“A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it.”

“My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?”

“If you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all.”

“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”

“Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them, if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.”

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”

“We know what we are, but not what we may be.”

“Let us step into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure.”

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”

“We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already.”

“The things you do for yourself are gone when you are gone, but the things you do for others remain as your legacy.”

“I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.”

“A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.”

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.”

“Live to the point of tears.”

“Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.”

“Enjoy it. Because it's happening.”

“The minute I heard my first love story,”

“Life is for the living.”

“Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.”

“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.”

“And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.”

“If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.”

“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”

“Pursue what catches your heart, not what catches your eyes.”

“Do not fear being eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”

“None but ourselves can free our minds.”

“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.”

“Sometimes our light goes out, but is blown again into instant flame by an encounter with another human being.”

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”

“Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful.”

“In the darkness, two shadows reach through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun.”

“God has no religion.”

“It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.”

“This moment will just be another story someday.”

“Success is not how high you have climbed, but how you make a positive difference to the world.”

“Dare to Be.”

“Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.”

“Don't grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.”

“Sometimes you make choices in life and sometimes choices make you.”

“Keep going.”

“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”

“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”

“If you want to be happy, do not dwell on the past, do not worry about the future, and focus on living fully in the present.”

“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”

“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”

“All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being, not just with my hands but with my heart.”

“The flower that blooms in adversity is the rarest and most beautiful of all.”

“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.”

“And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.”