Quotes by American Authors - Page 3362

Who we are in the present includes who we were in the past.
Fred Rogers
I believe that life is a prize, but to live doesn't mean you're alive.
Nicki Minaj
See? See what you can do? Never mind you can’t tell one letter from another, never mind you born a slave, never mind you lose your name, never mind your daddy dead, never mind nothing. Here, this here, is what a man can do if he puts his mind to it and his back in it. Stop sniveling,’ [the land] said. ‘Stop picking around the edges of the world. Take advantage, and if you can’t take advantage, take disadvantage. We live here. On this planet, in this nation, in this county right here. Nowhere else! We got a home in this rock, don’t you see! Nobody starving in my home; nobody crying in my home, and if I got a home you got one too! Grab it. Grab this land! Take it, hold it, my brothers, make it, my brothers, shake it, squeeze it, turn it, twist it, beat it, kick it, kiss it, whip it, stomp it, dig it, plow it, seed it, reap it, rent it, buy it, sell it, own it, build it, multiply it, and pass it on – can you hear me? Pass it on!
Toni Morrison
Happiness is not having what you want, it is wanting what you have.
Sheryl Crow
The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.
Anaïs Nin
Tough times never last. Tough people do
Robert H. Schuller
I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’ve come to learn that predictions don’t mean much. Too much lies outside the realm of medical knowledge. A lot of what happens next comes down to you and your specific genetics, your attitude. No, there’s nothing we can do to stop the inevitable, but that’s not the point. The point is that you should try to make the most of the time you have left.
Nicholas Sparks
Too many locks, not enough keys.
Sarah Dessen
The sun shall always rise upon a new day and there shall always be a rose garden within me. Yes, there is a part of me that is broken, but my broken soil gives way to my wild roses.
C. JoyBell C.
Man is, that he may have Joy.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
We cannot change what we are not aware of, and once we are aware, we cannot help but change.
Sheryl Sandberg
If one makes a mistake, then an apology is usually sufficient to get things back on an even keel. However-and this is a big ‘however’- most people do not ever know why their apology did not seem to have any effect. It is simply that they did not make a mistake; they made a choice…and never understood the difference between the two.
Andy Andrews
What's unnatural is homophobia. Homo sapiens is the only species in all of nature that responds with hate to homosexuality.
Alex Sanchez
A sail boat that sails backwards can never see the sun rise.
Bill Cosby
Until we see each other again, keep your head together, read some good books, be useful, be happy.
Stephen King
Survivors can't always choose their methods.
Patricia Briggs
you cannot find happiness, outside the plan of happiness!
John Bytheway
Live your life, no matter what that life is.
Corey Taylor
Don't let the tall weeds cast a shadow on the beautiful flowers in your garden.
Steve Maraboli
I would rather have 30 minutes of "wonderful" than a lifetime of nothing special.
Julia L. Roberts
The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
Fear is how you lose your life...a little bit at a time...What we give to fear, we take away from...faith.
Mitch Albom
Freedom is not having everything we crave, it's being able to go without the things we crave and being OK with it.
Rob Bell
Because sometimes there are problems bigger than this week’s end of the world and sometimes you just have to find the extraordinary in your ordinary life.
Patrick Ness
It’s funny how one summer can change everything. It must be something about the heat and the smell of chlorine, fresh-cut grass and honeysuckle, asphalt sizzling after late-day thunderstorms, the steam rising while everything drips around it. Something about long, lazy days and whirring air conditioners and bright plastic flip-flops from the drugstore thwacking down the street. Something about fall being so close, another year, another Christmas, another beginning. So much in one summer, stirring up like the storms that crest at the end of each day, blowing out all the heat and dirt to leave everything gasping and cool. Everyone can reach back to one summer and lay a finger to it, finding the exact point when everything changed. That summer was mine.
Sarah Dessen
Time to toss the dice
Robert Jordan
Doing nothing for others is the undoing of ourselves.
Horace Mann
In life, you need either inspiration or desperation.
Anthony Robbins
Were these boys in their right minds? Here were two boys with good intellect, one eighteen and one nineteen. They had all the prospects that life could hold out for any of the young; one a graduate of Chicago and another of Ann Arbor; one who had passed his examination for the Harvard Law School and was about to take a trip in Europe,--another who had passed at Ann Arbor, the youngest in his class, with three thousand dollars in the bank. Boys who never knew what it was to want a dollar; boys who could reach any position that was to boys of that kind to reach; boys of distinguished and honorable families, families of wealth and position, with all the world before them. And they gave it all up for nothing, for nothing! They took a little companion of one of them, on a crowded street, and killed him, for nothing, and sacrificed everything that could be of value in human life upon the crazy scheme of a couple of immature lads.Now, your Honor, you have been a boy; I have been a boy. And we have known other boys. The best way to understand somebody else is to put yourself in his place.Is it within the realm of your imagination that a boy who was right, with all the prospects of life before him, who could choose what he wanted, without the slightest reason in the world would lure a young companion to his death, and take his place in the shadow of the gallows?...No one who has the process of reasoning could doubt that a boy who would do that is not right.How insane they are I care not, whether medically or legally. They did not reason; they could not reason; they committed the most foolish, most unprovoked, most purposeless, most causeless act that any two boys ever committed, and they put themselves where the rope is dangling above their heads....Why did they kill little Bobby Franks?Not for money, not for spite; not for hate. They killed him as they might kill a spider or a fly, for the experience. They killed him because they were made that way. Because somewhere in the infinite processes that go to the making up of the boy or the man something slipped, and those unfortunate lads sit here hated, despised, outcasts, with the community shouting for their blood.. . . I know, Your Honor, that every atom of life in all this universe is bound up together. I know that a pebble cannot be thrown into the ocean without disturbing every drop of water in the sea. I know that every life is inextricably mixed and woven with every other life. I know that every influence, conscious and unconscious, acts and reacts on every living organism, and that no one can fix the blame. I know that all life is a series of infinite chances, which sometimes result one way and sometimes another. I have not the infinite wisdom that can fathom it, neither has any other human brain
Clarence Darrow
Patience is a virtue, but there comes a moment when you must stop being patient and take the day by the throat and shake it. If it fights back; fine. I'd rather end up bloody at the end of the day, then unhurt with no progress made, no knowledge gained. I'd rather have a no, then nothing. I'd forgotten that about myself.
Laurell K. Hamilton
Each of us is an innkeeper who decides if there is room for Jesus!
Neal A Maxwell
The world is your exercise book, the pages on which you do your sums. It is not reality, though you may express reality there if you wish. You are also free to write lies, or nonsense, or to tear the pages.
Richard Bach
Republicans are for both the man and the dollar, but in case of conflict the man before the dollar.
Abraham Lincoln
I challenge every one of you who can hear me to rise to the divinity within you. Do we really realize what it means to be a child of God, to have within us something of the divine nature?
Gordon B. Hinckley
No matter how much falls on us, we keep plowing ahead. That's the only way to keep the roads clear.
Greg Kincaid
You look at yourself and you accept yourself for who you are, and once you accept yourself for who you are you become a better person.
Oprah Winfrey
To exist in this vast universe for a speck of time is the great gift of life. Our tiny sliver of time is our gift of life. It is our only life. The universe will go on, indifferent to our brief existence, but while we are here we touch not just part of that vastness, but also the lives around us. Life is the gift each of us has been given. Each life is our own and no one else's. It is precious beyond all counting. It is the greatest value we can have. Cherish it for what it truly is..... Your life is yours alone. Rise up and live it.
Terry Goodkind
feminism is for everybody
Bell Hooks
If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have the time to do it over?
John Wooden
Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity
T.S Eliot
Is life too short to be taking this shit, or is life too short to be minding it?
Violet Weingarten
When we make our own misery we sometimes cling to it even when we want so bad to change, because misery is something we know. The misery is comfortable.
Dean Koontz
Music, my rampart and my only one.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
You’re not a human being until you value something more than the life of your body. And the greater the thing you live and die for the greater you are.
Orson Scott Card
Study, along the lines which the theologies have mapped, will never lead us to discovery of the fundamental facts of our existence. That goal must be attained by means of exact science and can only be achieved by such means. The fact that man, for ages, has superstitiously believed in what he calls a God does not prove at all that his theory has been right. There have been many gods – all makeshifts, born of inability to fathom the deep fundamental truth. There must be something at the bottom of existence, and man, in ignorance, being unable to discover what it is through reason, because his reason has been so imperfect, undeveloped, has used, instead, imagination, and created figments, of one kind or another, which, according to the country he was born in, the suggestions of his environment, satisfied him for the time being. Not one of all the gods of all the various theologies has ever really been proved. We accept no ordinary scientific fact without the final proof; why should we, then, be satisfied in this most mighty of all matters, with a mere theory?Destruction of false theories will not decrease the sum of human happiness in future, any more than it has in the past... The days of miracles have passed. I do not believe, of course, that there was ever any day of actual miracles. I cannot understand that there were ever any miracles at all. My guide must be my reason, and at thought of miracles my reason is rebellious. Personally, I do not believe that Christ laid claim to doing miracles, or asserted that he had miraculous power...Our intelligence is the aggregate intelligence of the cells which make us up. There is no soul, distinct from mind, and what we speak of as the mind is just the aggregate intelligence of cells. It is fallacious to declare that we have souls apart from animal intelligence, apart from brains. It is the brain that keeps us going. There is nothing beyond that.Life goes on endlessly, but no more in human beings than in other animals, or, for that matter, than in vegetables. Life, collectively, must be immortal, human beings, individually, cannot be, as I see it, for they are not the individuals – they are mere aggregates of cells.There is no supernatural. We are continually learning new things. There are powers within us which have not yet been developed and they will develop. We shall learn things of ourselves, which will be full of wonders, but none of them will be beyond the natural.]
Thomas A. Edison
I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing but faith and a belief in astonishment.
Pat Conroy
I am larger, better than I thought; I did not know I held so much goodness.All seems beautiful to me.Whoever denies me, it shall not trouble me;tWhoever accepts me, he or she shall be blessed, and shall bless me.
Walt Whitman
While we may judge things as good or bad, karma doesn't. It's a simple case of like gets like, the ultimate balancing act, nothing more, nothing less. And if you're deteremined to fix every situation you deem as bad, or difficult, or somehow unsavory, then you rob the person of their own chance to fix it, learn from it, or even grow from it. Some things, no matter how painful, happen for a reason. A reason you or I may not be able to grasp at first sight, not without knowing a person's entire life story—their cumulative past. And to just barge in and interfere, no matter how well-intentioned, would be akin to robbing them of their journey. Something that's better not done.
Alyson Noel
You don't have to make something that people call art. Living is an artistic activity, there is an art to getting through the day.
Viggo Mortensen
It was never about the world being too big, it was more like she was too much for the world to handle.
Robert M. Drake
Some we proudly display on our arms, while others we shyly conceal. Tattoo the moments of sorrow as well as the moments of splendor and beauty. Tattoo in an acknowledgment and tribute to home, and tattooing your beliefs that define who you are. Whether we intended to or not, every moment of our lives are tattooed to our heart.
Forrest Curran
We become so absorbed in our flaws and faults that we forget that it is better to be a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without. To have flaws is beauty in itself, a fact so frightening that we hurry to hide them from sight and tarnish the whole in the process of comparing ourselves to others.
Forrest Curran
As I naturally go through a full range of emotions in my life, I mustn’t feel ashamed for feeling lost, for it is honest and human to feel such.
Forrest Curran
One day in my shoes and a day for me in your shoes, the beauty of travel lies in the ease and willingness to be more open.
Forrest Curran
The first thing you have to know about writing is that it is something you must do everyday. There are two reasons for this rule: Getting the work done and connecting with your unconscious mind.
Walter Mosley
For your past, for your flaws, and ultimately for your stress; I judge no one whom I’ve met along the way because in a sense we were all wounded in our own ways.
Forrest Curran
I am buoyant and expansive and uncontainable--but I always was so, only I never knew it!
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
I have a dream.” “Is your dream very big?” “No.” “Well is it very grand?” “Not either.” “Neither?” “Neither.” “What is it then?” “It is very shiny.
C. JoyBell C.
It is books that are a key to the wide world; if you can't do anything else, read all that you can.
Jane Hamilton
Well, if it can be thought, it can be done, a problem can be overcome,
E.A. Bucchianeri