Daniel J > Daniel J's Quotes

“Anything you can imagine is probably true. And the worst you can imagine is probably worth money.”
― Will Christopher Baer, Hell's Half Acre

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

“The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“The mere ambition to write a poem is enough to kill it.”
― Henri Michaux

“Your skin was song. Your advice was:see.”
― Unica Zürn, The Trumpets of Jericho

“I read once that the ancient Egyptians had fifty words for sand & the Eskimos had a hundred words for snow. I wish I had a thousand words for love, but all that comes to mind is the way you move against me while you sleep & there are no words for that.”
― Brian Andreas, Story People

“I have no intention of dying. In fact, that will be the last thing I do!”
― Milton H. Erickson

“Love all, trust a few,
Do wrong to none: be able for thine enemy
Rather in power than use; and keep thy friend
Under thy own life's key: be check'd for silence,
But never tax'd for speech.”
― William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well

“We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.”
― MARY CATHERINE BATESON

“The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone else. You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offense, isn't it? A man may know that nobody has insulted him, but that he has invented the insult for himself, has lied and exaggerated to make it picturesque, has caught at a word and made a mountain out of a molehill--he knows that himself, yet he will be the first to take offense, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great pleasure in it.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
― Marcel Proust

“Change will lead to insight far more often than insight will lead to change.”
― Milton H. Erickson

“People who say they don't care what people think are usually desperate to have people think they don't care what people think.”
― George Carlin

“He who has rejected his demons badgers us to death with his angels.”
― Henri Michaux, Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology, 1927-1984

“In a theater, it happened that a fire started offstage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed-amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

“May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.”
― Nelson Mandela

“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“Tis a Fearful Thing

‘Tis a fearful thing
to love what death can touch.

A fearful thing
to love, to hope, to dream, to be –

to be,
And oh, to lose.

A thing for fools, this,

And a holy thing,

a holy thing
to love.

For your life has lived in me,
your laugh once lifted me,
your word was gift to me.

To remember this brings painful joy.

‘Tis a human thing, love,
a holy thing, to love
what death has touched.”
― Judah Halevi

“No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.”
― Alice Walker

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.”
― Alice Walker

“I am an expression of the divine, just like a peach is, just like a fish is. I have a right to be this way...I can't apologize for that, nor can I change it, nor do I want to... We will never have to be other than who we are in order to be successful...We realize that we are as ourselves unlimited and our experiences valid. It is for the rest of the world to recognize this, if they choose.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears.”
― Alice Walker

“Time moves slowly, but passes quickly.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“Activism is my rent for living on the planet.”
― Alice Walker

“Any God I ever found in church, I brought in myself.”
― Alice Walker

“Look closely at the present you are constructing:
it should look like the future you are dreaming.”
― Alice Walker

“The more I wonder, the more I love.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.”
― Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

“We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.”
― Confucius

“Truth without love is brutality, and love without truth is hypocrisy.”
― Warren Wiersbe