Steve > Steve's Quotes

“The world isn't fair? What a huge revelation! Some people in power abuse those they have power over? Amazing! When did this start happening?”
― Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance

“Somehow," she said coldly, "you have confused profitable and not profitable for right and wrong. I, however, have not.”
― Robin Hobb, Ship of Magic

“I’ve come to a frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It’s my personal approach that creates the climate. It’s my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or dehumanized.”
― Haim Ginott

“Onward, then! To glory and some such nonsense.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance

“Kaladin frowned. “Wait. Are you wearing cologne? In prison?”
“Well, there was no need to be barbaric, just because I was incarcerated.”
“Storms, you’re spoiled,” Kaladin said, smiling.
“I’m refined, you insolent farmer,” Adolin said. Then he grinned. “Besides, I’ll have you know that I had to use cold water for my baths while here.”
“Poor boy.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance

“When did you get so peppy?” she shouted.
“Ever since I assumed I was dead, then I suddenly wasn't.”
“Then remind me to try to kill you once in a while,” she snapped. “If I succeed, it will make me feel better, and if I fail, it will make you feel better. Everyone wins!”
― Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance

“Giving up all pretense of obeying natural laws again, I see,” he said. “Natural laws?” Syl said, finding the concept amusing. “Laws are of men, Kaladin. Nature doesn’t have them!” “If I toss something upward, it comes back down.” “Except when it doesn’t.” “It’s a law.” “No,” Syl said, looking upward. “It’s more like . . . more like an agreement among friends.” He looked at her, raising an eyebrow. “We have to be consistent,” she said, leaning in conspiratorially. “Or we’ll break your brains.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance

“Home is people. Not a place. If you go back there after the people are gone, then all you can see is what is not there any more.”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Fate

“When you cut pieces out of the truth to avoid looking like a fool you end up looking like a moron instead.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“Navani!” Dalinar shouted, pulling his horse to a slippery stop across the tarp from her. “I need a miracle!”
“Working on it,” she shouted back.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance

“The Ultimate Answer to Life, The Universe and Everything is...42!”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
― Albert Camus

“Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.”
― Joseph Campbell

“I go to seek a Great Perhaps.”
― François Rabelais

“Learn to light a candle in the darkest moments of someone’s life. Be the light that helps others see; it is what gives life its deepest significance.”
― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

“In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.

And God said, "Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done." And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close to mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. "What is the purpose of all this?" he asked politely.

"Everything must have a purpose?" asked God.

"Certainly," said man.

"Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this," said God.

And He went away.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“It does not matter how long you are spending on the earth, how much money you have gathered or how much attention you have received. It is the amount of positive vibration you have radiated in life that matters,”
― Amit Ray, Meditation: Insights and Inspirations

“There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“I have learned that you can go anywhere you want to go and do anything you want to do and buy all the things that you want to buy and meet all the people that you want to meet and learn all the things that you desire to learn and if you do all these things but are not madly in love: you have still not begun to live.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“Do you know a cure for me?"

"Why yes," he said, "I know a cure for everything. Salt water."

"Salt water?" I asked him.

"Yes," he said, "in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.”
― Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales

“About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough—and even miraculous enough if you insist—I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about?

Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don't believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart's content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others—while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity—so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities… but there, there. Enough.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Beyond work and love, I would add two other ingredients that give meaning to life. First, to fulfill whatever talents we are born with. However blessed we are by fate with different abilities and strengths, we should try to develop them to the fullest, rather than allow them to atrophy and decay. We all know individuals who did not fulfill the promise they showed in childhood. Many of them became haunted by the image of what they might have become. Instead of blaming fate, I think we should accept ourselves as we are and try to fulfill whatever dreams are within our capability.

Second, we should try to leave the world a better place than when we entered it. As individuals, we can make a difference, whether it is to probe the secrets of Nature, to clean up the environment and work for peace and social justice, or to nurture the inquisitive, vibrant spirit of the young by being a mentor and a guide.”
― Michio Kaku

“To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Familiar Studies of Men and Books

“Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons

“The secret to life is meaningless unless you discover it yourself.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“Everything ends, and Everything matters.

Everything matters not in spite of the end of you and all that you love, but because of it. Everything is all you’ve got…and after Everything is nothing. So you were wise to welcome Everything, the good and the bad alike, and cling to it all. Gather it in. Seek the meaning in sorrow and don’t ever turn away, not once, from here until the end. Because it is all the same, it is all unfathomable, and it is all infinitely preferable to the one dreadful alternative.”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“Life is a fairy tale. Live it with wonder and amazement.”
― Welwyn Wilton Katz

“True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written, in writing what deserves to be read, and in so living as to make the world happier and better for our living in it.”
― Pliny the Elder

“Ye know full well that the meaning of life is to find your gift. To find your gift is happiness. Never tae find it is misery.”
― Terry Pratchett

“To think what is true, to sense what is beautiful and to want what is good, hereby the spirit finds purpose of a life in reason.”
― Johann Gottfried Herder