“If there is to be any peace it will come through being, not having.”
Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist
Micko
Verified author @Micko, member from June 4, 2020
Ernest Hemingway book Men Without Women
Disputed <br class="br">Source: Claimed to be from Men Without Women, but it does not appear in that work. May have originated in a 2011 blogpost by Marc Chernoff entitled 30 things to stop doing to yourself http://www.marcandangel.com/2011/12/11/30-things-to-stop-doing-to-yourself/.
Tupac Shakur (1971–1996) rapper and actor
Variant: My Mama used to tell me if u can’t find something to live for, you best find something to die for.
Source: Resurrection, 1971-1996
“In quoting others, we cite ourselves.”
Julio Cortázar book Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
Source: Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer
from poem Go to the Limits of Your Longing.
Appears in movie Jojo Rabbit.
Variant: Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final
“To do nothing is the way to be nothing.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)
“Only the ideas that we actually live are of any value.”
Hermann Hesse book Demian
Source: Demian (1919), p. 146
Context: Only the ideas that we actually live are of any value. You knew all along that your sanctioned world was only half the world and you tried to suppress the second half the same way the priests and teachers do. You won't succeed. No one succeeds in this once he has begun to think.
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) French politician
Conversation with Jean Martet (1 June 1928), Ch. 30
Clemenceau, The Events of His Life (1930)
“Some mothers will do anything for their children, except let them be themselves.”
Banksy pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, and painter
Cut It Out (2004)
Source: Wall and Piece
Banksy pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, and painter
“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”
Ernest Hemingway book The Garden of Eden
Marita in Ch. 11
Source: The Garden of Eden (1986)
“It is a pity that you students aren't fully aware of the luxury and abundance in which you live.”
Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead Game
The Glass Bead Game (1943)
Context: It is a pity that you students aren't fully aware of the luxury and abundance in which you live. But I was exactly the same when I was still a student. We study and work, don't waste much time, and think we may rightly call ourselves industrious — but we are scarcely conscious of all we could do, all that we might make of our freedom. Then we suddenly receive a call from the hierarchy, we are needed, are given a teaching assignment, a mission, a post, and from then on move up to a higher one, and unexpectedly find ourselves caught in a network of duties that tightens the more we try to move inside it. All the tasks are in themselves small, but each one has to be carried out at its proper hour, and the day has far more tasks than hours. That is well; one would not want it to be different. But if we ever think, between classroom, archives, secretariat, consulting room, meetings, and official journeys — if we ever think of the freedom we possessed and have lost, the freedom for self-chosen tasks, for unlimited, far-flung studies, we may well feel the greatest yearning for those days, and imagine that if we ever had such freedom again we would fully enjoy its pleasures and potentialities.
“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.”
Norman Vincent Peale (1898–1993) American writer
Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist
While consistently attributed to Whitman, this popular motivational quote has no source. It is occasionally listed as occurring in Leaves of Grass, but the closest phrase found in that collection is "Be not curious about God."
Disputed
Variant: Be curious, not judgmental.
“You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Crack-Up
Notebook E: Epigrams, Wisecracks, and Jokes https://books.google.com/books?id=NIhKY8SpAE4C&q=%22You%20don%27t%20write%20because%20you%20want%20to%20say%20something%3B%20you%20write%20because%20you%27ve%20got%20something%20to%20say.%22&pg=PA123#v=onepage, edited by Edmund Wilson (1945) <br class="br">Quoted, The Crack-Up (1936)
“Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.”
William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist