Shi Ying Yong > Shi Ying's Quotes

“The novelist Stendhal, in his book On Love , calls this phenomenon "crystallization," telling the story of how, in Salzburg, Austria, they used to throw a leafless branch into the abandoned depths of a salt mine in the middle of winter. When the branch was pulled out months later, it would be covered with spectacular crystals. That is what happens to a loved one in our minds.”
― Robert Greene

“There is a perfection in everything that cannot be owned,”
― Anaïs Nin, Delta Of Venus: Erotica by Anaïs Nin

“Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder

“What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you’ve lost.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“The most important conversations you’ll ever have are the ones you’ll have with yourself.”
― David Goggins, Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds

“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Be the flame, not the moth.”
― Giacomo Casanova

“When you learn to love hell, you will be in heaven.”
― Thaddeus Golas, The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment

“For every man there exists bait he cannot resist swallowing.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

“A willing awareness will take us to heaven, a loving attitude will make us free. Nothing else controls our fate. Good or bad behavior is secondary. Whatever you are doing, love yourself for doing it. Whatever you are thinking, love yourself for thinking it. Love is the only dimension that needs to be changed. If you are not sure how it feels to be loving, love yourself for not being sure of
how it feels. There is nothing on earth more important than the love which conscious beings feel towards each other, whether or not it is ever expressed.”
― Thaddeus Golas, The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment

“I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ”
― Anais Nin

“Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.”
― Voltaire

“See if you can catch yourself complaining, in either speech or thought, about a situation you find yourself in, what other people do or say, your surroundings, your life situation, even the weather. To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“Every man has within himself the entire human condition”
― Michel de Montaigne

“And what's strange, what would be marvelous, is not that God should really exist; the marvel is that such an idea, the idea of the necessity of God, could enter the head of such a savage, vicious beast as man.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“You become what you think about all day long.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“He was jealous of her future, and she of his past.”
― Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus

“I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Lost love is still love. It takes a different form, that's all. You can't see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. But when those senses weaken another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it.”
― Mitch Albom

“The first rule that a geisha is taught, at the age of nine, is to be charming to other women...Every girl in the world should have geisha training.”
― Diana Vreeland

“Secrets—even in hardened criminals, they were just air pockets lodged under debris at the bottom of an ocean. It might take an earthquake, or you scuba diving down there, sifting through the sludge, but their natural proclivity was always to head straight to the surface—to get out.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

“You are in danger of living a life so comfortable and soft, that you will die without ever realizing your true potential.”
― David Goggins, Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds

“There will be—or already has been!—a last time in your life that you brush your teeth, cut your hair, drive a car, mow the lawn, or play hopscotch. There will be a last time you hear the sound of snow falling, watch the moon rise, smell popcorn, feel the warmth of a child falling asleep in your arms, or make love. You will someday eat your last meal, and soon thereafter you will take your last breath.”
― William B Irvin

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”
― Anais Nin

“Pare down to the essence, but don't remove the poetry.”
― Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers

“In the early nineteenth century Wilhelm von Humboldt – one of the chief architects of the modern education system – said that the aim of existence is ‘a distillation of the widest possible experience of life into wisdom’. He also wrote that ‘there is only one summit in life – to have taken the measure in feeling of everything human’.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

“Philosophers have spent centuries discussing the idea that there are an infinite number of ways your life could play out, and you just happen to be living in this specific version. It’s a wild thing to contemplate, and it leads to the question: What would be true in every imaginable version of your life, not just this one?”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“When you're given an opportunity to change your life, be ready to do whatever it takes to make it happen. The world doesn't give things, you take things.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“When you dig just the tiniest bit beneath the surface, everyone's love life is original and interesting and nuanced and defies any easy definition.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo