Adrian > Adrian's Quotes

“Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.”
― Ezra Pound

“After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.”
― Richard Dawkins

“It's good to let God pick a man for you. We don't do so well when we pick them ourselves. They end up lipsticks in a drawer, all those wrong colors you thought looked so good in the package.”
― Deb Caletti, The Queen of Everything

“The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most.”
― John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice

“One person's courage will help the other person to be equally brave.”
― Paulo Coelho, Manuscript Found in Accra

“For most people, generosity consists only in giving, and yet receiving is also an act of love. Allowing someone else to make us happy will make them happy, too.”
― Paulo Coelho, Manuscript Found in Accra

“Seek out those who think differently from you and whom you will never be able to convince that you are right.”
― Paulo Coelho, Manuscript Found in Accra

“People who seek only success rarely find it, because success is not an end, but a consequence.”
― Paulo Coelho, Manuscript Found in Accra

“Faith shows us that we are never alone.
Transformation helps us to love the mystery.”
― Paulo Coelho, Manuscript Found in Accra

“Love is free and is not ruled by our will or by what we do.”
― Paulo Coelho, Manuscript Found in Accra

“There is nothing wrong with anxiety.
Although we cannot control God's time, it is part of the human condition to want to receive the thing we are waiting for as quickly as possible.
Or to drive away whatever is causing our fear....
Anxiety was born in the very same moment as mankind. And since we will never be able to master it, we will have to learn to live with it-just as we have learned to live with storms.”
― Paulo Coelho, Manuscript Found in Accra

“But the great wisdom of life is to realize that we can be the masters of the things that try to enslave us”
― Paulo Coelho, Manuscript Found in Accra

“Woe to those who prefer to spend their lives saying: “I never had any opportunities!” Because with each day that passes, they will sink deeper into the well of their own limitations,”
― Paulo Coelho, Manuscript Found in Accra

“I'm not worried about tomorrow, because God is there already, waiting for me.”
― Paulo Coelho, Manuscript Found in Accra

“Love is an act of faith, not an exchange.
Contradictions are what make love grow. Conflicts are what allow love to remain by our side.”
― Paulo Coelho, Manuscript Found in Accra

“Stay close to those who sing, tell stories, and enjoy life, and whose eyes sparkle with happiness. Because happiness is contagious and will always manage to find a solution, whereas logic can find only an explanation for the mistake made.”
― Paulo Coelho, Manuscript Found in Accra

“The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Human rights' are a fine thing, but how can we make ourselves sure that our rights do not expand at the expense of the rights of others. A society with unlimited rights is incapable of standing to adversity. If we do not wish to be ruled by a coercive authority, then each of us must rein himself in...A stable society is achieved not by balancing opposing forces but by conscious self-limitation: by the principle that we are always duty-bound to defer to the sense of moral justice.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest for worthy spiritual growth. Our entire earthly existence is but a transitional stage in the movement toward something higher, and we must not stumble and fall, nor must we linger fruitlessly on one rung of the ladder. Material laws alone do not explain our life or give it direction. The laws of physics and physiology will never reveal the indisputable manner in which the Creator constantly, day in and day out, participates in the life of each of us, unfailingly granting us the energy of existence; when this assistance leaves us, we die. And in the life of our entire planet, the Divine Spirit surely moves with no less force: this we must grasp in our dark and terrible hour.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”
― Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“The master sees beyond what is obvious. He sees the unseen, feels the unfelt, and hears the unheard. He looks below the surface for what is hidden and so finds the great heartbeat of the Universe. He smiles, knowing it is his heartbeat, your heartbeat, our heartbeat.”
― Wu Wei, I Ching Wisdom Volume Two: More Guidance from the Book of Answers: 2

“A quiet-hearted person awakes with a smile on his lips and an eagerness in his heart for the day ahead.”
― Wu Wei, I Ching Wisdom Volume Two: More Guidance from the Book of Answers: 2

“I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air—that progress made under the shadow of the policeman’s club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. . . .In any dispute between a citizen and the government, it is my instinct to side with the citizen . . . I am against all efforts to make men virtuous by law.”
― H.L. Mencken

“The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.”
― Albert Camus

“Second to the right, and straight on 'til morning”
― J.M. Barrie

“When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
― C.S. Lewis