Inspirational Quotes

Mitsuki

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I thought this would be interesting. We all have read interesting stuff from various books out there. Some capture us in a way that inspire us at some point in our lives. So basically, just quote those lines and what book it was from. Extra credit - Give your own outlook of that particular quote...just to make it more interesting.

And here's mine:

"The most difficult of decisions are often not the ones in which we cannot determine the correct course, rather the ones in which we are certain of the path but fear the journey."

-- I really like this quote from The Locket. The book truly is inspiring and by reading that line there, it made me realize that yes, it is indeed true. I have felt that way before but could never put my words in justice the way that quote just now did. Now I know and it really means a lot to me. Perhaps that is why there are people who knows what they want but are unsuccessful when they try to shoot for their goals anyway. It is because their hearts are full of doubts. In a way, I am categorized in that group of people, and although I am trying to get past my insecurities, I can't help but hope for a miracle sometimes.

"There are those who will read the last page of a book first. But it is not me. I believe that it is fortunate that we are allowed to turn just one page of our lives at a time."

-- Again, another interesting one from The Locket that has become my favorite as well. I'm not a "last page turner" myself, but I do find myself wondering as I read a good book, and then being tempted to turn to the last page. But for some reason, something always held me back and as I finally read the last sentence hours/days later, I felt content and glad that I did not peek while I was still in the middle of the plot. I suppose life is similar to this for some people. We usually wonder what our future holds for us, and in the midst of it, we tend to just "live" the "present", but not actually cherishing it in our hurry to get ahead of time.
 
Okay. The quote I have is not exactly inspirational, but whenever I'm having a bad day, it pops into my head, and I feel a bit better. Here it is:

When I heard how she was losing heart,
I came up to her beside the clear stream.
"Beautiful one," I said "with too much weeping
your face grows pale, the color fades;
you have no reason to despair, now,
for He who makes the woods burst into leaf
has the power to give you joy in great abundance."

It's from a medieval Provençal poet named Marcabru. I don't know why, but it struck me in a way. I thought it was very beautiful and comforting. I'd be happy if someone came up to me when I was crying and said that :)
 
It's a wonder how such simple, yet meaningful words can mean so much to one person.

Here's one I came across with. I really like it a lot.


"Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. We do not fail overnight. Failure is the inevitable result of an accumulation of poor thinking and poor choices. To put it more simply, failure is nothing more than a few errors in judgment repeated everyday.

Now why would someone make an error in judgment and then be so foolish as to repeat it everyday? The answer is because he or she does not think that it matters.

On their own, our daily acts do not seem that important. A minor oversight, a poor decision, or a wasted hour generally doesn't result in an instant and measurable impact. More often than not, we escape from any immediate consequences of our deeds."
Jim Rohn
"The Formula for Failure and Success"


Talk about convoluted philosophy. I found that to be oh-so-true. I didn't really think there was so much more to failure - that failure is...simply failure. Big Fail. A disappointment to oneself or someone else.


But it's so much more than that. Failure is the result of our own poor choices...that yes, we can do something about it if we can help it. But sometimes, we choose not to help the situation because we simply don't care about the outcome. And yet when we fail, it either seem to come as a big surprise to us, or a careless shrug of the matter, which is well...a really big disappointment in general.


Meh, I ramble too much.






 
"Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change directions but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you..."

- the boy named Crow

This quote is from Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore
 
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire

I've never been a big fan of quotes. People rely on wisdom in words written by others instead of applying their own common sense. People would be well served to throw away quotes and rely on heart and character to make decisions instead. Ironically, it's why I've always been a big fan of this quote. P.S. - Fuck you Busta, I am not "sophisticated".

"People hate people that have theories about people" - House

Yea, yea, it's a TV show but I've found it to be very true. People cannot seem to separate "socialistic philosophies" and "being judged". I like the phrase because it reminds me to keep those little theories of mine tucked inside.

Glad this thread was revived though. lol This was made back when Suki was shy about everything. haha
 
' live free ' I dunno if this is classed as a qoute or not because its short but i think it speaks for itself, i love this phrase i even got it tattooed on my chest.

One day at a time this is enough
dont look back at the past and grieve because its gone
And dont worry about the future for it has not yet come
live in the present and make each day so beautiful itl be worth remembering

dunno who said that, think i read it on a calendar but its something il never forget. Its a reminder to just get on with things and focus on present.
 
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These aren't particularly quote-quotes but lines from a poem. I'm not the greatest fan of poetry but if I were to pick my favourite poem of all time it would be 'Dive For Dreams - EE Cummings' because it's such a down to earth and meaningful poem.

"Dive for dreams or a slogan may topple you"
What I love about that this quote and what I find inspirational is that it's telling you to search for your own ideas and not to follow what other people say or do even if you don't agree with it. He's essentially saying you'll get more out of your dreams and your own ideas than if you follow other people.

"Trust your heart if the seas catch fire (and live by love though the stars walk backward)"
My favourite line ever, whether it be from a poem or a song, or a novel or a speech this has always stuck with me and had meaning ever since I've read it. I love the way he uses "if the seas catch fire" and "stars walk backward" to emphasise that one should love even if the world seems strange.

"(and dance your death away at the wedding)"
This quote is pretty self explanatory and I more than agree with it.

Definitely my favourite quotes from my favourite poem; ace thread.
 
This is one of my favourite quote and the only one that comes to my mind now. It's simple but it does inspire me when I have difficulties. I was really into quotes two years ago but I realize now that i have forgot most of them. Fucking memory...


I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
-Thomas Edison

It's obvious that this person never gave up. For me it's a reminder that I must always retry when something doesn't work the first time and that I must be persistent in life to achieve my goals.
 
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
-The Little Prince (conversation with the Fox)

This quote says that the things that truly matter aren't material wealth. Rather, it's the inside of the person that truly counts. You could easily lose and never gain back wealth, but I think as long as you have inner strength and people that truly care for you (regardless of your wealth), you're still the richest person. :D

 
I'm not sure exactly where this quote of his was published, but I've always loved Theodore Roosevelt's quote here:

"The credit belongs to the man who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who, at best knows in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and at worst, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place may never be amongst those timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."

I love this quote because it's how I feel about life--either succeed or fail at something, but don't just sit in the middle indecisively without accomplishing anything. The greatest achievements in life often require great risks to be taken as well.
 
Here is something random from Steven Erikson's The Bonehunters that I found the other day. There are dozens of extremely profound and inspirational quotes in all of his books, but it'd take me far too long to flick through all them and pick them all out. So, here is one that serves as a prelude to a chapter, from a character who has a minor appearance, but quite a profound impact upon others.

"There is something profoundly cynical, my friends, in the notion of paradise after death. The lure is evasion. The promise is excusative. One need not accept responsibility for the world as it is, and by extenstion, one need do nothing about it. To strive for change, for true goodness in this mortal world, one must acknowledge and accept, within one's own soul, that this mortal reality has purpose in itself, that its greatest value is not for us, but for our children and their children. To view life as but a quick passage along a foul, tortured path - made foul and tortured by our own indifference - is to excuse all manner of misery and depravity, and to exact cruel punishment upon the innocent lives to come.

I defy this notion of paradise beyond the gates of bone. If the soul truly survives the passage, then it behooves us - each of us, my friends - to nurture a faith in similitude: what awaits us is a reflection of what we leave behind, and in squandering our mortal existence, we surrender the opportunity to learn the ways of goodness, the practice of sympathy, empathy, compassion and healing - all passed by in our rush to arrive at a place of glory and beauty, a place we did not earn, and most certainly do not deserve."
 
I am really into some Gritty stuff, like Chuck Palahniuk.

Here are a few quotes that made me stop in my tracks with my mouth gaping open.

"We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will."

"People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messed cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown."

"I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That's the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about."

"Evolve, and let the chips fall where they may"

--------------------------------
From Watchmen -

Rorschach: "You see, Doctor, God didn't kill that little girl. Fate didn't butcher her and destiny didn't feed her to those dogs. If God saw what any of us did that night he didn't seem to mind. From then on I knew... God doesn't make the world this way. We do."

Rorschach: "This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout "Save us!"... and I'll whisper "no."'

Rorschach: "What's one more body amongst foundations, What are you waiting for? Do it. Do it!!!!!!"

-------

Dean Koontz:

Brother Odd, By Dean Koontz: "[SIZE=-1]Humanity is a parade of fools, and I am at the front of it, twirling a baton."[/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]As individuals, as families, as neighbors, as members of one community, people of all races and political views are usually decent, kind, compassionate. But in large corporations or governments, when great power accumulates in their hands, some become monsters even with good intentions.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]DEAN KOONTZ, Dark Rivers of the Hearts[/SIZE]


"[SIZE=-1]Many human beings need no supernatural mentoring to commit acts of savagery; some people are devils in their own right, their telltale horns having grown inward to facilitate their disguise." [/SIZE]Odd Thomas

[SIZE=-1]"It is human nature to want to believe in the wizardry of the magician--but also to turn against him and to scorn him the moment that he commits the slightest error that reveals his trickery. Those in the audience are embarrassed to have been so easily astonished, and they blame the performer for their gullibility."[/SIZE] Odd Thomas

[SIZE=-1]"Pain is a gift. Humanity, without pain, would know neither fear nor pity. Without fear, there could be no humility, and every man would be a monster. The recognition of pain and fear in others gives rise in us to pity, and in our pity is our humanity, our redemption."[/SIZE] Velocity

"[SIZE=-1]I'm just a human being, after all. Look deep enough inside any of us, you'll find a selfish bastard." Dark Rivers of the Heart[/SIZE]
 
A few cool ones....

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Also my favourite George Carlin Quote :)

"Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own, and control the corporations. They've long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying, to get what they want.

Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. That's right. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin' years ago. They don't want that.

You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they're coming for your Social Security money. They want your fuckin' retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all from you sooner or later cause they own this fuckin' place. It's a big club and you ain't in it. You and I are not in The big club. By the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy.

The table has tilted, folks. The game is rigged. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people - white collar, blue collar, it doesn't matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-working people continue - these are people of modest means - Continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don't give a fuck about you. They don't give a fuck about you. They don't care about you at all. At all. At all. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care.

That's what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that's being jammed up their assholes every day, because the owners of this country know the truth: It's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."

-George Carlin (May 12, 1937 - June 22, 2008)
 
Bravery is not the absence of fear; it is having the strength to fight for what you believe in the face of danger.

I suppose it is a variation of the quote, but it has been said similarly by many different people. I am not exactly sure where/when it was first mentioned.
 
I'm sorry but I don't want to be an Emperor - that's not my business - I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible, Jew, gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another, human beings are like that. We all want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone and the earth is rich and can provide for everyone.

The way of life can be free and beautiful. But we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men's souls - has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed but we have shut ourselves in: machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little: More than machinery we need humanity; More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.

The airplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men, cries out for universal brotherhood for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me I say "Do not despair".

The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress: the hate of men will pass and dictators die and the power they took from the people , will return to the people and so long as men die [now] liberty will never perish. . .
Soldiers - don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you and enslave you - who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel, who drill you, diet you, treat you as cattle, as cannon fodder.

Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts. You are not machines. You are not cattle. You are men. You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don't hate - only the unloved hate. Only the unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers - don't fight for slavery, fight for liberty.

In the seventeenth chapter of Saint Luke it is written "the kingdom of God is within man " - not one man, nor a group of men - but in all men - in you, the people. You the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness. You the people have the power to make life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.

Then in the name of democracy let's use that power - let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give you the future and old age and security.

By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power, but they lie. They do not fulfill their promise, they never will. Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people. Now let us fight to fulfil that promise. Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men's happiness.

Soldiers - in the name of democracy, let us all unite!
. . .
Look up! Look up! The clouds are lifting - the sun is breaking through. We are coming out of the darkness into the light. We are coming into a new world. A kind new world where men will rise above their hate and brutality.

The soul of man has been given wings - and at last he is beginning to fly. He is flying into the rainbow - into the light of hope - into the future, that glorious future that belongs to you, to me and to all of us. Look up. Look up."

--The Great Dictator(1940)

:grin:
 
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Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself – George Bernard Shaw.

Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds you plant - Robert Louis Stevenson.

We don’t see things the way they are. We see them the way WE are - Talmud

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step – Lao Tzu.

-Setz-
 
Arthur Scopenhaur - From Nietzche's "The Birth of Tragedy"

"So long as we exist as individuals, we are bound to strive and suffer in an endless cycle of hope and dissapointment in which none of our desires can be fulfilled. "

Nietzche's "The Birth of Tragedy":

Change Beethoven's "jubilee-son" into a painting, and, if your imagination be equal to the occasion when awestruck millions sink into the dust, you will then be able to approach the Dionysian. Now is the slave a free man, now all the stuborn, hostile barriers, which necessity caprice, or "shameless fashion" has set up between man and man, are broken down. Now, at the evangel of cosmic harmony, each one feels himself not only united, reconciled, blended with his neighbour, but as one with him, as if the veil of Maya had been torn and were now merely fluterring in tatters before the mysterious Primordial Unity. In song and in dance man exhibits himself as a member of a higher community: he has forgotten how to walk and speak, and is on the point of taking a dancing flight into the air. His gestures bespeak enchantment. Even as the animals now talk, and as the earth yields milk and honey, so also something supernatural sounds forth from him: he feels himself a god, he himself now walks about enchanted and elated even as the gods whom he saw walking about in his dreams. Man is no longer an artistic power of all nature here reveals itself in the tremors of drunkenness to the highest gratification of the Primordial Unity. The noblest clay, the costliest marble, namely man, is here kneeded and cut, and the chisel strokes of the Dionysian world-artist are accompanied with the cry of the Elusinian mysteries: "Ihr sturzt nieder, Millionen ? Ahnest du den Schopfer, Welt?"

Nietzche's "The Birth of Tragedy"

Thus far we have considered the Apollonian and his antithesis, the Dionysian, as artistic powers, which burst forth from nature herself, without the mediation of the human artist, and in which her art impulses are satisfied in the most immediate and direct way: first, as the pictorial world of dream, the perfection of which has no connection whatever with the intellectual height or artistic culture of the unit man, and again, as drunken reality, which likewise does not heed the unit man, but even seeks to destroy the individual and redeem him by a mystic feeling of Oneness. Anent these immediate art-states of nature every artist is either an "imitator," to wit, either an Apollonian, an artist in dreams, or a Dionysian, an artist in ecstasies, or finally - as for instance in Greek Tragedy - an artist in both dreams and ecstasies: so we may perhaps picture him, as in Dionysian drunkenness and mystical self-abnegation, lonesome and apart from the reveling choruses, he sinks down and how now, through Apollonian dream-inspiration, his own state, i.e., his oneness with the primal source of the universe, reveals itself to him him in a symbolical dream-picture.
 
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