Mine right now is from The Curious Case of Benjamin Button...
"For what it's worth: it's never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There's no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again."
I like this because it made me realize that life really is what you make of it, and its never too late to start over.
"Hell is defined as being visited, on your deathbed, by the person you could have become"
I really like this one. It is such a short, yet powerful statement that could be used to inspire a person to live their life to the fullest.
It's torturous as well, because we all will face something like it at the end of our lives. No one has zero regrets, there's always going to be something. We just have to try and 'be the best we can be'
From Carl Sagan - The Frontier is Everywhere: This quote deeply represents what it means to internalize human evolutionary processes, and evolutionary processes in general. It is one thing to "know" we evolved. It is quite another to internalize this meaning for the deep future. Also - this quote is the best way to see me tear up.We were hunters and foragers. The frontier was everywhere. We were bounded only by the Earth, and the ocean, and the sky. The open road still softly calls. Our little terraquious globe as the madhouse of those hundred thousand millions of worlds. We, who cannot even put our own planetary home in order, riven with rivalries and hatreds; Are we to venture out into space? By the time we’re ready to settle even the nearest of other planetary systems, we will have changed. The simple passage of so many generations will have changed us. Necessity will have changed us. We’re… an adaptable species. It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths, and fewer of our weaknesses. More confident, farseeing, capable, and prudent. For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness. What new wonders, undreamed of in our time, will we have wrought in another generation? And another? How far will our nomadic species have wandered by the end of the next century? And the next millennium? Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds through the solar system and beyond, will be unified by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that whatever other life there may be, the only humans in all the universe come from Earth. They will gaze up, and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of raw potential once was. How perilous, our infancy. How humble, our beginnings. How many rivers we had to cross before we found our way.
"Circumstances make men." I'm not sure anyone actually said that; in my children's history of the Texas Rangers (the cowboy police force, not the baseball team) it's attributed to Anonymous. But it strikes me as one of the most true sentences I've read and has ever since I first read that book when I was 7. I can't really explain why it means so much to me, or why that book means so much to me. But if any of you have some spare time, read up on the Rangers, because I bet there's never been a more interesting para-police force, and that quote is well-evidenced in the annals of their history.
- Abraham Lincoln. This is possibly more responsible for my overall happiness in life than anything else.“People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be.”
"You cannot plow a field by turning it over in your mind." Thinking it over gets you no where, you have to go out and do something, even if it doesn't go as well as you planned there are always other fields to plow.
"Opportunities multiply as they are seized." - Sun Tzu When you seize an opportunity, in my experience, it only opens up more of them. Every achievment, every option, every opportunity that you take and carry out, ends up only providing even more opportunities. It's a chain reaction of fortune and opportunity if you are willing to keep taking them.
"This too shall pass." True and simple. When I'm happy, it reminds me not to take anything for granted because circumstances can and will change. When I'm sad, it reminds me that no matter what dire straits I'm in, the circumstances can and will change.
I've admired this quote from the moment I first read and understood it a few years ago. I think because of the weight and sentiment behind such a saying and feeling, yet its brevity, such a simple and poetic manner, really makes it for me, even when truncated to its more-common reference as "plus ça change""plus ça change, plus c'est la même, chose"
"The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing"
--
Jean-Baptiste Alphones Karr
You create your own luck in life I realize that everyone has heard this, but I can recall the very first time someone said this to me and it had a profound impact. When I was younger I was working at a restaurant in Ann Arbor and our head bartender (sounds_sound) was going to Ghana to study architecture for a summer. One of the regulars of the restaurant came in and asked where the bartender was? I said, Ghana and he said how great it was and I replied, "Yeah, he's so lucky". The guest stopped me in my tracks and said to me while looking intently at me "you know, you create your own luck in life". -That was a transformative moment for me. btw, s_s that guy was Michael, the chain smoking fella from the store on the corner. -nice guy.
I like the following from Muhammad Ali... "I hated every minute of training, but I said, 'Don't quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.'" I like it because it relates to me in my final years of high school, and finding it hard to focus through the repetitive tests and incredible boredom, even with the subjects I like.
Possession makes you rich? I don't have that kind of richness, my richness is life, forever!
-Bob Marley- When I heard this the first time in an interview, i just had to listen to it again and again.
It's difficult to explain why it means so much to me. It's so easy and yet made me over think my life drastically.
"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."
-T.S. Eliot This quote popped up while I was browsing Literary Jukebox by brainpickings.org. It struck a chord with me in that I'm currently on a somewhat desperate quest for adventure--I need to get out of the monotonous life through which I've been moseying for the last decade. Until I can physically remove myself from my current surroundings and lifestyle, I have to get off the couch/out of the library/out of bed (my three former hot spots) and explore. I'm being present. Through living in the present, I'm learning that what I have around me is more profound than I'd previously known. So long as one appreciates presence, he or she can find adventure in nothing (or "anything", if you prefer).
From Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Grey. My second favorite one probably has to be From Erik Satie, one of my favorite composers. EDIT: Whoops, I forgot to explain why it means something to me: For the first quote, I always feel as though I'm limited by something. Whether it's my looks, or my gender, or my upbringing, education, interests, etc. etc. etc... I can't help but feel that none of those things can explain who I am, to be somewhat narcissitic. In the end, I try my best to avoid being labeled and "limited". I want to be the kind of person that you never know knows something you never thought I'd know. But that too, is a limit. In the end, I don't know what I want to be, but being limited is one thing I strive (though not steadfastly, for that too is limiting) against. For the second quote, I often feel as though this life is all one huge joke. All I know is that the older I get the more I realize that no one truly knows what's going on and yet we pretend we do, or at least don't acknowledge that we're just as in the dark about everything as our children and make great efforts to appear to know more than we really let on. I also haven't seen a thing, at least not yet."To define is to limit"
When I was young, I was told: 'You'll see, when you're fifty.' I am fifty and I haven't seen a thing.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
"Row, row, Fight the Powah". Gurren Lagann is an excessively silly show, but it entered my life at a time where I was really struggling. I pretty much encompassed the show as a life-style/philosophy, "kicked logic to the curb and did the impossible," and now I'm here. it's very possible that this wouldn't have been the case if I hadn't stumbled on this show.
more of a proverb, than a quote, but I use it all the time, and frequently think it to remind myself of it. "the mills of the gods, grind exceedingly slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine." things can often take a long time to happen, but it will be worth it when they come to fruition.
I don't really have a favorite quote, certainly nothing inspirational that I like to go back to every so often. Instead I have this: "Do you suppose yourself anything to her, but that? You have been too long among your uncle's books. Girls love easily, there. That is the point of them. If they loved so in life, the books would not have to be written." It's from Fingersmith by Sarah Waters. I use it to kind of remind myself of my place in other people's lives. I too easily fall into a sense of adoration for friends, expecting some great friendship, imagining bonds that will never break. The quote reminds me to chill out, that I don't know people who are looking for that right now.