Jenny > Jenny's Quotes

“Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky

“Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased.”
― J. Krishnamurti

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

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“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

“whatever you are feeling right now, there is a mathematical certainty that someone is feeling that exact thing. This is not to say you aren’t special. This is to say thank god you aren’t special.”
― Neil Hilborn, Our Numbered Days

“I am not saying you will find the meaning of life in other people. I am saying that other people are the life to which you provide the meaning.”
― Neil Hilborn, Our Numbered Days

“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
― Steve Jobs

“The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.”
― Neil Hilborn, Our Numbered Days

“The future is a blue sky and a full tank of gas.”
― Neil Hilborn

“Everything's already been said, but since nobody was listening, we have to start again.”
― Andre Gide

“But this too is true: stories can save us.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Winter collapsed on us that year. It knelt, exhausted, and stayed.”
― Emily Fridlund, History of Wolves

“True education is a kind of never ending story — a matter of continual beginnings, of habitual fresh starts, of persistent newness.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“Most of my friends from Columbia are going on to get advanced degrees. And why not? A Ph.D. is the new M.A., a master's is the new bachelor's, a B.A. is the new high school diploma, and a high school diploma is the new smiley-face sticker on your first-grade spelling test.”
― Megan McCafferty, Fourth Comings

“I'm not so worried anymore, because now I know nobody knows what they are doing in life, and nobody knows what to do when bad things happen, to themselves or to other people. We make it up as we go, and sometimes we are big and generous and sometimes we are small and petty. We say the wrong things, we obsess over all the ways we got it wrong and all the ways that other people did, too. The only thing I know for sure it that it is okay not to know everything, to try and fail and to sometimes suck at life, as long as you try to get better.”
― Nora McInerny Purmort, It's Okay to Laugh

“happiness isn’t something that is handed to you, but something you have a hand in making, every day.”
― Nora McInerny Purmort, It's Okay to Laugh

“There is no syllabus for life that outlines the steps you need to take to graduate to the next event. This life itself is the lesson and the test and there is no dean’s list and no gold stars. There is just the sum of your relationships and your actions, measured by how you feel when you lie down to go to sleep at night, and how many people heart your tweets. I”
― Nora McInerny Purmort, It's Okay to Laugh

“Much of the beauty that arises in art comes from the struggle an artist wages with his limited medium. — HENRI MATISSE”
― Jack Flam, Matisse on Art

“Don't wait for inspiration. It comes while working.”
― Henri Matisse

“Without hard work, talent is not enough - Henri Matisse”
― Hernri Matisse

“The most important thing is this: to sacrifice what you are now for what you can become tomorrow.”
― Shannon Alder

“Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird,
That cannot fly.”
― Langston Hughes

“Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“It's an universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“If you want to understand a society, take a good look at the drugs it uses. And what can this tell you about American culture? Well, look at the drugs we use. Except for pharmaceutical poison, there are essentially only two drugs that Western civilization tolerates: Caffeine from Monday to Friday to energize you enough to make you a productive member of society, and alcohol from Friday to Monday to keep you too stupid to figure out the prison that you are living in.”
― Bill Hicks

“I am a lover of truth, a worshiper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.”
― Stephen Fry

“The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriousity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.”
― Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles