Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“Wild animals run from the dangers they actually see, and once they have escaped them worry no more. We however are tormented alike by what is past and what is to come. A number of our blessings do us harm, for memory brings back the agony of fear while foresight brings it on prematurely. No one confines his unhappiness to the present.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
― George Eliot

“I am afraid. Not of life, or death, or nothingness, but of wasting it as if I had never been.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“The first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It’s the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows.

The problem is not slipping up; the problem is thinking that if you can not do something perfectly, then you shouldn’t do it at all...”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

“It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“Why am I always looking at life through a window?”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“I love fools'experiments,
I am always making them.”
― Charles Darwin

“But I am very poorly today & very stupid & I hate everybody & everything. One lives only to make blunders.”
― Charles Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Volume 9: 1861

“There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.”
― Charles Darwin

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives,
not the most intelligent that survives.
It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
― Charles Darwin

“The greatest danger to our future is apathy.”
― Jane Goodall