Vee > Vee's Quotes

“What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.”
― Walt Whitman

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“Don't be afraid of death; be afraid of an unlived life. You don't have to live forever, you just have to live.”
― Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.”
― Maya Angelou

“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.”
― Charles W. Eliot

“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”
― Aristotle

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
― George Eliot

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“One of the deep secrets of life is that all that is really worth the doing is what we do for others.”
― Lewis Carroll

“That’s sad. How plastic and artificial life has become. It gets harder and harder to find something…real.” Nin interlocked his fingers, and stretched out his arms. “Real love, real friends, real body parts…”
― Jess C Scott, The Other Side of Life

“Did you ever wonder if the person in the puddle is real, and you're just a reflection of him?”
― Bill Watterson

“Just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read. If one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy ready-made things in the shops. But since there are no shops where you can buy friends, men no longer have any friends.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“Reflect upon your present blessings -- of which every man has many -- not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings

“For God’s sake, let us be men
not monkeys minding machines
or sitting with our tails curled
while the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone.

Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Selected Letters

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

“Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa

“Even if it meant that she had failed, she was glad. And if what she'd wanted had been impossible from the start, still there was a certain lonely comfort in the fact that she'd known it was impossible and had gone ahead and done it anyway.”
― Donna Tartt, The Little Friend

“The possible, as it was presented in her Health textbook (a mathematical progression of dating, "career," marriage, and motherhood), did not interest Harriet. Of all the heroes on her list, the greatest of them all was Sherlock Holmes, and he wasn’t even a real person. Then there was Harry Houdini. He was the master of the impossible; more importantly, for Harriet, he was a master of escape. No prison in the world could hold him: he escaped from straitjackets, from locked trunks dropped in fast rivers and from coffins buried six feet underground.

And how had he done it? He wasn’t afraid. Saint Joan had galloped out with the angels on her side but Houdini had mastered fear on his own. No divine aid for him; he’d taught himself the hard way how to beat back panic, the horror of suffocation and drowning and dark. Handcuffed in a locked trunk in the bottom of a river, he squandered not a heartbeat on being afraid, never buckled to the terror of the chains and the dark and the icy water; if he became lightheaded, for even a moment, if he fumbled at the breathless labor before him– somersaulting along a river-bed, head over heels– he would never come up from the water alive.

A training program. This was Houdini’s secret.”
― Donna Tartt, The Little Friend

“That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
― Isaac Asimov

“I've always thought that love was being foolish and stupid. It's about being on the edge and I like being on the edge. It's not divine madness like some people think, there's no such thing as divine madness, madness is just madness. Love is hallucinating without drugs.”
― Louis Nowra, Così

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald