Quotes in category: “Life”:

Failure is only the opportunity to begin again, this time more wisely.

And the truth is, sometimes you can prepare for something, be sure it’s the right choice, and yet still wake up one day, look around you, and think, “I made a mistake.” It would be great you hadn’t, but you did.

Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. 

We all lead secret lives, even if only in our heads. I guess the question is: Why? Aren’t there easier ways to pinch myself awake? I’m not asking forgiveness for the things I’ve done. my sins are mine to live with. I guess it was just one of those moments, a unique detail in an otherwise ordinary life. 

It’s not about who you’ve been with, it’s about who you end up with. Sometimes, the heart doesn’t know what it wants until it finds what it wants. 

Nostalgia - It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards… it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel, it’s called the carousel. It let’s us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know are loved.

Loosen up. Relax. Except for rare life-and-death matters, nothing is as important as it first seems. 

Here’s one of the things I learned that morning: if you cross a line and nothing happens, the line loses meaning. It’s like that old riddle about a tree falling in a forest, and whether it makes a sound if there’s no one around to hear it. You keep drawing a line farther and farther away, crossing it every time. That’s how people end up stepping off the edge of the earth. You’d be surprised at how easy it is to bust out of orbit, to spin out to a place where no one can touch you. To lose yourself—to get lost.

The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.

The bottom line is, life is about learning, whether you’re in school or not. We are human. We make mistakes. But your lowest moment might also be the one where you begin to rise, and rise. So double back. Regroup. Brush yourself off, and try again.

I know it feels like you have all these options and when you make a decision, you lose a world of possibilities. But the reality is, until you make a decision, you have nothing at all. 

I have a simple philosophy: Fill what’s empty. Empty what’s full. Scratch where it itches.

Remember sadness is always temporary. This, too, shall pass. 

There are moments of such pure, sublime, unparalleled perfection that they will force you to close your eyes and hold on to them as best you can. Life is a series of these moments. Everything else is just waiting for them.

Don't stress the could haves. If it should have, it would have.

They say that from the instant he lays eyes on her, a father adores his daughter. Whoever she grows up to be, she is always, to him, that little girl in pigtails. She makes him feel like Christmas. In exchange, he makes a secret promise not to see the awkwardness of her teenage years, the mistakes she makes or the secrets she keeps. Some fathers may enjoy the pedestal their daughters place them on, but the best ones step down and allow their flaws to be seen. It is from these unsung fathers that daughters learn what’s most important in this life – how to embrace joy, how to endure sorrow and how to live each day to the fullest … not knowing which of those two is on the horizon.

Only a few find the way, some don’t recognize it when they do; some… don’t ever want to.

Despite how much we fought, and how hard I tried to ignore her.... my mother was right. About almost everything.

Think of what a better world it would be if we all - the whole world - had cookies and milk about 3 o’clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankets for a nap. Or if we had a basic policy in our nations to always put things back where we found them and cleaned up our own messes. And it is still true, no matter how old you are, when you go out into the world, it is better to hold hands and stick together. 

Forget the times of your distress, but never forget what they taught you.

It is what we make of whatever we encounter that determines the outcome. what we choose to see, what we choose to save. and what we choose to remember.

You should never give yourself a chance to fall apart because, when you do, it becomes a tendency and it happens over and over again. You must practice staying strong, instead.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance and write poems and suffer and understand, for all of that is life.

Never say never. Never is a long, undependable time, and life is too full of rich possibilities to have restrictions placed upon it.

It is not easy … to wait. Waiting is what the hunter does, and the poet and the slugger. He waits for the moment of inevitability and fate and then he swings, or shoots, or takes up the pen to put down a line. They don’t teach us to wait in America; they teach us to grab. But waiting is what we do when we are looking for something beautiful, when we are looking for an end to our sorrow. Nothing is infinite in life, not even sorrow. You just have to wait.