Lara Zan > Lara's Quotes

“If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what's left and live it properly. What doesn't transmit light creates its own darkness.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?”

So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?

You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“A person's worth is measured by the worth of what he values.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Whatever anyone does or says, I must be emerald and keep my colour.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Humans have come into being for the sake of each other, so either teach them, or learn to bear them.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Do not act as if you had ten thousand years to throw away. Death stands at your elbow. Be good for something while you live and it is in your power.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Observe always that everything is the result of change, and get used to thinking that there is nothing Nature loves so well as to change existing forms and make new ones like them.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing, in so far as it stands ready against the accidental and the unforeseen, and is not apt to fall.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Time is like a river made up of the events which happen, and a violent stream; for as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place, and this will be carried away too.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“I'm not a religious person but I do sometimes think God made you for me.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Generally I find men are a lot more concerned with limiting the freedoms of women than exercising personal freedom for themselves.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“He knows that a lot of the literary people in college see books primarily as a way of appearing cultured, It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about. Even the writer himself was a good person, and even if his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marketed as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“He often makes blithe remarks about things he 'wishes'. I wish you didn't have to go, he says when she's leaving, or: I wish you could stay the night. If he really wished any of those things, Marianne knows, then they would happen. Connell always gets what he wants, and then feels sorry for himself when what he wants doesn't make him happy.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People