Words

This is simply an ever-growing collection of quotations (and occasionally short poems) that I love.  For years I kept a notebook, adding things to it when I came across them.  Then they started living in a Quotes document on my computer (where there are hundreds more that I haven't yet transferred!), and now they're migrating to here.

You'll have met some of these on the Project Pages, and others may be new to you.

Learn to be silent.  Let your quiet mind listen and absorb.
Pythagoras

The inspiration you seek is already within you.  Be silent and listen.
Rumi

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
Mahatma Gandhi

The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.
Albert Einstein

You can't use up creativity.  The more you use, the more you have.
Maya Angelou

Wheresoever you go, go with all your heart.
Confucius

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.  We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.
Albert Einstein

The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.
Eleanor Roosevelt

Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love.
Rumi

The words you speak become the house you live in.
Hafiz

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
Martin Luther King Jr.

Dream no small dreams, for they have no power to move the hearts of men.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.
Friedrich Nietzsche

You must learn a new way to think before you can master a new way to be.
Marianne Williamson

Find something you're passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it.
Julia Child

Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities.  Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.
Gloria Steinem

I am made and remade continually.  Different people draw different words from me.
Virginia Woolf

I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.
J.G. Ballard

Once, poets were magicians.  Poets were strong, stronger than warriors or kings - stronger than old hapless gods.  And they will be strong once again.
Greg Bear 

To survive, you must tell stories.
Umberto Eco

The constant happiness is curiosity.
Alice Munro

Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting.
Haruki Murakami

I want to be with those who know secret things, or else alone.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Look as long as you can

at the friend you love

No matter whether that friend is moving away from you

or coming back toward you.

Rumi

Vital lives are about action.  You can't feel warmth unless you create it, can't feel delight unless you play, can't know serendipity unless you risk.
Joan Erickson

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.
Albert Einstein

My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done; and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.
Maya Angelou

You only live once but, if you do it right, once is enough.
Mae West

Anyone in pursuit of art is responding to a desire to make visible that which is not, to offer the unknown self to others.

Hettie Jones

To produce any art, well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow.
Kurt Vonnegut

Quietness is an essential part of all awareness. In quiet times and sleepy times, a child can dwell in thoughts of his own, and in songs and stories of his own.
Margaret Wise Brown

Only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive, and will himself sound the depths of his own being.
Rainer Maria Rilke

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

We went down into the silent garden. Dawn is the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence. Everything is transfixed, only the light moves.
Leonora Carrington

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.
Albert Einstein

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.
Lao Tzu

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. 
Rudyard Kipling

The most wasted of days is one without laughter.
e.e. cummings

To live is the rarest thing in the world.  Most people exist, that is all.
Oscar Wilde

The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities,

But to know someone who thinks and feels with us,

And who, though distant, is close to us in spirit,

This makes the earth, for us, an inhabited garden.

Goethe 

You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.
Friedrich Nietzsche

If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?
Albert Einstein

Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart.  Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
C.G. Jung

I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being.
Sufi poet Hafez of Shiraz

You don’t get to choose how you’re going to die.  Or when.  You can only decide how you’re going to live.  Now.
Joan Baez

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
From The Summer Day by Mary Oliver

All the windows of my heart I open to the day.
John Greenleaf Whittier

Some people come into our lives and quickly go.

Some people move our souls to dance. They awaken us to
new understanding with the passing whisper of their wisdom.
Some people make the sky more beautiful to gaze upon.
They stay in our lives for awhile, leave footprints
on our hearts, and we are never ever the same.”
Flavia Weedn

Act mindfully.  Accept entirely.  Move strongly.  Think softly.  Speak beautifully.  Live simply.  Love completely.
Anonymous 

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world.  Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead

The earth was overwhelmed with beauty and indifferent to it, and I went with a heart ready to crack for its unbearable loveliness. 
Josephine Winslow Johnson

Eventually everything connects - people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key to quality per se. 
Charles Eames

Each of us, when our day's work is done, must seek our ideal, whether it be love or pinochle or lobster à la Newburg, or the sweet silence of the musty bookshelves. 
O. Henry

The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.
George Bernard Shaw

Keep the circus going inside you, keep it going, don't take anything too seriously, it'll all work out in the end.
David Niven

Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.
Thomas Szasz

They say a person needs just three things in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for.
Tom Bodett

I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion.  These three are your greatest treasures.
Lao-Tzu

Imagination is more important than knowledge.  Knowledge is limited.  Imagination encircles the world.
Albert Einstein

He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.
Goethe

Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future.  Rather it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.
Thomas Merton

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.
Benjamin Franklin

I once had a rose named after me, and I was very flattered.  But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.
Eleanor Roosevelt

                                   One Perfect Rose

                                   A single flow'r he sent me, since we met.
                                   All tenderly his messenger he chose;
                                   Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet - 
                                   One perfect rose.

                                   I knew the language of the floweret;
                                   'My fragile leaves,' it said, ' his heart enclose'.
                                   Love long has taken for his amulet
                                   One perfect rose.

                                   Why is it no one ever sent me yet
                                   One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
                                   Ah no, it's always just my luck to get
                                   One perfect rose.

                                   Dorothy Parker


It is good to be alone in a garden at dawn or dark so that all its shy presences may haunt you and possess you in a reverie of suspended thought.
James Douglas

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
J.R.R. Tolkien

Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.
D.H. Lawrence

To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

You don't make friends, you recognise them.
Isabel Paterson

A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart, and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words.
Unknown (but not C.S. Lewis as is sometimes claimed)

To change one’s life: start immediately; do it flamboyantly.
William James

Writing is an exploration.  You start from nothing and learn as you go.

E.L. Doctorow

The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.  

Ralph W. Sockman

The important thing is to not stop questioning.  Curiosity has its own reason for existing.
Albert Einstein

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.  

George Bernard Shaw

The mediocre teacher tells.  The good teacher explains.  The superior teacher demonstrates.  The great teacher inspires.  

William Arthur Ward

The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.  

Kahlil Gibran

If you think you can do it, or you think you can’t do it, you are right.

Henry Ford

Art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can only be explored by those willing to take the risks.
Mark Rothko

And she always had a way with her brokenness.  She would take her pieces and make them beautiful.
R.M.Drake

He who works with his hands is a labourer.
He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.
St Francis of Assisi

My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude.
Albert Einstein

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, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
Ralph Waldo Emerson