Famous Quotes

"Education is teaching our children to desire the right things."

"The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are."

"People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take."

"The best way to measure how much you've grown isn't by inches or the number of laps you can now run around the track, or even your grade point average-- though those things are important, to be sure. It's what you've done with your time, how you've chosen to spend your days, and whom you've touched this year. That, to me, is the greatest measure of success."

"Life is painful. It has thorns, like the stem of a rose. Culture and art are the roses that bloom on the stem. The flower is yourself, your humanity. Art is the liberation of the humanity inside yourself."

"I was born into Bolívar's labyrinth, and so I must believe in the hope of Rabelais' Great Perhaps."

"We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people."

"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,Or what's a heaven for?"

"...even a tiny bit of deceit is dishonorable when it's used for selfish or cowardly reasons.- Mr. Penderwick"

"What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step."

"It doesn't matter what you do...so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away."

"It takes a huge effort to free yourself from memory"

"You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive."

"Life is wasted on the living."

"Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy —the joy of being Salvador Dalí— and I ask myself in rapture: What wonderful things is this Salvador Dalí going to accomplish today?"

"My heart might be bruised, but it will recover and become capable of seeing beauty of life once more. It's happened before, it will happen again, I'm sure. When someone leaves, it's because someone else is about to arrive--I'll find love again."

"If I must fall, may it be from a high place."

"To be in your children's memories tomorrow,You have to be in their lives today."

"It's just that in the Deep South, women learn at a young age that when the world is falling apart around you, it's time to take down the drapes and make a new dress."

"To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man."

"It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me. When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell. And of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered."

"I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it."