Nora > Nora's Quotes

“Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.”
― Terry Pratchett, Jingo

“I am in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing.”
― Louise L. Hay

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Do it trembling if you must, but do it!”
― Emmet Fox

“If you could only love enough, you could be the most powerful person in the world.”
― Emmet Fox

“The grandiose person is never really free; first because he is excessively dependent on admiration from others, and second, because his self-respect is dependent on qualities, functions, and achievements that can suddenly fail.”
― Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West.”
― E.M. Forster

“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
― C.S. Lewis

“We are the people of the book. We love our books. We fill our houses with books. We treasure books we inherit from our parents, and we cherish the idea of passing those books on to our children. Indeed, how many of us started reading with a beloved book that belonged to one of our parents? We force worthy books on our friends, and we insist that they read them. We even feel a weird kinship for the people we see on buses or airplanes reading our books, the books that we claim. If anyone tries to take away our books—some oppressive government, some censor gone off the rails—we would defend them with everything that we have. We know our tribespeople when we visit their homes because every wall is lined with books. There are teetering piles of books beside the bed and on the floor; there are masses of swollen paperbacks in the bathroom. Our books are us. They are our outboard memory banks and they contain the moral, intellectual, and imaginative influences that make us the people we are today.”
― Cory Doctorow

“When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.”
― Cory Doctorow

“Most of us are not raised to actively encounter our destiny. We may not know that we have one. As children, we are seldom told we have a place in life that is uniquely ours alone. Instead, we are encouraged to believe that our life should somehow fulfill the expectations of others, that we will (or should) find our satisfactions as they have found theirs. Rather than being taugh to ask ourselves who we are, we are schooled to ask others. We are, in effect, trained to listen to others' versions of ourselves. We are brought up in our life as told to us by someone else! When we survey our lives, seeking to fulfill our creativity, we often see we had a dream that went glimmering because we believed, and those around us believed, that the dream was beyond our reach. Many of us would have been, or at least might have been, done, tried something, if...
If we had known who we really were.”
― Julia Cameron

“The world has a fast-growing problematic disability, which forges bonds in families, causes people to communicate in direct and clear ways, cuts down meaningless social interaction, pushes people to the limit with learning about themselves, whilst making them work together to make a better world. It’s called Autism – and I can’t see anything wrong with it, can you? Boy I’m glad I also have this disability!”
― Patrick Jasper Lee

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

“Vision, Uncertainty, and Knowledge of Materials are inevitabilities that all artists must acknowledge and learn from: vision is always ahead of execution, knowledge of materials is your contact with reality, and uncertainty is a virtue.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“Nature places a simple constraint on those who leave the flock to go their own way: they get eaten. In society it's a bit more complicated. Nonetheless the admonition stands: avoiding the unknown has considerable survival value. Society, nature, and artmaking tend to produce guarded creatures.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“You make good work by (among other things) making lots of work that isn't very good, and gradually weeding out the parts that aren't good, the parts that aren't yours. It's called feedback, and it's the most direct route to learning about your own vision. It's also called doing your work. After all, someone has to do your work, and you're the closest person around.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“If you want to know who the oppressed minorities in America are, simply look at who gets their own shelf in the bookstore. A black shelf, a women's shelf, and a gay shelf.”
― Armistead Maupin

“Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.”
― Voltaire

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

“in my experience, the words “now just calm down” almost inevitably have the opposite effect on the person you are speaking to.”
― Elyn R. Saks, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“He was a thundering paradox of a man, noble and ignoble, inspiring and outrageous, arrogant and shy, the best of me and the worst of men, the most protean, most ridiculous, and most sublime. No more baffling, exasperating soldier ever wore a uniform. Flamboyant, imperious, and apocalyptic, he carried the plumage of a flamingo, could not acknowledge errors, and tried to cover up his mistakes with sly, childish tricks. Yet he was also endowed with great personal charm, a will of iron, and a soaring intellect. Unquestionably he was the most gifted man-at arms- this nation has produced. -William Manchester on Douglas MacArthur”
― William Manchester

“But there are no loners. No man lives in a void. His every act is conditioned by his time and his society.”
― William Manchester

“Life is a spiritual dance and that our unseen partner has steps to teach us if we will allow ourselves to be led. The next time you are restless, remind yourself it is the universe asking 'Shall we dance?”
― Julia Cameron

“You do not need to work to become spiritual. You are spiritual; you need only to remember that fact. Spirit is within you. God is within you. (67)”
― Julia Cameron, God is No Laughing Matter: Observations and Objections on the Spiritual Path

“God does not give us more than we can handle," I am told but I wonder if God doesn't overestimate me just a little. Or perhaps, and this is likely, I underestimate God.”
― Julia Cameron, Finding Water: The Art of Perseverance