Alese > Alese's Quotes

“When You Are Old"


WHEN you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.”
― W.B. Yeats

“Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King and a Selection of Poems

“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“When we become advocates of a creed, something dies; we do not believe God, we only believe our belief about Him.”
― Oswald Chambers

“However many holy words you read, however many you speak, what good will they do you if you do not act on upon them?”
― Buddha Siddhartha Guatama Shakyamuni

“When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“No enthusiasm will ever stand the strain that Jesus Christ will put upon His worker, only one thing will, and that is a personal relationship to Himself which has gone through the mill of His spring-cleaning until there is only one purpose left--I am here for God to send me where He will.”
― Oswald Chambers

“If I am not good to myself, how can I expect anyone else to be good to me?”
― Maya Angelou

“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.”
― Lao Tzu

“My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die!”
― William Goldman, The Princess Bride

“Still, despite all this, traveling is the great true love of my life. I have always felt, ever since I was sixteen years old and first went to Russia with my saved-up babysitting money, that to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice. I am loyal and constant in my love for travel, as I have not always been loyal and constant in my other loves. I feel about travel the way a happy new mother feels about her impossible, colicky, restless, newborn baby--I just don't care what it puts me through. Because I adore it. Because it's mine. Because it looks exactly like me. It can barf all over me if it wants to--I just don't care.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
― Edmund Burke

“Promise me you'll always remember: You're braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”
― Carter Crocker

“My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. […]. I'm two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren't attached.”
― Fernando Pessoa , The Book of Disquiet

“A woman is like a tea bag; you never know how strong it is until it's in hot water.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.”
― Shel Silverstein

“You belong among the wildflowers
You belong in a boat out at sea
You belong with your love on your arm
You belong somewhere you feel free”
― Tom Petty

“I hope something happens. I'm restless as the devil and have a horror of getting fat or falling in love and growing domestic.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“You is kind. You is smart. You is important.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“Jane Eyre
"I desired more...than was within my reach. Who blames me? Many call me discontented. I couldn't help it: the restlessness is in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes.”
― Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

“When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“[Harry] had always suffered from a vague restlessness, a longing for adventure that she told herself severely was the result of reading too many novels when she was a small child.”
― Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword

“I don't talk things, sir. I talk the meaning of things.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“I'm awaiting a lover. I have to be rent and pulled apart and live according to the demons and the imagination in me. I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.”
― Anaïs Nin, Fire: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1934-1937