54 Quotes

At 3 p.m. today, I became 54.

Years, that is. Swimming pools. Movie stars.

For those of you who know me, you understand that I write in notebooks. Black Moleskin notesbooks. Every day. All year round.

I find quotes, and write them down. I make up quotes, and scribble them in.

Here are 54 of them that I have gathered over the last year, a list in no particular order, a collection of words written for the most part by people so much wiser than I can ever hope to be.

1. "As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary." - Hemingway


2. "He is able who thinks he is able." - Buddha


3. "Whenever we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." - John Muir


4. "Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters." - Victor Hugo


5. "You cannot travel the path before you have become The Path itself." - Buddah


6. "When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it's his duty." - G.B. Shaw


7. "No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path." - Buddha


8. "A writer is dear and necessary to us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul." - Tolstoy


9. "Turn your face to the sun, and the shadows fall behind you." - Maori Proverb


10. "In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you." - Tolstoy


11. "Take eloquence, and wring its neck." - Paul Verlaine, French poet


12. "He who finds a thought that enables him to obtain a slightly deeper glimpse into the eternal secrets of nature has been given great grace." - Einstein


13. "In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day." - F. Scott Fitzgerald


14. "My life has taught me to be more curious than afraid." - Ishi


15. "But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads." - Albert Camus


16. "At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future, tradition has placed 10,000 men to guard the past." - Maurice Maeterlinck


17. "Young people do not perceive at once that the giver of wounds is the enemy." - F. Scott Fitzgerald


18. "Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear." - Ezra Pound


19. "Never go on trips with anyone you do not love." - Ernest Hemingway


20. "Work out your own salvation. Don't depend on others." - Buddha


21. "All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time." - Hemingway


22. "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places." - Hemingway


23. "To be successful in writing, use short sentences." - Hemingway


24. "Never mistake motion for action." - Hemingway


25. "The biggest temptation is to settle for too little." - Thomas Merton


26. "I had nothing to offer anyone except my own confusion." - Jack Kerouac


27. "People living deeply have no fear of death." - Anais Nin


28. "A mind that is stretched by new experience can never go back to its old dimensions." - Oliver Wendall Holmes


29. "Religion is for people who are afraid to go to hell. Spirituality is for people who have already been there." - Bonnie Raitt


30. "If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty." - Rilke


31. "Own only what you can always carry with you; know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag." - Alexander Solzhenitsyn


32. "But if you do not find an intelligent companion, a wise and well-behaved person going the same way as yourself, then go on your way alone, like a king abandoning a conquered kingdom, or like a great elephant in the deep forest." - Buddha


33. "Could it think, the heart would stop beating." - Fernando Pessoa


34. "A nation that keeps its eye on the past is wise. A nation that keeps two eyes on the past is blind." - Quote written on the wall of a pub in Belfast, Northern Ireland, posted on Twitter by NGS Travel Editor
    
    
35. "One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time." - Andre Gide, French writer


36. "If we have not found heaven within, it is a certainty we will not find it without." - Henry Miller


37. "If we are in harmony with life, life will keep us alive." - George Dibbern


38. "Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace." - Victor Hugo


39. "There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth...not going all the way, and not starting." - Buddha


40. "As long as you have not grasped that you have to die to grow, you are a troubled guest upon this earth." - Mircea Eliade


41. "The whole soulmates idea...is really most useful when you are stealing someone's husband. It is not so good when someone might be stealing yours." - Maile Meloy, Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It


42. "We've all got our good sides and our bad sides. If you want to have joy and love in this lifetime, you've got to live by mercy." - Rhett Ellis


43. "Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify." - Thoreau


44. "Until we accept the fact that life itself is founded in mystery, we shall learn nothing." - Henry Miller


45. "One's greatest security is to be loved. Banks fail, love never." - George Dibbern


46. "If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance." - George Bernard Shaw


47. "If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to." - Dorothy Parker


48. "A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us." - Ralph Waldo Emerson


49. "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force." - Dorothy Parker


50. "Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken." - Jack Kerouac


51. "There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in." - Leonard Cohen


52. "...But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face..." - W.B. Yeats


53. "Always do what you are afraid to do." - Ralph Waldo Emerson


54. "It is only when you realize that you don't belong to anyone or anything and that you truly own nothing, it is then that your life begins to make any sense. You only belong to something bigger...God, nature, whatever you want to call it. It is then that you have learned to write your name in the dark." - MPG

Comments

[Genie]

Wonderful quotes, Mary...and a very happy birthday to you!