Anurag > Anurag's Quotes

“For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights and Other Stories

“It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“All great and precious things are lonely.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

[Address at Rice University, September 12 1962]”
― John F. Kennedy

“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

“We can but try.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle

“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.”
― Ayn Rand

“to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on a seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
― Michio Kaku, Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century

“Remember, if the time should come when you have to make a choice between what is right and what is easy, remember what happened to a boy who was good, and kind, and brave, because he strayed across the path of Lord Voldemort. Remember Cedric Diggory.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“The reward of running—of anything—lies within us.”
― Scott Jurek, Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness

“Let the beauty we love be what we do. —RUMI”
― Scott Jurek, Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness

“Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“Suffering is humbling. It pays to know how to get your butt kicked.”
― Christopher McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

“Everything he does is fast,” Brogan said. “He pees fast. It’s like a fire hose—three seconds and out. He’s authentically in a hurry.”
― Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“He is a thinker,’ wrote Jacquemont in his memoir, ‘who finds nothing but solitude in that exchange of words without ideas which is dignified by the name of conversation in the society of this land.”
― William Dalrymple, City Of Djinns: A Year In Delhi

“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”
― Mark Twain

“I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”
― Mark Twain

“When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me-it still sometimes happens-and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don't ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous-not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance. . . . That pure chance could be so generous and so kind. . . . That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time. . . . That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful. . . . The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don't think I'll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.”
― Ann Druyan

“Not knowing when the dawn will come
I open every door.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“We often miss opportunity because it's dressed in overalls and looks like work”
― Thomas A. Edison

“I will prepare and some day my chance will come.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“The world must be all fucked up," he said then, "when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“and when all the wars are over, a butterfly will still be beautiful.”
― Ruskin Bond, Scenes from a Writer's Life

“We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals.”
― Andrew Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master