Laura > Laura's Quotes

“Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner.”
― Lao Tzu

“A subject to which few intellectuals ever give a thought is the right to be a vagrant, the freedom to wander. Yet vagrancy is a deliverance, and life on the open road is the essence of freedom. To have the courage to smash the chains with which modern life has weighted us (under the pretext that it was offering us more liberty), then to take up the symbolic stick and bundle and get out.”
― Isabelle Eberhardt

“As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

“I think... if it is true that
there are as many minds as there
are heads, then there are as many
kinds of love as there are hearts.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“I've always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, just as he or she is, and not as you would like them to be.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“She always wanted to believe in things.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“I am a lover and have not found my thing to love. That is a big point if you know enough to realize what I mean. It makes my destruction inevitable, you see. There are few who understand that.”
― Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

“As if you were on fire from within.

The moon lives in the lining of your skin.”
― Pablo Neruda

“If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
― Saul Bellow

“traveling - it gives you home in thousand strange places, then leaves you a stranger in your own land.”
― Ibn Batuta

“If adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures. None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“The Men of Earth came to Mars. They came because they were afraid or unafraid, because they were happy or unhappy, because they felt like Pilgrims or did not feel like Pilgrims. There was a reason for each man. They were leaving bad wives or bad towns; they were coming to find something or leave something or get something, to dig up something or bury something or leave something alone. They were coming with small dreams or large dreams or none at all...it was not unusual that the first men were few. The numbers grew steadily in proportion to the census of Earth Men already on Mars. There was comfort in numbers. But the first Lonely Ones had to stand by themselves...”
― Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

“We earth men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things.”
― Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

“Science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.”
― Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

“I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“You can't trust reason. We threw it out of the ad profession long ago and have never missed it.”
― Frederik Pohl, The Space Merchants

“Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers."

(Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains.)”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“It's necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“I don’t think man was meant to attain happiness so easily. Happiness is like those palaces in fairy tales whose gates are guarded by dragons: we must fight in order to conquer it.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“The world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“The world to me was a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein