Belynda > Belynda's Quotes

“A truly compassionate attitude toward others does not change even if they behave negatively or hurt you.”
― Dalai Lama XIV

“ The Paradoxical Commandments

People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.

If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.

If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.

The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.

Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.

The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.

People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.

What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.

People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway.

Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway.”
― Kent M. Keith, The Silent Revolution: Dynamic Leadership in the Student Council

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

“The way to change others' minds is with affection, and not anger.”
― Dalai Lama XIV

“He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”
― Mother Teresa

“If a violin string could ache, I would be that string.”
― Vladimir Nobokov

“There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“If you judge people, you have no time to love them.”
― Mother Teresa

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.”
― Allen Saunders

“When the woman you live with is an artist, every day is a surprise.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“There is only one page left to write on. I will fill it with words of only one syllable. I love. I have loved. I will love.”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.”
― Narcotics Anonymous

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain

“Be nice to nerds. You may end up working for them. We all could.”
― Charles J. Sykes, Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can't Read, Write or Add

“Reality continues to ruin my life.”
― Bill Watterson, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Most of them... most of us never figure it out. Bad dream, they think, or good one. Funny rash, never really goes away, but Doc says it's fine, nothing to worry about. Why dwell on it? But some people, they just can't let it go... Some people drink themselves out of school trying to find it again, trolling through bars where the shadows are so greasy they leave trails on the walls, just to find a way in, a way through. Some people forget too that you're supposed to stop sleeping, you're supposed to have a life in the sun.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my eyes and all is born again.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower