Jacob Morris > Jacob's Quotes

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

“He tried to think of something to say but could not. He's had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things toe eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.”
― Cormac McCarthy

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”
― A.A. Milne, The Complete Tales of Winnie-the-Pooh

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”
― Fred Rogers

“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“The problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude about the problem”
― Captain Jack Sparrow

“What is success?
To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate the beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch Or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded!”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“These are the three false assumptions of the monkey mind-set. As long as I am certain, as long as I am perfect, and as long as others are okay I will be safe, able to relax, and happy. Each of these assumptions overestimates the threat and underestimates our ability to cope. Each of them treats the perception of threat as accurate, a problem to be fixed.”
― Jennifer Shannon, Don't Feed the Monkey Mind: How to Stop the Cycle of Anxiety, Fear, and Worry

“Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”
― Jamie Anderson

“My heart is so full of you
I can hardly call it
my own”
― Liana Rădulescu

“If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.”
― W.H. Auden