Vesna > Vesna's Quotes

“Joie de vivre is about loving life, loving people, loving to be alive, feeling alive. It is about smiling, being in your heart, and being grateful for all the beautiful things in your life: being in good health, being able to hear, to see, to walk, being grateful for all the lovely and loving people...”
― Jamie Cat Callan, Bonjour, Happiness!: Secrets to Finding Your Joie de Vivre

“It is an acknowledged truth that the constancy of a good father during childhood goes a long way to prevent a girl from letting herself get kicked around by jerkface male sadists later in life -- and I am no exception to this rule.”
― Leah McLaren

“We must assume every event has significance and contains a message that pertains to our questions...this especially applies to what we used to call bad things...the challenge is to find the silver lining in every event, no matter how negative.”
― James Redfield, The Celestine Prophecy

“I don't think that anything happens by coincidence... No one is here by accident... Everyone who crosses our path has a message for us. Otherwise they would have taken another path, or left earlier or later. The fact that these people are here means that they are here for some reason"...”
― James Redfield, The Celestine Prophecy: A Pocket Guide to the Nine Insights

“...But friends, those I wanted to please? There are so few, so few... and you're one of them. You... because you have such a gift for life. You grab hold of it with both hands. You move, you dance, you know how to make the rain and the sunshine in a home. You have this incredible gift for making people around you happy. You're so at ease, so at ease on this little planet...”
― Anna Gavalda

“I think we go well together. I like being with you because I'm never bored. Even when we're not talking, even when we're not touching, even when we're not in the same room, I'm not bored. I'm never bored. I think it's because I have confidence in you, in your thoughts. Do you understand? I love everything I see in you, and everything I don't see. I know your faults, but as it turns out, I feel as though your faults go well with my qualities. We're not afraid of the same things. Even our inner demons go well together! You, you're worth more than you show...”
― Anna Gavalda, Someone I Loved

“...I don't know where a utopia is supposed to be, or where one could be found. I sometimes think that it is the place where fear and doubt end with the realization that around you is everything you need, and there is nothing else to find.”
― Kira Salak, Four Corners: A Journey into the Heart of Papua New Guinea

“People have the wrong idea about the hijab,: said Zuhra with a toss of her glossy hair. "I wear it because I respect myself. And when the beauty is hidden the more important things rise to the surface.”
― Jennifer Steil, The Woman Who Fell from the Sky

“How does one develop compassion for someone with a completely different set of values without reading something from their point of view? Books are one of the ways in which we can truly get into the heads of people we would never meet in our ordinary lives and travel to countries we would otherwise never visit.”
― Jennifer Steil, The Woman Who Fell from the Sky

“Sometimes, when I look at my work at the newspaper and squint in just the right way, I can even see it as a microcosm of democracy itself. After all, every staff member participates in the creation of each issue. I solicit their ideas. I value the contributions of women and minorities. Of course, I wasn't democratically elected, but what newspaper chief ever was?”
― Jennifer Steil, The Woman Who Fell from the Sky

“This is the essence of French joie de vivre. It is a gesture. An experience. It is the fleeting moment in time that can never be repeated and must be appreciated now before it flies away, gone forever.

It's about being present and alive to the ordinary moment. It's about friendship and the knowledge that nothing lasts forever. It is Zen. And for the Frenchwoman, I believe, it is the heart of happiness.”
― Jamie Cat Callan, Bonjour, Happiness!: Secrets to Finding Your Joie de Vivre

“Every soul innately yearns for stillness, for a space, a garden where we can till, sow, reap, and rest, and by doing so come to a deeper sense of self and our place in the universe. Silence is not an absence but a presence. Not an emptiness but repletion A filling up.”
― Anne LeClaire

“Like too many of us, I mistook a busy life for a rich one.”
― Anne D. LeClaire, Listening Below the Noise: A Meditation on the Practice of Silence – Ancient Wisdom for Finding Stillness and Peace.

“Having integrity is about knowing what your own standards are and being completely comfortable with them.”
― Matthew Hussey, Get the Guy: Learn Secrets of the Male Mind to Find the Man You Want and the Love You Deserve

“That's for the best. Otherwise they might realize they're in prison. It can't be helped. You women are used to harems and prisons. A person can spend his whole life between four walls. If he doesn't think or feel that he's a prisoner, then he's not a prisoner. But then there are people for whom the whole planet is a prison, who see the infinite expanse of the universe, the millions of stars and galaxies that remain forever inaccessible to them. And that awareness makes them the greatest prisoners of time and space.”
― Vladimir Bartol, Alamut

“The French believe that kids feel confident when they're able to do things for themselves, and do those things well. After children have learned to talk, adults don't praise them for saying just anything. They praise them for saying interesting things, and for speaking well.”
― Pamela Druckerman, Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting

“I can't think of anything that anyone has ever accomplished without having some sort of self-discipline. Without knowing how to work for it. Without learning how to earn it. I talk to my friends who are writers. I say, "Well, how do you do it?" Most all of them will say, "I sit down. I force myself every day to sit down and write for at least two hours. Whether something comes out of it or doesn't come out of it, whether I finish my fifty pages or two, I sit down and I do that because I have to make myself do it."

That's what a work ethic is. Any person I know who is successful in my business or any other business is so because they work their asses off for it, because nothing is for free. If you want something, if you want to achieve success in any area of life, you must apply your discipline and your work ethic. Because discipline is what helps you consciously do things in order to reach a desired goal. Discipline is a rejection of entitlement and expectation. Discipline is having a strong awareness that your choices have impact and that your actions make a difference.”
― Cameron Diaz, The Body Book: The Law of Hunger, the Science of Strength, and Other Ways to Love Your Amazing Body - Cameron Diaz

“You live in a world where you can drive through the drive-thru, flop down in a chair to work all day, and spend your evening on the couch, in front of the TV, before you crawl off to your cozy bed. Even if you work hard all day, your day-to-day living can make your body soft. And that softness is a modern-day killer, the equivalent of the savanna-dweller’s lion (actually, the lion was better, since it kept people moving).”
― Cameron Diaz, The Body Book: The Law of Hunger, the Science of Strength, and Other Ways to Love Your Amazing Body

“The truth has become a secret, a rare and dangerous commodity, highly prized and to be handled with great care.”
― Ramita Navai, City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death, and the Search for Truth in Tehran

“When he would try to reason with her, she would tell him she did not want to be without him in the afterlife; he was all she had in this world and all she wanted for the next.”
― Ramita Navai, City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death, and the Search for Truth in Tehran

“All that matters is that artists keep reminding mortals about what really matters: the wonder, the glory, the madness, the importance and the improbability of love.”
― Hannah Mary Rothschild, The Improbability of Love

“Practice giving things away, not just things you don't care about, but things you do like. Remember, it is not the size of a gift, it is its quality and the amount of mental attachment you overcome that count. So don't bankrupt yourself on a momentary positive impulse, only to regret it later. Give thought to giving. Give small things, carefully, and observe the mental processes going along with the act of releasing the little thing you liked. (53)
(Quote is actually Robert A F Thurman but Huston Smith, who only wrote the introduction to my edition, seems to be given full credit for this text.)”
― Huston Smith, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Liberation Through Understanding the Between

“I don’t care about losing people who don’t wanna be in my life anymore. I’ve lost people who meant the world to me and I’m still doing just fine.”
― Pleasure P

“Perhaps Danish happiness is not really happiness at all, but something much more valuable and durable: contentedness, being satisfied with your lot, low-level needs being met, higher expectations being kept in check.”
― Michael Booth, The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia

“To achieve authentic, sustained happiness, above all else you need to be in charge of your life, to be in control of who you want to be, and be able to make the appropriate changes if you are not.”
― Michael Booth

“I have lost years that I will never get back. Only now am I just beginning to live, on the verge of old age. It is painful and unfair. But today I have a different attitude to life: it can't be constructed from superficial things, no matter how attractive they may appear. Neither wealth not appearances have any importance now.
Pain gave me new life. It took a long time for me to die as Malika, General Oufkir's eldest daughter, the child of a powerful figure, of a past. I've gained an identity. My own identity. And that is priceless.
If there had not been all that waste, all that horror...I'd almost venture to say that my suffering made me grow. In any case, it changed me. for the better. It's as well to make the best of things.”
― Malika Oufkir, Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail

“Each day is a miracle that intoxicates me. I want more. I greet every morning like a new pleasure. And yet I am keenly aware of all life's artifices. Getting dressed, wearing make-up, laughing, having fun-isn't all that just playing a role? Am I not more profound, carrying the burden of those twenty years when I 'wasn't alive', than all those who rushed around in vain during that time?”
― Malika Oufkir, Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“What on earth could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book, and a cup of coffee?...Was ever anything so civil?”
― Anthony Trollope, The Warden

“Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”
― Henry James