Claire > Claire's Quotes

“Threats are the last resort of a man with no vocabulary.”
― Tamora Pierce, Lady Knight

“Every now and then I like to do as I'm told, just to confuse people.”
― Tamora Pierce, Melting Stones

“
Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“But then I have always been somewhat of a square peg in a round hole.”
― Cressida Cowell, How to Speak Dragonese

“However small we are, we should always fight for what we believe to be right. And I don’t mean fight with the power of our fists or the power of our swords…I mean the power of our brains and our thoughts and our dreams.

And as small and quiet and unimportant as our fighting may look, perhaps we might all work together…and break out of the prisons of our own making. Perhaps we might be able to keep this fierce and beautiful world of ours as free for all of us as it seemed to be on that blue afternoon of my childhood.”
― Cressida Cowell, How to Speak Dragonese

“I was not a natural. . . . This is the story of becoming . . . the Hard Way.”
― Cressida Cowell, How to Train Your Dragon

“We're all snatching precious moments from the peaceful jaws of time.”
― Cressida Cowell

“For a Hero cannot triumph all the time. Sometimes he will be defeated, and how he faces that defeat is a test of his character.”
― Cressida Cowell, How to Steal a Dragon's Sword

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
― Margaret Atwood

“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Nothing is so strong as gentleness. Nothing is so gentle as real strength.”
― Ralph W. Sockman

“The test of courage comes when we are in the minority. The test of tolerance comes when we are in the majority.”
― Ralph W. Sockman

“The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.”
― Eric Schmidt

“A tragedy need not have blood and death; it's enough that it all be filled with that majestic sadness that is the pleasure of tragedy.”
― Jean Racine

“We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin.”
― André Berthiaume

“Love feels no burden, thinks nothing of its trouble, attempts what is above its strength, pleads no excuse for impossibility, for it thinks all things are lawful for itself and all things are possible”
― Thomas A. Kempis

“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“When you meet a master swordsman, show him your sword. When you meet a man who is not a poet, do not show him your poem.

Robert Greene rephrase:
When you meet a swordsman, draw your sword. Do not recite poetry to one who is not a poet.”
― Lin-Chi

“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.”
― Galileo

“It's hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.”
― Sally Kempton

“People will believe a big lie sooner than a little one, and if you repeat it frequently enough, people will sooner or later believe it.”
― Walter Langer

“The old faiths light their candles all about,
But burly Truth comes by and puts them out.”
― Lizette Woodworth Reese

“Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events”
― Adrianne Rich

“Of this alone, even god is deprived, the power of making things that are past never to have been.”
― Agathon

“The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.”
― Joseph Conrad

“I really don't know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it's because in addition to the fact that the sea changes, and the light changes, and ships change, it's because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea - whether it is to sail or to watch it - we are going back from whence we came.

[Remarks at the Dinner for the America's Cup Crews, September 14 1962]”
― John F. Kennedy

“The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.”
― Ferdinand Foch

“To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.”
― Erich Fromm

“We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.”
― MARY CATHERINE BATESON