Melissa > Melissa's Quotes

“Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.”
― Henry Miller

“Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such”
― Henry Miller

“Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery. ”
― Henry Miller

“Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”
― Abraham Lincoln

“In the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it.”
― Barack Obama

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”
― Henri Nouwen, Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian Life

“Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.”
― Anais Nin

“I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“I don't trust people who don't love themselves and tell me, 'I love you.' ... There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.”
― Maya Angelou

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

“A woman's heart should be so hidden in God that a man has to seek Him just to find her.”
― Maya Angelou

“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”
― Oscar Wilde

“To define is to limit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement.”
― Alfred Adler

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
― Rumi

“Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.”
― Charles M. Schulz

“Simplicity is the keynote of all true elegance.”
― Coco Chanel

“There is no time for cut-and-dried monotony. There is time for work. And time for love. That leaves no other time.”
― Coco Chanel

“The best things in life are free. The second best things are very, very expensive.”
― Coco Chanel

“People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don't find myself saying, "Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner." I don't try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.”
― Carl R. Rogers, A Way of Being

“When a person realizes he has been deeply heard, his eyes moisten. I think in some real sense he is weeping for joy. It is as though he were saying, "Thank God, somebody heard me. Someone knows what it's like to be me”
― Carl R. Rogers

“In my early professional years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?”
― Carl R. Rogers

“The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”
― David W. Orr, Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World

“A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid.”
― Basil King

“Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
― James Baldwin

“Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.”
― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“To affect the quality of the day - that is the highest of the arts.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“The art of love... is largely the art of persistence. ”
― Albert Ellis