The important thing in this world is not so much where we stand, but in what direction we are moving.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes
But I look up high to see only the light,
And never look down to see my shadow.
This is wisdom which man must learn.
-- from Song of the Flower by Kahlil Gibran
It is something that gathers strength with patience, grows despite obstacles, warms in winter, flourishes in spring, casts a breeze in summer, and bears fruit in autumn -- I found Love.
-- from Laughter and Tears by Kahlil Gibran
I should like to spend the whole of my life in traveling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home.
-- Hazlitt, Table-Talk: On Going a Journey
A man who leaves home to mend himself and others is a philosopher; but he who goes from country to country, guided by the blind impulse of curiosity, is only a vagabond.
-- Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World
Everything in life is good; even gold, for it teaches a lesson. Money is like a stringed instrument; he who does not know how to use it properly will hear only discordant music. Money is like love; it kills slowly and painfully the one who withholds it, and it enlivens the other who turns it upon his fellow men.
-- from Yesterday and Today by Kahlil Gibran
We sleep, but the loom of life never stops and the pattern which was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up tomorrow.
-- Henry Ward Beecher, Life Thoughts
I met at eve the Prince of Sleep,
His was a still and lovely face,
He wandered through a valley steep.
Lovely in a lonely place.
-- Walter de la Mare, I Met at Eve
A grateful couch was spread for our repose;
Where, in the guise of mountaineers, we lay,
Stretched upon fragrant heath, and lulled by sound
Of far-off torrents charming the still night,
And, to tired limbs and over-busy thoughts,
Inviting sleep and soft forgetfulness.
-- Wordsworth, The Excursion. Book Four: Despondency Corrected, line 1319.
You can lay the foundation of a friendship in a matter of moments, but it is a work of time to build a monument.
-- Madelyn Watt
Our home is where our friends abide. We are lonely in the crowded city, if our friends are not there; we are contented in the desert wild, if our friends are about us.
-- Charles Edward Locke
A friend may be found and lost, but an old friend can never be found, and nature has provided he cannot be easily lost.
-- Samuel Johnson
My fondest hope is that I may be worthy of a place in your friendship, and being admitted to that sacred circle, that I may never prove unfaithful to your trust in me.
-- Edwin Osgood Grover
God evidently does not intend us all to be rich or powerful or great, but he does intend us all to be friends.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The beauty of a real friendship is that unconsciously the two friends travel uphill together.
-- Edward Osgood Grover
In making dinner for a friend, don't forget the love.
-- Jeanne Moreau
The ideal of friendship is to feel as one while remaining two.
-- Madame Swetchine
Good company in a journey makes the way to seem the shorter.
-- Izaak Walton
There are only two people who can tell you the truth about yourself -- an enemy who has lost his temper and a friend who loves you dearly.
-- Antisthenes
The ultimate test of a relationship is to disagree but to hold hands.
-- Alexandra Penny
Human kinds cling to earthly things, but I seek ever to embrace the torch of love so it will purify me by its fire and sear inhumanity from my heart.
-- from A Poet's Voice by Kahlil Gibran
A real friend is one who helps us to think our best thoughts, do our noblest deeds, and be our finest selves.
-- Unknown
When friends ask, there is no tomorrow....only now.
-- Alexander Drey
What sweetness is left in life if you take away friendship? It is like robbing the world of the sun.
-- Cicero
A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you have a friend worth loving,
Love him. Yes, and let him know
That you love him, ere life's evening
Tinge his brow with sunset glow.
Why should good words ne'er be said
Of a friend -- till he is dead?
-- Daniel W. Hoyt
Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.
-- Dinah Craik
... And, when the stream
Which overflowed the soul was passed away,
A consciousness remained that it had left,
Deposited upon the silent shore
Of memory, images and precious thoughts,
That shall not die, and cannot be destroyed.
-- Wordsworth, The Excursion. Book Seven: The Churchyard Among the Mountains, line 25.
When other lips and other hearts
Their tales of love shall tell,
In language whose excess imparts
The power they feel so well,
There may, perhaps, in such a scene,
Some recollection be
Of days that have as happy been,
And you'll remember me.
-- Alfred Bunn, Then You'll Remember Me
All to myself I think of you,
Think of the things we used to do,
Think of the things we used to say,
Think of each happy bygone day.
Sometimes I sigh, and sometimes I smile,
But I keep each olden, golden while
All to myself.
-- Wilbur D. Nesbit, All to Myself
Where is the heart that doth not keep,
Within its inmost core,
Some fond remembrance hidden deep,
Of days that are no more?
-- Ellen Clementine Howarth, 'Tis But a Little Faded Flower
Oh, I have roamed o'er many lands,
And many friends I've met;
Not one fair scene or kindly smile
Can this fond heart forget.
-- T.H. Bayly, Song: Oh, Steer My Bark
The sight of you...is as necessary for me as is the sun for the spring flowers.
-- Marguerite of Valois
Heaven gives us friends to bless the present scene.
-- Edward Young
The noblest part of a friend is an honest boldness in the notifying of errors. He that tells me of a fault, aiming at my good, I must think him wise and faithful.
-- Owen Felltham
To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.
-- George Macdonald
My friends are not perfect -- no more than I -- and so we suit each other admirably. It is one of the charitable dispensations of Providence that perfection is not essential to friendship.
-- Alexander Smith
Thou may be sure that he who will tell thee of thy faults is thy friend, for he ventures thy dislike and doth hazard the hatred.
-- Sir Walter Raleigh
The highest compact we can make with our fellow is: Let there be truth between us two forevermore.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Oh, what is life without a friend
To dissipate our gloom?
A path where naught but briars grow,
Where flowers never bloom.
'Tis friends who make the desert world
To blossom as the rose;
Strew flowers o're our rugged path,
Pour sunshine o're our woes.
-- Anonymous (Friendship. Comp. by Paul Elder. Paul Elder & Co: San Francisco, 1910.)
The language of friendship is not words, but meanings. It is an intelligence above language.
-- Henry David Thoreau
Life is a boundless privilege, and when you pay for your ticket, and get into the car, you have no guess what good company you will find there.
-- Emerson
Reader, farewell! My last words let them be --
If in this book Fancy and Truth agree;
If simple Nature trained by careful Art
Through It have won a passage to thy heart;
Grant me thy love, I crave no other fee!
-- Wordsworth
Our lives are albums written through
With good or ill, with false or true;
And as the blessed angels turn
The pages of our years,
God grant they read the good with smiles,
And blot the ill with tears!
-- Whittier
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
-- Soren Kierkegaard
As a rule, the game of life is worth playing, but the struggle is the prize.
-- Dean W. R. Inge
We are in this life as it were in another man's house... In heaven is our home, in the world is our Inn: do not so entertain thyself in the Inn of this world for a day as to have thy mind withdrawn from longing after thy heavenly home.
-- Paul Gerhardt, Meditations (XXXVIII)
To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich; to study hard, think quietly, talk frankly; to listen to stars and birds, to babes and sages, with open heart; to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasion, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious grow up through the common: this is to be my symphony.
-- William Henry Channing
A sacred burden is this life ye bear:
Look on it, lift it, bear it solemnly,
Stand up and walk beneath it steadfastly,
Fail not for sorrow, falter not for sin,
But onward, upward, till the goal ye win.
-- Frances Anne Kemble
And in the wreck of noble lives
Something immortal still survives.
-- Longfellow
Where we live or how we live is of little consequence. What is all-important is to live.
-- Ernest Dimnet
Learn to make the most of life,
Lose no happy day,
Time will never bring thee back
Chances swept away!
-- Unknown
Leave no tender word unsaid,
Love while love shall last;
"The mill cannot grind
With the water that is past."
-- Sarah Doudney
For this is wisdom: to love, to live,
To take what Fate or the gods may give.
-- Laurence Hope
We are the masters of the days that were:
We have lived, we have loved, we have suffered . . . even so.
-- W.E. Henley
When a man has said, "I have lived," every morning he arises he receives a bonus.
-- Seneca
It is not a great thing to have been to Jerusalem, but to have lived well is a great thing.
-- St. Jerome
The measure of a happy life is not from the fewer or more suns we behold, the fewer or more breaths we draw, or meals we repeat, but from the having once lived well, acted our part handsomely, and made our exit cheerfully.
-- Lord Shaftesbury
There, like the wind through woods in riot,
Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet:
Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I.
-- A.E. Housman
As leaves on the trees, such is the life of man.
-- Homer
We are such stuff as dreams are made on,
And our little life is rounded with a sleep.
-- Shakespeare (Prospero in The Tempest)
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.
-- Shakespeare (Puck's last lines in A Midsummer Night's Dream)
And step by step, since time began,
I see the steady gain of man.
-- Whittier
At any rate, I might pursue some path, however solitary and narrow and crooked, in which I could walk with love and reverence. Wherever a man separates from the multitude, and goes his own way in this mood, there indeed is a fork in the road, though ordinary travelers may see only a gap in the paling. His solitary path across-lots will turn out the higher way of the two.
-- Henry David Thoreau
Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant? We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology! -- I know of no reading of another's experience so startling and informing as this would be.
-- Henry David Thoreau
The very simplicity and nakedness of man's life in the primitive ages imply this advantage, at least, that they left him still but a sojourner in nature. When he was refreshed with food and sleep, he contemplated his journey again. He dwelt, as it were, in a tent in this world, and was either threading the valleys, or crossing the plains, or climbing the mountain-tops.
-- Henry David Thoreau
Of course it is of no use to direct our steps to the woods, if they do not carry us thither. I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit.
-- Henry David Thoreau
Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture, even politics, the most alarming of them all, -- I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape.
-- Henry David Thoreau
So here it is at last, the distinguished thing.
-- Henry James
Man passes away; his name perishes from record and recollection; his history is as a tale that is told, and his very monument becomes a ruin.
-- Washington Irving
I thank God far more for friends than for my daily bread -- for friendship is the bread of the heart.
-- Mary Mitford
The ornaments of our house are the friends that frequent it.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Now may the warming love of friends
Surround you as you go
Down the path of light and laughter
Where the happy memories grow.
-- Helen Lowrie Marshall
"What is REAL?" asked the rabbit... "Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand...but once you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always."
-- Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit
Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.
-- Jeanne Moreau
It is always good to know, if only in passing, a charming human being; it refreshes our lives like flowers and woods and clear brooks.
-- George Eliot
So let the way wind up the hill or down,
O'er rough or smooth, the journey will be joy,
Still seeking what I sought when but a boy.
-- Henry Van Dyke
To see where something leads, it's best to wait until you reach the end.
-- Dan Millman
To attain a true relation to one human being is enough to make a year memorable.
-- Henry David Thoreau
The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend.... If he knows that I am happy in loving him, he will want no other reward. Is not friendship divine in this?
-- Henry David Thoreau
Some men may be acquaintances merely, but one whom I have been accustomed to regard, to idealize, to have dreams about as a friend, and mix up intimately with myself, can never denigrate into an acquaintance.
-- Henry David Thoreau
I have three chairs in my house: one for solitude, two for friendship, three for company.
-- Henry David Thoreau
It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
-- Ursula K. Le Guin
You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have really lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love.
-- Henry Drummond
The hardest of all is learning to be a well of affection, and not a fountain, to show them that we love them, not when we feel like it, but when they do.
-- Nan Fairbrother
Isn't it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about? It just makes me feel glad to be alive -- it's such an interesting world.
-- Montgomery
The past, like an inspired rhapsodist, fills the theatre of everlasting generations with her harmony.
-- Shelley
This is the place. Stand still, my steed,
Let me review the scene.
And summon from the shadowy Past
The forms that once have been.
-- Longfellow
Ah, me! what a world this was to live in two or three centuries ago, when it was getting itself discovered! . . . Then man was courting Nature, now he has married her. Every mystery is dissipated. The planet is familiar as the trodden pathway running between towns.
-- Alexander Smith
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.
-- Tennyson
Things bygone are the only things that last:
The present is mere grass, quick-mown away;
The Past is stone, and stands forever fast.
-- Eugene Lee-Hamilton
Look not mournfully into the Past. It comes not back again. Wisely improve the Present. It is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy Future, without fear, and with a manly heart.
-- Longfellow
The future is only the past again, entered through another gate.
-- Pinero
Man hath a weary pilgrimage
As through the world he wends,
On every stage, from youth to age,
Still discontent attends:
With heaviness he casts his eye
Upon the road before,
And still remembers with a sigh
The days that are no more.
-- Robert Southey
By harmony our souls are swayed;
By harmony the world was made.
-- George Granville
There is nothing so fragile as civilization, and no high civilization has long withstood the manifold risks it is exposed to.
-- Havelock Ellis
Limited in his nature, infinite in his desires, man is a fallen god who remembers the heavens.
-- Lamartine
And step by step, since time began,
I see the steady gain of man.
-- Whittier
There is a temple in ruin stands,
Fashion'd by long-forgotten hands;
Two or three columns, and many a stone,
Marble and granite, with grass o'ergrown!
Out upon time! it will leave no more
Of the things to come than the things before!
-- Byron
While in the progress of their long decay,
Thrones sink to dust, and nations pass away.
-- Earl of Carlisle
So many great nobles, things, administrations,
So many high chieftains, so many brave nations,
So many proud princes, and power so splendid,
In a moment, a twinkling, all utterly ended.
-- Jacopone
God is the author, men are only the players. These grand pieces which are played upon earth have been composed in heaven.
-- Balzac
Glorious indeed is the world of God around us,
but more glorious the world of God within us.
There lies the Land of Song;
there lies the poet's native land.
-- Longfellow
Nor deem the irrevocable Past,
As wholly wasted, wholly vain,
If, rising on its wrecks, at last
To something nobler we attain.
-- Longfellow
The birds have vanished into the sky,
and now the last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.
-- Li Po
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Peace is every step.
-- Thich Nhat Hanh
Go out of the house to see the moon, and 'tis mere tinsel: it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey.
-- Emerson
"I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge,
That myth is more potent than history.
I believe that dreams are more powerful than fact,
That hope always triumphs over experience,
That laughter is the only cure for grief.
I believe that love is stronger than death."
-- Robert Fulgham: Storyteller's Creed
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
-- Mark Twain
James Joyce: clinesterton beademungen (which turns out to mean "blessed are they who snore in bed", a very Joycean pun).
One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.
-- James Joyce: Dubliners, "The Dead"
"I have met you too late. You're too old for me to help you."
-- A young Joyce to the 37 year-old Yeats
I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.
-- James Joyce
I believe that the true joy in life is being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. It is being a force of Nature, instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making YOU happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and that as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die. For the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I've got a hold of for a moment, and I want to make it burn, as brightly as possible, before handing it on to future generations.
-- George Bernard Shaw
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
-- Stephen Roberts
It is small minds and small thinkers who don't consider anything outside of their neighborhood important. We are all citizens of the world. You'd better come to terms with that concept or get ready to spend your life behind a fast-food counter.
-- Jimmy Buffett
Ultimately, the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or friendship, is conversation.
-- Oscar Wilde, DE PROFUNDIS
The truth is that enlightenment is neither remote nor unattainable. It is closer than your skin and more immediate than your next breath. If we wonder why so few seem able to find that which can never be lost, we might recall the child who was looking in the light for a coin he dropped in the dark because "the light is better over here." Mankind has spent ages looking in the light for a coin that awaits us not in light and not in dark, but beyond all opposites.
-- Jed McKenna
