“What we cannot bear removes us from life; what remains can be borne.”

“One can bear anything. The pain we cannot bear will kill us outright.”

Janet Fitch book White Oleander

“We cannot become what we need by remaining what we are.”

John C. Maxwell (1947) American author, speaker and pastor

“Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.”

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) American writer

“What are we? What is the future? What is the past? What magic fluid envelops us and hides from us the things it is most important for us to know? We are born, we live, and we die in the midst of the marvelous.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

“Only what we have not accomplished and what we could not accomplish matters to us, so that what remains of a whole life is only what it will not have been.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

“In the end, it is important to remember that we cannot become what we need to be, by remaining what we are.”

Max DePree (1924–2017) American businessman and writer

“Love what we see can from our sight remove,
And things invisible are seen by Love.”

John Hoole (1727–1803) British translator

“The point is not what we expect from life, but rather what life expects from us.”

Viktor E. Frankl (1905–1997) Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor

“We are here to add what we can to, not to get what we can from, Life.”

William Osler (1849–1919) Canadian pathologist, physician, educator, bibliophile, historian, author, cofounder of Johns Hopkins Hospi…