A collection of quotes on the topic of deep, life, peaceful, beauty.
“Sweat saves blood, blood saves lives, but brains saves both.”
“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
Variant: I am not what happens to me. I choose who I become.
“Believe you can and you're halfway there.”
“Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.”
Source: Heliogabalus
“How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.”
“Do one thing every day that scares you.”
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.”
“Life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it.”
Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.
Variant translations: Here is my secret. It is very simple: one sees well only with the heart. The essential is invisible to the eyes.
The essential things in life are seen not with the eyes, but with the heart.
Le Petit Prince (1943)
“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.”
“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”
Attributed on the internet but not found in print prior to an attribution in Aero Digest, Vols. 58–59, 1949, p. 115 https://books.google.com/books?id=q2ofAQAAMAAJ&dq=%22Life+is+simple%22+but+we+insist+on+making+it+complicated&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=%22Life+is+simple%22+
Misattributed, Not Chinese
“If you don’t like the road you’re walking, start paving another one.”
“Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.”
“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
Variant: Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.
“The secret to getting ahead is getting started.”
“Count your age by friends, not years. Count your life by smiles, not tears.”
“Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.”
Georges Duhamel in THE HEART'S DOMAIN (1919). As it was composed in French, the wording in English may vary in translation. Theodore Geisel / Dr. Seuss was born in 1904, and would have been about 15 years old at the time that it was published. The full text can be found at the link below: We do not know the true value of our moments until they have undergone the test of memory. Like the images the photographer plunges into a golden bath, our sentiments take on color; and only then, after that recoil and that trans-figuration, do we understand their real meaning and enjoy them in all their tranquil splendor.
Misattributed
The Bulletin, San Francisco, California, December 2, 1916, part 2, p. 1.
Also included in Jack London’s Tales of Adventure, ed. Irving Shepard, Introduction, p. vii (1956)
“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life — It goes on.”
As quoted in The Harper Book of Quotations (1993) edited by Robert I. Fitzhenry, p. 261
General sources
Variant: In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.
“Do not take life too seriously – you will never get out of it alive.”
Source: A Thousand & One Epigrams: Selected from the Writings of Elbert Hubbard (1911), p. 74
“Every one is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.”
Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. LXVI
Following the Equator (1897)
"In Search of a Majority: An Address" (Feb 1960); reprinted in Baldwin, "Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobody_Knows_My_Name (1961)
“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
"The Leaning Tower", lecture delivered to the Workers' Educational Association, Brighton (May 1940)
The Moment and Other Essays (1948)
“Action may not always bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.”
Books, Coningsby (1844), Lothair (1870)
Variant: Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.
As quoted in Journal of France and Germany (1942–1944) by Gilbert Fowler White, in excerpt published in Living with Nature's Extremes: The Life of Gilbert Fowler White (2006) by Robert E. Hinshaw, p. 62. From the context http://books.google.com/books?id=_2qfZRp9SeEC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA62#v=onepage&q&f=false it seems that White did not specify whether he had heard Einstein himself say this or whether he was repeating a quote that had been passed along by someone else, so without a primary source the validity of this quote should be considered questionable.
Some have argued that elsewhere Einstein defined a "miracle" as a type of event he did not believe was possible—Einstein on Religion by Max Jammer (1999) quotes on p. 89 from a 1931 conversation Einstein had with David Reichinstein, where Reichinstein brought up philosopher Arthur Liebert's argument that the indeterminism of quantum mechanics might allow for the possibility of miracles, and Einstein replied that Liebert's argument dealt "with a domain in which lawful rationality [determinism] does not exist. A 'miracle,' however, is an exception from lawfulness; hence, there where lawfulness does not exist, also its exception, i.e., a miracle, cannot exist." ("Dort, wo eine Gesetzmässigkeit nicht vorhanden ist, kann auch ihre Ausnahme, d.h. ein Wunder, nicht existieren." D. Reichenstein, Die Religion der Gebildeten (1941), p. 21). However, it is clear from the context that Einstein was stating only that miracles cannot exist in a domain (quantum mechanics) where lawful rationality does not exist. He did not claim that miracles could never exist in any domain. Indeed, Einstein clearly believed, as seen in many quotations above, that the universe was comprehensible and rational, but he also described this characteristic of the universe as a "miracle". In another example, he is quoted as claiming belief in a God, "Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world."
As quoted in From Yale to Jail: The Life Story of a Moral Dissenter (1993) by David T. Dellinger, p. 418
Disputed
Variant: There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
Variant: There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
“Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.”
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
Attributed to Aristotle in Lowell L. Bennion, Religion and the Pursuit of Truth http://books.google.gr/books?id=2HPUAAAAMAAJ&q=, Deseret Book Company, 1959, p. 52, and in American Opinion, Volume 24 http://books.google.gr/books?id=irofAQAAMAAJ&q=, Robert Welch, Inc., 1981, p. 23. Possibly a discombobulation http://publicnoises.blogspot.fi/2009/02/aristotle-and-accuracy.html of the Nicomachean Ethics Book I, 1094b.24 quote above.
Disputed
Source: Metaphysics
“You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
Source: You Learn by Living (1960), p. 29–30
Context: You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, "I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along." … You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
The Cancer Journals, Special Edition, Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco, CA, 1997, p. 13.
“There are two great days in a person's life - the day we are born and the day we discover why.”
“There is no remedy for love but to love more.”
Variant: The only remedy for love is to love more.
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)
Context: With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
“Some of us think holding on makes us strong, but sometimes, it is letting go.”
As quoted in Our Precarious Habitat (1973) by Melvin A. Benarde, p. v
“Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.”
Source: A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.”
Source: Quoted in Man's Search for Meaning and attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche.
“Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.”
Shared on her Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/MayaAngelou/posts/10150251846629796, July 4, 2011
“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.”
As quoted in Our Precarious Habitat (1973) by Melvin A. Benarde, p. v
Context: Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.
“Honesty is the first chapter of the book wisdom.”
“Try to be a rainbow in someone's cloud.”
Variant: Be a rainbow in somebody else's cloud.
Source: Letter to My Daughter
“A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself.”
“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”
“Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.”
In answer to a question asked by the editors of Youth, a journal of Young Israel of Williamsburg, NY. Quoted in the New York Times, June 20, 1932, pg. 17 http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F40617F83B5A13738DDDA90A94DE405B828FF1D3
Unsourced variant: Only a life in the service of others is worth living.
1930s
Variant: I believe in one thing—that only a life lived for others is a life worth living.
“The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.”
The Note Book of Elbert Hubbard (1927)
Variant: The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.
“Choice, not chance, determines your destiny.”
“Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.”
Quoted in Matthew M. Radmanesh, Cracking the Code of Our Physical Universe, p. 269.
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.”
Letter to his son Eduard (5 February 1930), as quoted in Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), p. 367
1930s
“A life without love is like a tree without fruit.”
Source: Doctor Sleep
“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
Touchstone, Act V, scene i
Source: As You Like It (1599–1600)
“Your friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you.”
Variant: A friend is one who knows you and loves you just the same.
Source: The Note Book of Elbert Hubbard (1927), p. 112.
“You get in life what you have the courage to ask for.”
“Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.”
From the same 24 March 1954 letter as above, p. 44
Attributed in posthumous publications, Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979)
“Luck is when opportunity meets preparation.”
“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”
“Never bend your head. Hold it high. Look the world straight in the eye.”
Variant: The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.
Variant: The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen, nor touched... but are felt in the heart.
“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”
“We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”
Variant: You must give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you.
“Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life.”
“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”
Source: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 22
“No-one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
Attributed quotes
“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable.”
The character "Rose Walker" in The Sandman #65
Context: Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up a whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life... You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' or 'how very perceptive' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. Nothing should be able to do that. Especially not love. I hate love.
“All you need is the plan, the road map, and the courage to press on to your destination.”
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
Variant: Life can only be understood going backward, but must be lived going forward.
“Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.”
Source: The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers
“Whoso loves
Believes the impossible.”
Book V.
Aurora Leigh http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/barrett/aurora/aurora.html (1857)
Variant: Whoso loves
Believes the impossible.
Foreword (January 1960)
You Learn by Living (1960)
“It isn't where you came from; it's where you're going that counts.”
“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”
Frequently misattributed to Marilyn Monroe or Kurt Cobain.
Source: https://books.google.com/books?id=xUtdDnEhkMMC&pg=PT12&lpg=PT12#v=onepage&q&f=false
Source: Autumn Leaves, Philosophical eLibrary, 2012, (Feuillets d'automne, 1941, trans. Jeanine Parisier Plottel)
“I've failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.”
“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”
Source: Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, with Annotations - 1841-1844
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
Laozi in the Tao Te Ching, Chapter 64
Misattributed, Chinese
“Dieting is the only game where you win when you lose!”
“Every day may not be good…
but there's something good in every day”
“Creativity is intelligence having fun.”
Variant: You build on failure. You use it as a stepping sone. Close the door on the past. You don't try to forget the mistakes, but you don't dwell on it. You don't let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.
“There is another world, but it is in this one.”
Il y a assurément un autre monde, mais il est dans celui-ci...
Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, Gallimard, 1968.
“And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.”
This quote is often misattributed to Lincoln. The earliest instance that Quote Investigator could locate was "in an advertisement in 1947 for a book about aging by Edward J. Stieglitz, M.D". The advertisement for “The Second Forty Years” which ran in the Chicago Tribune newspaper read like this: The important thing to you is not how many years in your life, but how much life in your years! (Compare 1947 March 16, Chicago Tribune, “How Long Do You Plan to Live?”, [Advertisement for the book "The Second Forty Years" by Edward J. Stieglitz, M.D.], p. C7, Chicago, Illinois. (ProQuest)). Source of misattribution: It’s Not the Years in Your Life That Count. It’s the Life in Your Years - Abraham Lincoln? Adlai Stevenson? Edward J. Stieglitz? Anonymous? by Quote Investigator on July 14, 2012 http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/07/14/life-years-count/
To my way of thinking it is not the years in your life but the life in your years that count in the long run.
Adlai Stevenson II, Address at Princeton University, "The Educated Citizen" (22 March 1954) http://infoshare1.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/mudd/online_ex/stevenson/adlai1954.html. This has also been paraphrased "What matters most is not the years in your life, but the life in your years" and misattributed to Abraham Lincoln and Mae West.
Adlai Stevenson II, "If I Were Twenty-One" in Coronet (December 1955).
Misattributed
Variant: It is not the years in your life but the life in your years that counts.
Source: You Learn by Living (1960), p. 29–30
Context: You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, "I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along." … You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
“We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.”
“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.”
“It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
Manuscript Found in Accra (2012), Love has always passed me by
“Each person must live their life as a model for others.”
“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”
Attributed to Kierkegaard in a number of books, the earliest located on Google Books being the 1976 book Jack Kerouac: Prophet of the New Romanticism by Robert A. Hipkiss, p. 83 http://books.google.com/books?id=g_JaAAAAMAAJ&q=%22problem+to+be+solved%22#search_anchor. In the 1948 The Hibbert Journal: Volumes 46-47 the quote is referred to as "the famous Kierkegaardian slogan" on p. 237 http://books.google.com/books?id=UuDRAAAAMAAJ&q=%22the+famous+Kierkegaardian+slogan+life+is+not+a+problem+to+be+solved%22#search_anchor, which may be intended to suggest the phrase is Kierkegaard-esque rather than being something written by Kierkegaard. In reality this seems to be a slightly altered version of the quote "The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved; it is a reality to be experienced" which appeared in the 1928 book The Conquest of Illusion by Jacobus Johannes Leeuw, p. 9 http://books.google.com/books?id=OFdVAAAAMAAJ&q=%22not+a+problem+to+be+solved%22#search_anchor.
Misattributed
“It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.”
“Some succeed because they are destined to, but most succeed because they are determined to.”
"Personal Conduct" http://books.google.com/books?id=IYOcAQAAQBAJ&q=%22The+stupid+neither+forgive+nor+forget+the+na%C3%AFve+forgive+and+forget+the+wise+forgive+but+do+not+forget%22&pg=PA177#v=onepage, p. 51. http://openlibrary.org/works/OL15151528W/The_Second_Sin
The Second Sin (1973)
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
Attributed to Winston Churchill in The Prodigal Project : Book I : Genesis (2003) by Ken Abraham and Daniel Hart, p. 224 and other places, though no source attribution is given. It actually derives from an advertising campaign for Budweiser beer in the late 1930s.
Misattributed
Variant: Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
Source: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/09/03/success-final/
“Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.”
Alternate (also Twain's): Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Source: Mark Twain's Notebook (1935), p. 393
