That which God said to the rose, and caused it to laugh in full-blown beauty, He said to my heart, and made it a hundred times more beautiful. - Jalaluddin Rumi

Why are you limping like that?' Nicholas demanded.'I'm swaggering,' I informed him.'You look like you're wearing a diaper.'Charming. And I had a crush on this guy.Wait. I had a crush on this guy?'Now what?' he asked. 'You're making weird faces.''Nothing,' I said quickly. 'Never mind. - Alyxandra Harvey, My Love Lies Bleeding

Art is the reason I get up in the morning, but the definition ends there. It doesn't seem fair that I'm living for something I can't even define. - Ani DiFranco

The power of death signifies that this real world can only have a neutral image of life, that life's intimacy does not reveal it's dazzling consumption until the moment it gives out. - Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion

Falling in love is painful on the knees. - Jon Bon Jovi

Making others happy, through kindness of speech and sincerity of right advice, is a sign of true greatness. To hurt another soul by sarcastic words, looks, or suggestions, is despicable. - Paramahansa Yogananda, Where There is Light: Insight and Inspiration for Meeting Life's Challenges

If you enter this world knowing you are loved and you leave this world knowing the same, then everything that happens in between can be dealt with. - Michael Jackson

But it so happens that everything on this planet is, ultimately, irrational; there is not, and cannot be, any reason for the causal connexion of things, if only because our use of the word reason already implies the idea of causal connexion. But, even if we avoid this fundamental difficulty, Hume said that causal connexion was not merely unprovable, but unthinkable; and, in shallower waters still, one cannot assign a true reason why water should flow down hill, or sugar taste sweet in the mouth. Attempts to explain these simple matters always progress into a learned lucidity, and on further analysis retire to a remote stronghold where every thing is irrational and unthinkable.If you cut off a man's head, he dies. Why? Because it kills him. That is really the whole answer. Learned excursions into anatomy and physiology only beg the question; it does not explain why the heart is necessary to life to say that it is a vital organ. Yet that is exactly what is done, the trick that is played on every inquiring mind. Why cannot I see in the dark? Because light is necessary to sight. No confusion of that issue by talk of rods and cones, and optical centres, and foci, and lenses, and vibrations is very different to Edwin Arthwait's treatment of the long-suffering English language.Knowledge is really confined to experience. The laws of Nature are, as Kant said, the laws of our minds, and, as Huxley said, the generalization of observed facts.It is, therefore, no argument against ceremonial magic to say that it is absurd to try to raise a thunderstorm by beating a drum; it is not even fair to say that you have tried the experiment, found it would not work, and so perceived it to be impossible. You might as well claim that, as you had taken paint and canvas, and not produced a Rembrandt, it was evident that the pictures attributed to his painting were really produced in quite a different way.You do not see why the skull of a parricide should help you to raise a dead man, as you do not see why the mercury in a thermometer should rise and fall, though you elaborately pretend that you do; and you could not raise a dead man by the aid of the skull of a parricide, just as you could not play the violin like Kreisler; though in the latter case you might modestly add that you thought you could learn.This is not the special pleading of a professed magician; it boils down to the advice not to judge subjects of which you are perfectly ignorant, and is to be found, stated in clearer and lovelier language, in the Essays of Thomas Henry Huxley. - Aleister Crowley

If you don’t give up on something you truly believe in, you will find a way. - Roy T. Bennett

Life sucks, and then you die... - Stephenie Meyer, Breaking Dawn

You should never be surprised when someone treats you with respect, you should expect it. - Sarah Dessen, Keeping the Moon

Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave. - Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Truly powerful people have great humility. They do not try to impress, they do not try to be influential. They simply are. People are magnetically drawn to them. They are most often very silent and focused, aware of their core selves. ... They never persuade, nor do they use manipulation or aggressiveness to get their way. They listen. If there is anything they can offer to assist you, they offer it; if not, they are silent. - Sanaya Roman, Living with Joy: Keys to Personal Power and Spiritual Transformation

Peace is not so much a political mandate as it is a shared state of consciousness that remains elevated and intact only to the degree that those who value it volunteer their existence as living examples of the same... Peace ends with the unraveling of individual hope and the emergence of the will to worship violence as a healer of private and social dis-ease. - Aberjhani, The American Poet Who Went Home Again

If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does. - Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

Why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want. - Ayn Rand

I had to learn to live without you and I couldn't make sense of it, because I left so much of me inside of you. - Robert M. Drake

If other people do not understand our behavior—so what? Their request that we must only do what they understand is an attempt to dictate to us. If this is being asocial or irrational in their eyes, so be it. Mostly they resent our freedom and our courage to be ourselves. We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them. How many lives have been ruined by this need to explain, which usually implies that the explanation be understood, i.e. approved. Let your deeds be judged, and from your deeds, your real intentions, but know that a free person owes an explanation only to himself—to his reason and his conscience—and to the few who may have a justified claim for explanation. - Erich Fromm, The Art of Being

I wonder if I'll ever have to decide which is worse, life as we're living or no life at all. - Susan Beth Pfeffer, Life As We Knew It

I was wasting my time, praying for love.For a love that never comes, from someone who does not exist. - Morrissey