Love comes like lightning, and disappears the same way. If you are lucky, it strikes you right. If not, you’ll spend your life yearning for a man you can’t have.
—Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (Indian-born American Novelist)
To each individual the world will take on a different connotation of meaning-the important lies in the desire to search for an answer.
—T. S. Eliot (American-born British Poet)
From a distance it is something; and nearby it is nothing.
—Jean de La Fontaine (French Poet)
My God, give me neither poverty nor riches, but whatsoever it may be thy will to give, give me, with it, a heart that knows humbly to acquiesce in what is thy will.
—Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (German Writer)
Fortune may find a pot, but your own industry must make it boil.
—John Gay (English Poet, Dramatist)
War is a curtain of dense black fabric across all the hopes and kindliness of mankind. Yet always it has let through some gleams of light, and not–I am not dreaming–it grows threadbare, and here and there and at a thousand points the light is breaking through.
—H. G. Wells (English Novelist, Historian)
I’m a perfectionist, so I can drive myself mad – and other people, too. At the same time, I think that’s one of the reasons I’m successful. Because I really care about what I do.
—Michelle Pfeiffer (American Film Actress)
The one happiness is to shut one’s door upon a little room, with a table before one, and to create; to create life in that isolation from life.
—Eleonora Duse (Italian Actress)
One-half of the people of this nation to-day are utterly powerless to blot from the statute books an unjust law, or to write there a new and a just one.
—Susan B. Anthony (American Civil Rights Leader)
True love is a discipline in which each divines the secret self of the other and refuses to believe in the mere daily self.
—William Butler Yeats (Irish Poet)
Nonviolence is not a garment to be put on and off at will. Its seat is in the heart, and it must be an inseparable part of our being.
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (Indian Hindu Political leader)
One of the worst forms of mental suffering is boredom, not knowing what to do with oneself and one’s life. Even if man had no monetary, or any other reward, he would be eager to spend his energy in some meaningful way because he could not stand the boredom which inactivity produces.
—Erich Fromm (German Social Philosopher)