Mike Callihoo > Mike's Quotes

“No! Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.”
― George Lucas, The Star Wars Trilogy

“I’m bored’ is a useless thing to say. I mean, you live in a great, big, vast world that you’ve seen none percent of. Even the inside of your own mind is endless; it goes on forever, inwardly, do you understand? The fact that you’re alive is amazing, so you don’t get to say ‘I’m bored.”
― Louis C.K.

“He not busy being born is busy dying.”
― Bob Dylan

“A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.”
― Bob Dylan

“People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent.”
― Bob Dylan

“Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet.”
― Bob Dylan

“Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am. That I will never fulfill my obligation to surpass myself unless I first accept myself, and if I accept myself fully in the right way, I will already have surpassed myself.”
― Thomas Merton

“Souls are like athletes, that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers, and rewarded according to their capacity.”
― Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

“First of all, although men have a common destiny, each individual also has to work out his own personal salvation for himself in fear and trembling. We can help one another to find the meaning of life no doubt. But in the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for "finding himself." If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence. You cannot tell me who I am and I cannot tell you who you are. If you do not know your own identity, who is going to identify you?”
― Thomas Merton

“Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint...They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems.”
― Thomas Merton

“Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice “out there” calling me to be something I am not. It comes from a voice “in here” calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God.”
― Thomas Merton

“The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.”
― Thomas Merton

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor. ”
― Seneca

“He suffers more than necessary, who suffers before it is necessary.”
― Seneca

“Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow, and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune's control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.”
― Seneca

“While we wait for life, life passes”
― Seneca

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
― Socrates

“What man
can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is
dying daily? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed,
Whatever years be behind us are in death's hands.”
― Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“If no one knows you, then you are no one.”
― Dan Chaon, Among the Missing

“There is your car and the open road, the fabled lure of random adventure. You stand at the verge, and you could become anything. Your future shifts and warps with your smallest step, your shitty little whims. The man you will become is at your mercy.”
― Dan Chaon, Stay Awake

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“So now I know what I have to do. I have to keep breathing. And tomorrow the sun will rise, and who knows what the tide will bring in.”
― William Broyles Jr., Cast Away: The Shooting Script

“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.”
― Oscar Wilde (attributed to)

“To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.”
― Oscar Wilde

“A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.”
― Oscar Wilde