Favorite Quotes

I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will. Charlotte Bronte

I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. ~Charlotte Bronte

Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear. ~Charlotte Bronte

There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart.
Jane Austen

To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain for the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.
Jane Austen

You forget too much That every creature, female as the male, Stands single in responsible act and thought As also in birth and death.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

What is art But life upon the larger scale, the higher, When, graduating up in a spiral line Of still expanding and ascending gyres, It pushed toward the intense significance Of all things, hungry for the Infinite? Art’s life–and where we live, we suffer and toil.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

A woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.
Jane Austen

Give a girl an education and introduce her properly into the world, and ten to one but she has the means of settling well, without further expense to anybody.
Jane Austen

Cheerfulness, it would appear, is a matter which depends fully as much on the state of things within, as on the state of things without and around us.
Charlotte Bronte

“The Minstrel’s Prayer”

Shelter me oh genius words
Just give me strength
To pen these things
Give me peace to weld her wings
And oh oh carry on all you minstrels of the world
We will catch our lady’s ear
We will win for us the girl
-Cartel

“Say Anything (Else)”

It’s time for you to understand
Stop getting up for the let down
Oh, who you are is not up to them
Stop getting up for the let down

And I’m here to say that you’re the star you wanna be
Just open up and look inside you will see

Someday you’ll sing it out loud
One day this will make you proud
-Cartel

Sleep is still most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it is shared with a beloved. The warmth, the security and peace of soul, the utter comfort from the touch of the other, knits the sleep, so that it takes the body and soul completely in its healing. ~D.H. Lawrence

Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days ~Flannery O’Connor

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I’m always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system. ~Flannery O’Connor

I write to discover what I know. ~Flannery O’Connor

To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness. ~Flannery O’Connor

Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place… Nothing outside you can give you any place… In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got. ~Flannery O’Connor

If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants. ~Sir Isaac Newton

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me ~Sir Isaac Newton (For RJO!)

I am so in favour of the actual infinite that instead of admitting that Nature abhors it, as is commonly said, I hold that Nature makes frequent use of it everywhere, in order to show more effectively the perfections of its Author. ~Georg Cantor

True love and prayer are learned in the moment when prayer has become impossible and the heart has turned to stone. ~Thomas Merton

We are what we think.  All that we are arises with our thoughts.  With our thoughts we make the world. ~Buddha

The key to development along the Buddhist path is repetitive routine guided by inspirational vision.  It is the insight into final freedom-the peace and purity of a liberated mind-that uplifts us and impels us to overcome our limits.  But it is by repetition-the methodical cultivation of wholesome practices-that we cover the distance separating us from the goal and draw ever closer to awakening. ~Bhikkhu Bodhi, American Buddhist Monk

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in every foreign tongue.  Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.  And the point is, to live everything.  Live the questions now.  Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. ~Rainer Maria Rilke