Quotes

John Green once said, “Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we’re quoting.”

I love quotes, from all kinds of places and people; they’re important to me for so many reasons. So here are some of my favourites of all time.

“I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one… . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil… . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?”  - East of Eden by John Steinbeck

“I wonder how many people I’ve looked at all my life and never seen.” ―  The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck

“I’m seventeen and I’m crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane.” - Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

“I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth. And I might have been given a bad break, but I’ve got an awful lot to live for,” - Lou Gehrig

“I cannot live without books,” – Thomas Jefferson

The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and must therefore be treated with great caution – J. K. Rowling

“When a child first catches adults out - when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence that their judgements are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just - his world falls into panic and desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of the gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child’s world is never quite whole again.” – East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Hell is empty and all the devils are here - The Tempest by William Shakespeare

“It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.” - Abraham Lincoln

“The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame”. - Oscar Wilde

“Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other.”  - Mark Twain

“Maybe there’s a trapdoor under my chair, and I’ll just disappear.”  -  Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger

“There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.”  - Friedrich Nietzsche

“Spiteful words can hurt your feelings but silence breaks your heart.”   - C.S Lewis

“The only problem with resolutions, is that they’re only as solid as the person making them.”  - Crank by Ellen Hopkins

“Always be kind, for everyone is fighting a hard battle,” - Plato

“Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.”  - Leo Tolstoy

“A good scare is worth more than good advice.” - Paulo Coelho

“In the end, it’s not the years in your life that matters; it’s the life in your years,” – Abraham Lincoln

“Don’t judge others because they sin differently than you.” – Ablaz Poetry

“Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity,” – Edgar Allen Poe

“We must love one another or die” – W.H Auden (1st September 1939)

“The appropriate response to reality is to go insane,” - Philip K. Dick

“We must be our own before we can be another’s.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Love is an action you must repeat ceaselessly.” – Andrew Davidson

“He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.” – Elbert Hubbard

“Why do we feel an obligation to certify emotions with some kind of retrospective, self-imposed authenticity?” – Chuck Klosterman

“Sometimes, words are not enough,” – Lemony Snicket

 

What are your favourite quotations? And what do they say about you?