#if

I can do pain. That’s the easy part of life. It’s everything else, happiness, laughter, love, that’s fucking complicated. ↗

— Jessica Sorensen

#jessica-sorensen #love #life

We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another -- carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#life #lolita #nabokov #life

No man needs sympathy because he has to work, because he has a burden to carry. Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing. ↗

— Theodore Roosevelt

#labor #prize #work #life

The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possibilities, as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean contentment has kept humanity in helpless degradation. ↗

— Emma Goldman

#atheism #religion #life

It is a wise thing to be polite; consequently, it is a stupid thing to be rude. To make enemies by unnecessary and willful incivility, is just as insane a proceeding as to set your house on fire. For politeness is like a counter--an avowedly false coin, with which it is foolish to be stingy. ↗

— Arthur Schopenhauer

#politeness #rudeness #life

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#fiction-writing #on-fiction #life

You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don’t try. ↗

— Beverly Sills

#life #success #life

Humility is perfect quietness of heart. It is to expect nothing, to wonder at nothing that is done to me, to feel nothing done against me. It is to be at rest when nobody praises me, and when I am blamed or despised. It is to have a blessed home in the Lord, where I can go in and shut the door, and kneel to my Father in secret, and am at peace as in a deep sea of calmness, when all around and above is trouble. ↗

— Andrew Murray

#humility #life #peace #prayer #life

I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer. Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up. ↗

— Anne Lamott

#writing #life

A soul mates purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master... ↗

— Elizabeth Gilbert

#life