Sara Wise > Sara'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 want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.”
― Maurice Switzer, Mrs. Goose, Her Book

“I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rainer Maria Rilke's The Book of Hours: A New Translation with Commentary (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.”
― Rainer Marie Rilke

“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“The necessary thing is after all but this; solitude, great inner solitude. Going into oneself for hours meeting no one - this one must be able to attain.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.”
― Rilke Rainer Maria

“If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“How can I keep my soul in me, so that it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise it high enough, past you, to other things?”
― Rilke Rainer Maria

“If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Forget safety.
Live where you fear to live.
Destroy your reputation.
Be notorious.”
― Rumi

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”
― Socrates

“There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.
" Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget, that until the day God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words, 'Wait and Hope.”
― Alexandre Dumas

“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Today was good. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one.”
― Dr. Seuss

“If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - What would you tell him?"

I…don't know. What…could he do? What would you tell him?"

To shrug.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”
― Ayn Rand

“Who is John Galt?”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“I am, therefore I'll think.”
― Ayn Rand

“I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“So you think that money is the root of all evil? [...] Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“There's so much nonsense about human inconstancy and the transience of all emotions. I've always thought that a feeling which changes never existed in the first place.”
― Ayn Rand

“She thought how strange it would be if she ever said 'Hello' to him. One did not greet oneself each morning.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead