Yen Chen > Yen's Quotes

“You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

“If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. If they don't, they never were.”
― Kahlil Gibran

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”
― Kahlil Gibran

“Your children are not your children.
They are sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you.
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For thir souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the make upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness.
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He also loves the bow that is stable.”
― Kahlil Gibran

“Generosity is giving more than you can, and pride is taking less than you need.”
― Khalil Gibran, Sand and Foam

“Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Life is a journey, not a destination.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“People do not seem to realise that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“To be great is to be misunderstood.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance and Other Essays

“For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“People only see what they are prepared to see.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Sorrow looks back, Worry looks around, Faith looks up”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“We are always getting ready to live, but never living.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Works

“Fear always springs
from ignorance.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Trust instinct to the end, even though you can give no reason.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Nothing can work damage to me except myself; the harm that I sustain I carry about with me and never am a real sufferer except by my own fault.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The First wealth is health.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..”
― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

“Humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science two great outrages upon its naive self-love. The first was when it realized that our earth was not the center of the universe, but only a tiny speck in a world-system of a magnitude hardly conceivable; this is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus, although Alexandrian doctrines taught something very similar. The second was when biological research robbed man of his peculiar privilege of having been specially created, and relegated him to a descent from the animal world, implying an ineradicable animal nature in him: this transvaluation has been accomplished in our own time upon the instigation of Charles Darwin, Wallace, and their predecessors, and not without the most violent opposition from their contemporaries. But man's craving for grandiosity is now suffering the third and most bitter blow from present-day psychological research which is endeavoring to prove to the ego of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind. We psycho-analysts were neither the first nor the only ones to propose to mankind that they should look inward; but it appears to be our lot to advocate it most insistently and to support it by empirical evidence which touches every man closely.”
― Sigmund Freud, Introduction à la psychanalyse

“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

“Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism