Quotes

Attitude:

"Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens." -Kahlil Gibran

"Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense." -Ralph Waldo Emerson

"A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort." -Herm Albrig

“The thing that is really hard, and is really amazing is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself!” – Anna Quindlen

“Promise me you’ll always remember: you’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.” –Christopher Robin to Winnie the Pooh

“As we know from life, decisions are far more difficult to make than actions are to take. We often put off doing something for as long as possible, then as we finally make the decision and step into the action, we’re surprised by its relative ease. We’re left to wonder why we dreaded doing it until we realize that most of life’s actions are within our reach, but decisions take willpower.” -Robert McKee

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.” -Henry David Thoreau

“The difference between great people and everyone else is that great people create their lives actively, while everyone else is created by their lives, passively waiting to see where life takes them next. The difference between the two is the difference between living fully and just existing.” -Michael E. Gerber

"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better...to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded." -Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Flatter me, and I may not believe you. Criticize me, and I may not like you. Ignore me, and I may not forgive you. Encourage me, and I may not forget you." -William Arthur

"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty." -Sir Winston Churchill

“I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” -Mark Twain
“Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.” -Lewis Mumford

“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, but are felt in the heart” -Helen Keller

“Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.” -Lao-Tze

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” -Albert Einstein

"Could I have endured that time without the drugs, if I'd just held out a little longer? Could I have survived myself, by myself? I don't know. That's the thing about a human life-- there's no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed." -Elizabeth Gilbert in her book Eat, Pray, Love 

"Promise yourself:
To be strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind.
To talk health, happiness, and prosperity to every person you meet.
To make all your friends feel that there is something in them.
To look at the sunny side of everything and make your optimism come true.
To think only of the best, to work only for the best, and expect only the best.
To be just as enthusiastic about the success of others as you are about your own.
To forget the mistakes of the past and press on to the greater achievements of the future.
To wear cheerful countenance at all times and give every living creature you meet a smile.
To give so much time to the improvement of yourself that you have no time to criticize others.
To be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear, and too happy to permit the presence of trouble."
-Christian D. Larson

Spiritual:

"Thirsty hearts are those whose longings have been wakened by the touch of God within them." A.W. Tozer

"The danger is that the soul should persuade itself that it is not hungry." -Simone Weil

"Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket-- safe, dark, motionless, airless-- it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk or tragedy, is damnation." -C.S. Lewis

Relationships:

"One advantage of marriage is that, when you fall out of love with him or he falls out of love with you, it keeps you together until you fall in again." -Judith Viorst

"Marriage halves our griefs, doubles our joys, and quadruples our expenses." -English Proverb

"To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you're wrong, admit it;
Whenever you're right, shut up."
- Ogden Nash

"What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined for life - to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent, unspeakable memories." -George Eliot

"The question of love is one that cannot be evaded. Whether or not you claim to be interested in it, from the moment you are alive you are bound to be concerned with love, because love is not just something that happens to you. It is a certain special way of being alive. Love is, in fact, an intensification of life, a completeness, a fullness, a wholeness of life." -Thomas Merton

Confidence:

"Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people." -André Dubus

“The miracle isn’t that I finished. The miracle is that I had the courage to start.” -John Bingham

"Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong." -Peter T. Mcintyre

"Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent." -Eleanor Roosevelt

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." -Anaïs Nin

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." -Ralph Waldo Emerson

"You cannot find peace by avoiding life." -Virginia Woolf

“You can do anything, but not everything.” -David Allen

“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.” -Ambrose Redmoon

"Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says I'll try again tomorrow." -Mary Anne Radmacher

“If anything is worth trying at all, it’s worth trying at least 10 times.” -Art Linkletter

TV and Movie Quotes:

"Have I pointed out that I'm extremely uncomfortable with dancing, loud music, and most other forms of alcohol-induced frivolity?" -Sheldon Cooper, Big Bang Theory

"You hypocrite! Little Miss 'Grownups-Don't-Play-With-Toys.' If I went into that apartment right now, would I not find Beanie Babies? Are you not an accumulator of Care Bears and My Little Ponies? And who is that japanese feline I see frolicking on your shorts? Hello, Hello Kitty!" -Sheldon Cooper, Big Bang Theory

"'Disappointed' is anger for wimps" -House

"Well I'm sorry, Sammy. But I am not about to spend the next fifty years of my life with someone I'm not gonna run into in the hereafter." -Annelle in Steel Magnolias

"It's not our abilities that show who we truly are, it's our choices" -Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

"Of course it’s hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great!" -from the movie A League of Their Own

Miscellaneous:

"It is a curious fact that of all the illusions that beset mankind none is quite so curious as the tendency to suppose that we are mentally and morally superior to those that differ from us in opinion." -Elbert Hubbard

"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools talk because they have to say something." -Plato

"Black holes are where God divided by zero." -Stephen Wright

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'" -Isaac Asimov

"Omaha lacks the cynicism of the East Coast and for that reason will never be all that hip, despite the rock scene and the Old Market and the new skyscrapers. But that's fine. Omaha has its own identity, and in a distinctly Midwestern way, an unfaltering belief in the future. I don't stay for long. But it's good to go home again." -The Washington Post

"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live." -Henry David Thoreau

“We learn something every day, and lots of times it’s that what we learned the day before was wrong.“ -Bill Vaughan

“If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin.” -Ivan Turgenev

"People throw away what they could have by insisting on perfection, which they cannot have, and looking for it where they will never find it." -Edith Schaeffer

“Try a thing you haven’t done three times. Once, to get over the fear of doing it. Twice, to learn how to do it. And a third time, to figure out whether you like it or not.“ -Virgil Garnett Thomson

"Obsessed is just a word the lazy use to describe the dedicated." -Russell Warren

“What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.“ -John Ruskin

“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time.” -John Lubbock

"Cooking is 80% confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice." -Barbara Kingsolver, in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

"My apartment is infested with koala bears. Its the cutest infestation ever. Much better than cockroaches. I turn the lights on and a bunch of koala bears scatter. I'm like, come back! I want to hold one of you, and feed you a leaf." - Mitch Hedburg  

"It is always the simple things that change our lives. And these things never happen when you are looking for them to happen. Life will reveal answers at the pace life wishes to do so. You feel like running, but life is on a stroll." -Donald Miller