Silvia > Silvia's Quotes

“I know many lives worth living.”
― Mary Oliver

“She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it).”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

“When someone shows you who they are believe them the first time.”
― Maya Angelou

“If you can't change your mind, you can't change anything.”
― Orna Ross, After The Rising

“Reading is one form of escape. Running for your life is another.”
― Lemony Snicket

“All the secrets of the world are contained in books. Read at your own risk.”
― Lemony Snicket

“We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again and that is well but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.”
― Mark Twain

“When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.”
― Mark Twain, Notebook

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“It is not enough that we do our best; sometimes we must do what is required.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“You’re wishin’ too much, baby. You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughtta be.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Vol. 2

“This year will take from me
the hardened person
who I longed to be.
I am healing by mistake.
Rome is also built on ruins.”
― Eliza Griswold

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
― Mary Oliver

“I have to say that although it broke my heart, I was, and still am, glad I was there.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“Be careful, lest in casting out your demon you exorcise the best thing in you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Oh”, he said. He was trying to smile, but it was a brave smile, a sickroom smile, and I was sorry I had caused it. I had apparently taken the wind out of his sails. His discouragement wasn’t a good sign. Men should stand up to me more than that. They have to fight back to satisfy me. They have to face me down.”
― Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love

“Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.”
― Toni Morrison, Jazz

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

“A person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was getting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever going to grow dim or doubtful.”
― Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad

“If you set to work to believe everything, you will tire out the believing-muscles of your mind, and then you'll be so weak you won't be able to believe the simplest true things.”
― Lewis Carroll

“One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
― Winston Churchill

“Everyone in me is a bird
I am beating all my wings”
― Anne Sexton, Love Poems

“if
the ocean
can calm itself,
so can you.
we
are both
salt water
mixed with
air.”
― Nayyirah Waheed

“Ask for what you want and be prepared to get it!”
― Maya Angelou

“Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.”
― Mark Twain