Quotes From Books

Do not just seek happiness for yourself. Seek happiness for all. Through kindness. Through mercy.

You can never visit the same place twice. Each time, it's a different story. By the very act of coming back, you wipe out what came before.

A million dollars sounds like a lot, I know. Especially when you're young. But you can't let money erode your principles or you'll wind up with nothing.

There is no such thing as equality for some. Equality must be for all. That is what freedom is. That is what liberty is. No human being is born more or less important than any other. How can we allow ourselves to forget that? What simpler truth is there?

It's always easier to say good-bye when you know it's just a prelude to hello.

We are all going, I thought, and it applies to turtles and turtlenecks, Alaska the girl and Alaska the place, because nothing can last, not even the earth itself. The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we'd learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did.

One time, when I was very little, I climbed a tree and ate these green, sour apples. My stomach swelled and became hard like a drum, it hurt a lot. Mother said that if I'd just waited for the apples to ripen, I wouldn't have become sick. So now, whenever I really want something, I try to remember what she said about the apples.

The term "forgive and forget" doesn't make sense to me. Forgiving does allow us to stop dwelling on an issue, which isn't always healthy. But if we forget, we don't learn from our mistakes.

"You should know," said Estella. "I am what you have made me. Take all the praise, take all the blame; take all the success, take all the failure; in short, take me."

That's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.

Don't ever let them tell you that you're too stupid to do something. I'm not saying it's going to be easy for you. Maybe you're going to have to work for it a little harder than other people, which I know isn't fair. But that doesn't mean you should just give up.

Infatuation cannot be sustained indefinitely, my friend. Love that embraces the entire person is a monumental gift that takes time to grow.

The choices we make can have lasting consequences.

Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.

There are some things your mind has been hiding from you.

How much good inside a day? Depends how good you live 'em. How much love inside a friend? Depends how much you give 'em.

I don't want you to leap into another relationship without thinking. Looking for perfect is a big, fat myth because perfect isn't out there.