I like to collect quotes. These summarize my ideas, my feelings, and my philosophy in words more eloquent than my own.

• Charlotte Bronte
• Emily Dickinson
• Benjamin Franklin
• E. M. Forster
• Mary Hays
• Helen Keller
• Carson McCullers
• Merle Shain

It's the thoughts that are never expressed that are interesting.
~ Martha Lavell

The wind is absolutely essential to my being.
~ Martha Lavell

A written word carries a certain destiny; a spoken word drops into silence and is no more.
~ Winifred Willis

The unexamined life is not worth living.
~ Socrates

He who knows not his own genius has none.
~ William Blake

Live isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself."
~ George Bernard Shaw

Most men spend their days struggling to evade three questions... Where am I? How do I know it? What should I do?
~ Ayn Rand

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is the struggle itself that is most important. We must strive to be more than we are. It does not matter that we will never reach our ultimate goal. The effort yields its own rewards.
~ Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation

Sometimes I write because I have time to kill; sometimes because time is killing me. If I don't write for a while I start muttering to myself in public, and that's no good. Or else I wake up in the morning with words in my mouth. If I don't write for too long I feel as if I've been holding my breath.
~ L. B. Tell

If my life were a story, there would be a steady shift away from plot and toward character development. It would be one of those stories that you hated to read in high school because it took pages and pages for something to happen—endless paragraphs of thought, protagonist thinking this, protagonist thinking that, emoting, agonizing.
~ Chris Taggi

There's just too many people in the world with shallow interaction with life. Fully 99.9% I think. They watch TV, go shopping, and have parties. Just listen to peoples conversations at parties. They talk about sports, other people, funny stuff that's happened, and that's about it.
~ Mike Little

The definition of insanity is repeating the same behavior over and over again expecting different results.
~ 28 Days

"The world was made for people who weren't cursed with self-awareness."
~ Annie in Bull Durham

Yesterday is history.
Tomorrow is a mystery.
Today is a gift.
That's why they call it the present.
~ Loretta LaRoche

Life is a hereditary disease, sexually transmitted and invariably fatal.
~ anon.

Don't worry about avoiding temptation. As you grow older, it will avoid you.
~ anon.

Our kids are being raised by appliances.
~ Naomi Judd

Life is what happens while we're busy making other plans.
~ John Lennon

It was kind of like driving by a horrible car accident; you just had to look.
~ Angela Chase (My So-Called Life)

This life has been a test; if it had been an actual life, you would have received instructions on where to go and what to do.
~ Angela Chase (My So-Called Life)

Age isn't magic, there are plenty of imbecilic morons of every age.
~ Gabrielle Hon

The lottery is an idiot tax.
~ anonymous

Growing old is mandatory. Growing up is optional
~ anonymous

Excellence is in the details.
~ Barbra Streisand

In the beginning, God created man in His own image and ever since then it seems that man has been trying to return the favor.
~ anonymous

To refuse praise is to seek praise twice.
~ anonymous

Life is something to do when you can't get to sleep.
~ Fran Lebowitz

Experience is a comb that nature gives us when we are bald.
~ Chinese Proverb

Half the world is world and half the world is sky.
Half of everything is all that ever meets the eye.
~ Mac Davis

If error is corrected whenever it is recognized as such, the path of error is the path of truth.
~ Hans Reichenbach

Space is filled with so many strange and exotic worlds that it would take countless lifetimes to satisfy my passion to know them.
~ Carl Sagan

The mass emphasis on leisure activities that has gripped the world's most affluent citizens is the greatest threat to man's search for more useful knowledge. It is influencing our changing values and priorities, weakening our vigilance, and decreasing our educational capacity. The emphasis of mankind's activities must change from mindless pleasures to intellectual seeking.
~ Dr. Orlando Aloysius Battista

If two people think alike then one of them is not thinking.
~ Leif Erikson

Television steals our kids time.
~ Sherri Lewis

No one ever helped their self esteem by watching someone else perform.
~ Sherri Lewis

You know, my hair is upsetting to people, but it's upsetting on purpose. It is important to look old so that the young will not be afraid of dying.
~ Tyne Daly

Millions of persons long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy afternoon.
~ Susan Ertz

Just because everything is different doesn't mean that anything has changed.
~ Irene Poter

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
~ Ellen Parr

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
~ Albert Einstein

We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking that was used when they were created.
~ Albert Einstein

The brave may not live forever, but the cautious do not live at all.
~ from The Princess Diaries

Doing good and being in control are not the same thing.
~ Tai-San in The Tribe

It's better to be guided by your dreams than your fears.
~ from Caitlin's Way

Accidents don't just happen. They must be carelessly planned.
~ anon.

Exploration can give people two gifts that are otherwise just words: meaning and hope.
~ Astronaut Story Musgrave

God: Stop underachieving. Stop squandering the potential I gave you. Have some pride.
Joan: What about humility?
God: Humility isn't actually humility unless there's something you're good enough at to be humble about.
~ from Joan of Arcadia

There are two wisdoms: the first inclines to action, the second to inaction. Do you not agree that the second is the greater? For surely, even the most farsighted mind cannot foresee the ultimate consequences of present undertakings, consequences therefore so uncertain, that they render problematical those very undertakings. And thus perfection lies in the abstention from all action.
~ Stanislaw Lem in The Cyberiad

The business of art lies just in this,—to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible.
~ Leo Tolstoi

Young men's love then lies
Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes.
~ William Shakespeare

Silence is the perfectest herald of joy.
~ William Shakespeare

True, I talk of dreams;
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,
Which is as thin of substance as the air,
and more inconstant than the wind...
~ William Shakespeare

Romances serve but to feed the imagination of the young; they add nothing to the sum of truth.
~ Kate Chopin

Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.
~ Charles Dickens' A Tale Of Two Cities

... And oh, what a mercy it is that these women do not exercise their powers oftener! We can't resist them, if they do. Let them show ever so little inclination, and men go down on their knees at once: old or ugly, it is all the same. And this I set down as a positive truth. A woman with fair opportunities, and without an absolute hump, may marry whom she likes. Only let us be thankful that the darlings are like the beasts of the field, and don't know their own power. They would overcome us entirely if they did.
~ William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair

"By experience," says Roger Ascham, "we find out a short way by a long wandering." Not seldom that long wandering unfits us for further travel, and of what use is our experience to us then? Tess Durbeyfield's experience was of this incapacitating kind. At last she had learned what to do; but who would now accept her doing?
~ Thomas Hardy in Tess of the d'Urbervilles

I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all.
~ Mary Shelly's Frankenstein

But we're so different, you know: she likes being good, and I like being happy.
~ Edith Wharton

Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn't any.
~ Edith Wharton

She had been fashioned to adorn and delight; to what other end does nature round the rose-leaf and paint the hummingbird's breast?
~ Edith Wharton

Were you happy I came? Were we godlike as you promised? Two earnest pacers, pointing diligent toes in the dust. Did you remark—setting Electrical Powers and Galvanic Impulses aside for the moment—how shy we are one with another? Mere acquaintances, if not on paper. We pass the time of day--and the Time of the Universe has a brief stop at our fingers' touch—who are we? who?—would you not rather have the freedom of the white page? Is it alas too late? Is our primaeval innocence gone?
~ A. S. Byatt in Possession

How true it was that one needed to be seen by others to be sure of one's own existence.
~ A. S. Byatt in Possession

It is not at all surprising that a young woman makes an impression on an old man. While we have life we have our passions; age represses but does not extinguish them. As in maturer years, the fire lurks under the ashes of prudence; so, if that be wanting, love burns up and blazes fiercely; and is generally inextinguishable, if it takes hold of the dry and worm-eaten wood of old-age. Persons of languid passions (it has been observed) have few partialities; they neither love, nor hate, nor look, nor move, with the energy of a man of sense. People of real genius, and strong passions, have great partialities. The blamelessness of the former should be weighed with their insignificancy; and the faults of the latter balanced with their superiority.
~ Mary Hamilton

For when you come to think of it, the only way to love a person is not, as the stereotyped Christian notion is, to coddle them and bring them soup when they are sick, but by listening to them and seeing and believing in the god, in the poet, in them. For by doing this, you keep the god and the poet alive and make it flourish.
~ Brenda Ueland

It is our nasty twentieth century materialism that makes us feel: what is the use of writing, painting, etc., unless one has an audience or gets cash for it? Socrates and the men of the Renaissance did so much because the rewards were intrinsic, i.e., the enlargement of the soul.
~ Brenda Ueland

I drank at every vine
The last was like the first
I came upon no wine
So wonderful as the thirst
~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

If I had known him less well the whole thing might have been over comparatively quickly: I might have written him off as a monster, dropped all hope, and have been cured. Two things prevented this. One was the reaction common to almost everyone in such a situation: the terrible knowledge that if you accept the unworthiness of the object of your love, then your love itself is discredited and all the good in its past becomes poisoned retroactively. The other was the plain fact that [he] was not a monster.
~ Diana Athill from Instead of a Letter

Oh! what a world is this!—into what false habits has it fallen! Can hypocrisy be virtue? Can a desire to call forth all the best affections of the heart, be misconstrued into something too degrading for expression?
~ Holcroft's Anna St Ives

Elinor was not inclined, after a little observation, to give him credit for being so genuinely and unaffectedly ill-natured or ill-bred as he wished to appear. His temper might perhaps be a little soured by finding, like many others of his sex, that through some unaccountable bias in favour of beauty, he was the husband of a very silly woman.
~ Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility

The remote worship of a woman throned out of their reach plays a great part in men's lives, but in most cases the worshipper longs for some queenly recognition, some approving sign by which his soul's sovereign may cheer him without descending from her high place.
~ George Eliot's Middlemarch

All true histories contain instruction, though in some the treasure may be hard to find, and when found so trivial in quantity that the dry, shrivelled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut. Whether this be the case with my history or not, I am hardly competent to judge. I sometimes think it might prove useful to some, and entertaining to others; but the world may judge for itself. Shielded by my own obscurity, and bye the lapse of years, and a few fictitious names, I do not fear to venture, and will candidly lay before the public what I would not disclose to the most intimate friend.
~ Anne Bronte in Agnes Grey

When I tell you not to marry without love, I do not advise you to marry for love alone.
~ Anne Bronte in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
~ John Keats

I love love.
~ Jewel Staite

I love love.
~ Drew Barymore

Find me if you love me.
~ from the movie Suzhou River

Nobody ever loved anybody like everybody wants to be loved.
~ Mignon McLaughlin

The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.
~ Margaret Atwood

Sometimes when people are frightened by the love they feel, it comes out through mock hostility.
~ Roger Ebert

Today we rush heedless into life. We believe in ``love at first sight.'' We get our values from TV and film, where the plot exists only to hurry the characters into sex.
~ Roger Ebert

The first loves of early adolescence are so powerful because they are not based on romance, but on ideals. When they are 13 or 14, boys and girls do not fall in love with one another because of all the usual reasons that are celebrated in love songs; they fall in love because the other person is perfect. Not smart or popular or good-looking, but perfect, the embodiment of all good.
~ Roger Ebert

Odd, how the heart finds hope. When we are weighing the possibility of love with someone, we do not compare their reality with our reality. We compare their reality with our need, so there is always a perfect fit.
~ Roger Ebert

Romance is built on illusion, and when we love someone, we love the illusion they have created for us.
~ Roger Ebert

Introduclng Alwa: "Alwa is my best friend because he expects nothing from me."
To Alwa: "Do you expect nothing from me because you don't love me."
~ Lulu in Pandora's Box

I don't have anybody that I could laugh with.
~ Lucy in While You Were Sleeping

It's like medicine for the mind, letting someone know how much you love them.
~ Jena Malone

I wonder if everyone craves affection. If so why is it wrong or at least unwise to show ones affection too strongly?
~Azalia Emma Peet

After all is said and done—this is a lonely world.
~ Azalia Emma Peet

Being afraid to loose people is never a reason not to love them.
~ anon.

One of the worst diseases is to be nobody to anybody.
~ Mother Teresa

You are right. Disappointment doesn't kill. Rejection kills; disappointment only maims."
~ Janeane Garafalo in The Truth About Cats and Dogs

The world is no longer a romantic place. Some of its people still are, however. And therein lies the promise.
~ John Cage (Ally McBeal)

Like every other couple I know—they have no use for anyone else.
~ Maggie Tenenbaum

Pining? Men don't pine. Girls pine. Men just... suffer.
~ Fred Astaire as Guy Holden in The Gay Divorcee

It's really hard to like someone and not have them know how you feel.
~ Ren Stevens in Even Stevens

Loneliness can really screw you up.
~ Isobel in Te Amo

I think only stupid people have good relationships.
~ Enid in Ghost World

Love is a two way dream.
~ Bjork

crazy mean crazy people on the street
mean crazy mean half the people that you meet
you can't love 'em you can't trust 'em
you can't take 'em anywhere
you can't hold 'em you can't tell 'em that you ever really care
~ Edie Brickell

I quit—I give up
nothing's good enough for anybody else
it seems
& being alone is the best way to be
when I'm by myself it's the best way to be
when I'm all alone it's the best way to be
when I'm by myself nobody else can say goodbye
~ Edie Brickell

And everything stands so still when you dance
Everything spins so fast
And the night's in a paper cup
When you want it to last
~ Heather Nova (Paper Cup)

My mouth is full of secrets that I'm too afraid to tell.
My body's full of longing for you to know me well.
~ Heather Nova (Truth and Bone)

I need you to cut through to where I'm hidden,
I'm awkward and I'm too polite
~ Heather Nova (Truth and Bone)

Well ya know I don't know so many things, but I know what's been goin' on; we're only puttin' in a little to get rid of a lot that's wrong.
~ Melanie Safka

Wish I could find a good book to live in.
~ Melanie Safka

God makes us dream but won't set us free.
God calls us dance to songs we can't hear.
~ Selena (God's Child)

This is how she's dying; she's dying to survive.
~ Sade (Pearls)

I touch the fire and it freezes me.
I look into it and it's black.
Why can't I feel?
My skin should crack and peel.
I want the fire back.
~ Buffy the Vampire Slayer in Buffy: The Musical

I tried to be an outsider, but I didn't really fit in.
~ Jenny (Michelle Beaudoin) in Sabrina The Teenage Witch

I like bubbles and I like gas and I'm calmed by water.
~ Ariel Cola in Stepsister from Planet Weird

I go online sometimes, but everyone's spelling is really bad, and it's depressing.
~ Tara in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

I said I don't sleep with married men, but what I meant was I don't sleep with happily married men.
~ Britt Ekland

She's a professional girlfriend and an amateur actress.
~ Peter Sellers summing up the talents of his second wife, Britt Ekland

She even ruins my clothes when I'm wearing them.
~ Shanna Schmelter

What kind of a bumbling idiot does not even realize how much of a bumbling idiot he is?
~ Karen Chow

Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before.
~ Steve Wright

Oh well.
~ Nicole Bobek

Why don't you call it Smithtown Mickey Mouse Butterfly Boat?
~ Elizabeth Koleff

Guys don't have best friends.
~ Mallory Corson

We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams.
~ Willy Wonka

A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.
~ Willy Wonka

Never beam down in a red shirt
~ anon.

God's gift is a tiny h.
~ Fred Allan Wolf

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of—if you do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
~ Robert A. Heinlein

The internet is helping to spread ignorance like fire!
~ anon.

When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it's only a minute. But when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it's two hours. That's relativity.
~ Albert Einstein

It's been swell, but the swellings gone down.
~ Tank Girl

anyway, i had a good day. i was just upstairs singing showtunes to my family—they were not amused cuz i kind of suck, but i found it to be quite enjoyable.
~ elizabeth miller

I brought my physics book home to read today, oh my gosh, I'm such a nerd! It was fun to read though. Like, the book illustrates everything with cartoony pictures, and it's just so cute. It's my kind of textbook.
~ Karen Chow

A man is wealthy if he can earn more money than his wife can spend.
~ Keith

Some people have active imaginations, but they don't know me and they're wrong if they think they do.
~ Yamila Diaz Rahi, model