Quotes on… Respect
This is the final test of the gentleman: His respect for those who can be of no possible service to him.
- William Lyon Phelps
Respect is love in plain clothes.
- Frankie Byrne
Chris had been fifteen. He could be expected to feel only scorn towards me. I detested the fact that I was so young. I did not think I would be able to say anything at all to him…. What won me was that he would talk to me and wisecrack as though I were his same age. He was – although I didn’t know the phrase then – a respecter of persons.
- Margaret Laurence (Horses of the Night)
He who wants a rose must respect the thorn.
- Persian proverb
You should respect each other and refrain from disputes; you should not, like water and oil, repel each other, but should, like milk and water, mingle together.
- Buddha
Quotes on… Change
Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.
- J.R.R Tolkien (Lord of the Rings)
You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
- Ghandi
They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
- Andy Warhol
People don’t change when you tell them there is a better option. They change when they conclude that they have no other option. People change as a result of what they notice not just what they are told.
- Michael Mandelbaum
I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas: they’ve gone through and through me, like wine colour of my mind.
- Emily Bronte
Quotes by… Oscar Wilde
I often have long conversations all by myself, and I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.
- Oscar Wilde
Always forgive your enemies — nothing annoys them so much
- Oscar Wilde
There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.
- Oscar Wilde
One’s real life is so often the life that one does not lead.
- Oscar Wilde
Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.
- Oscar Wilde
Quotes on… Travel
The Initial Mystery that attends any journey is how did the traveler reach his starting point in the first place?
- Louise Bogan (Journey Around My Room)
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the road less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
- Robert Frost
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A traveler! I love his title. A traveler is to be reverenced as such. His profession is the best symbol of our life. Going from–toward; it is the history of every one of us.
- Henry David Thoreau
We wave at people in trains because their lives – their cores – are so intensely and powerfully reflected in the inexorable, unstoppable roaring dreams of motion and voyage and discovery, which trains embody. One can’t help but admire the power and brutality and singularity of decision a moving train implies.
- Douglas Coupland (Microserfs)
Quotes on… Today
The future is the result of what we do today. The future comes after every breath we breathe and every minute we live; it comes after every action we take in pursuit of our dreams.
- Gerardo Reyes Chavez
I’m sure you’ve all heard at some point in time, the saying, “You should live today like the world is going to end tomorrow.” I think this is a good idea however I don’t suppose that when I tell my physics teacher that I didn’t do my homework because, “I was living yesterday like the world was going to end today… however, my calculations were a bit off and it seems the world hasn’t ended… my bad,” he’s going to accept that as a valid excuse. Talk about mixed messaging.
- Beverly Eastham
The future is always ideal: The fridge is stocked, the weather clear, the train runs on schedule and meetings end on time. Today, well, stuff happens.
- Hara Estroff Marano
Yesterday is ashes; tomorrow is wood.
Only today does the fire burn brightly.
- Old Inuit proverb
To be realistic today is to be visionary. To be realistic is to be starry-eyed.
- Hubert H. Humphrey
Quotes on… Trust
Trust in Allah, but tie your camel.
- Muslim Proverb
“What the hell is your problem?”
“For starters, I don’t know you, therefore I don’t trust you.”
“The world is full of people you don’t know.”
“I worry about that all the time.”
- tv: Babylon Five
I know God will not give me anything I can’t handle. I just wish He didn’t trust me so much.
- Mother Teresa
Trust, but verify.
- Ronald Reagan
The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.
- Ernest Hemingway
Quotes on… Stars
I’m wishing on a star
to follow where you are.
I’m wishing on a dream
to follow what it means.
And I wished on all the rainbows that I’ve seen
I wished on all the people who really dream.
I’m wishing on a star.
- Rose Royce (song: Wishing on a Star)
We are star stuff. We are the universe made manifest trying to figure itself out.
-tv: Babylon 5
I just need your star for a day.
- Nick Drake (song: Fly)
Non est ad astra mollis e terris via – There is no easy way from the earth to the stars.
- Cecil Castellucci (Boy Proof)
If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I’ll bet they’d live a lot differently.
- Bill Watterson
Quotes by… Terry Pratchett
I want apprentices…not craftsmen. I have no use for people who have learned the limits of the possible.
- Terry Pratchett (The Last Hero)
“I would like a question answered today,” said Tiffany. “Provided it’s not the one about how you get baby hedgehogs,” said the man. “No,” said Tiffany patiently. “It’s about zoology.” “Zoology eh? That’s a big word, isn’t it.” “No, actually it isn’t,” said Tiffany. “Patronizing is a big word. Zoology is really quite short.”
- Terry Pratchett (Wee Free Men)
You expected him any moment to break into the kind of song that has suspicious rhymes and phrases like ‘my kind of town’ and ‘I wanna be a part of it’ in it; the kind of song where people dance in the street and give the singer apples and join in and a dozen lowly matchgirls suddenly show amazing choreographical ability and everyone acts like cheery lovable citizens, instead of the murderous, evil-minded, self-centered individuals they suspect themselves to be
- Terry Pratchett (Men at Arms)
It’s not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren’t doing.
- Terry Pratchett
The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.
- Terry Pratchett (Jingo)
Quotes on… Suicide
Shame on thee. Shame! What you describe is not power; nay, ‘tis the very opposite of power. [Suicide] is weakness and stupidity and indolence and defeat. Marke me, cousin, there is nothing mighty in quitting life. The only victory is summoning the audacity to stay.
- Lisa Fiedler (Romeo’s Ex – Rosaline’s Story)
It’s funny but on good days I don’t think of her so much. In fact never. I never just say hi when the sun is on my tongue and my belly’s all warm. On bad days I talk to Death constantly, not about suicide because honestly that’s not dramatic enough. Most of us love the stage, and suicide is definitely your last performance, and being addicted to the stage, suicide was never an option – plus people get to look you over and stare at your fatty bits and you can’t cross your legs to give that flattering thigh angle and that’s depressing.
- Tori Amos (Afterword to ‘The Sandman Book of Dreams’)
I didn’t want it to be me underneath. I wanted to kill the me underneath. That fact haunted my days and nights. When you realize you hate yourself so much, when you realize that you cannot stand who are you, and this deep spite has been the motivation behind your behaviour for many years, your brain can’t quite deal with it. It will try very hard to avoid that realization; it will try, in a last-ditch effort to keep your remaining parts alive, to remake the rest of you. This is, I believe, different from the suicidal wish of those who are in so much pain that death feels like relief, different from the suicide I would later attempt, trying to escape that pain. This is a wish to murder yourself; the connotation of kill is too mild. This is a belief that you deserve slow torture, violent death. Without being entirely aware of it, I had settled on starvation as my torture of choice. When people think about killing themselves, they usually think about killing themselves with the least amount of pain, the briefest period of suffering. This is different.
- Marya Hornbacher (Wasted)
Anyone desperate enough for suicide… should be desperate enough to go to creative extremes to solve problems: elope at midnight, stow away on the boat to New Zealand and start over, do what they always wanted to do but were afraid to try.
- Richard Bach
Suicide sometimes proceeds from cowardice, but not always; for cowardice sometimes prevents it; since as many live because they are afraid to die, as die because they are afraid to live.
- Charles Caleb Colton
