Quotes

Lines I keep coming back to.

• Eat at a local restaurant tonight. Get the cream sauce. Have a cold pint at 4 o'clock in a mostly empty bar. Go somewhere you've never been. Listen to someone you think may have nothing in common with you. Order the steak rare. Eat an oyster. Have a negroni. Have two. Be open to a world where you may not understand or agree with the person next to you, but have a drink with them anyways. Eat slowly. Tip your server. Check in on your friends. Check in on yourself. Enjoy the ride.

  — Anthony Bourdain

• Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.

  — Albert Einstein

• How should you be? You should be like a rocky promontory against which the restless surf continually pounds. It stands fast while the churning sea is lolled to sleep at its feet. I hear you say 'How unlucky that this should happen to me?' But not at all. Perhaps, say instead, how lucky I am that I am not broken by what has happened, and am not afraid for what is about to happen, for the same blow might of struck anyone, but not many would of absorbed it without compilation or complaint.

  — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

• Life is short… Be thoughtful, be generous, forgive quickly, kiss slowly, and never regret anything that made you smile.

  — Unknown

• Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.

  — Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours

• A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

  — Charles Spurgeon

• Never trust a thought that occurs to you indoors.

  — Friedrich Nietzsche

• The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

  — Jack London

• To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

  — E.E. Cummings

• Life is a storm. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes.

  — Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

• The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer someone else up.

  — Mark Twain

• We'd worry a lot less about what other people think of us if we realized how seldom they do.

  — David Foster Wallace

• If you don't know it's not shameful. But if you don't know, and you pretend you know, it is very shameful.

  — Jack Ma

• Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.

  — Charlie Munger

• Life will have terrible blows in it, horrible blows, unfair blows. It doesn't matter. And some people recover and others don't. And there I think the attitude of Epictetus is the best. He thought that every missed chance in life was an opportunity to behave well, every missed chance in life was an opportunity to learn something, and that your duty was not to be submerged in self-pity, but to utilize the terrible blow in constructive fashion. That is a very good idea.

  — Charlie Munger

• Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn't matter. Cold or warm. Tired or well-rested. Despised or honored.

  — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

---

See also: Books · Advice · Writing