inspiration

"Roosevelt's declaration that Americans had 'nothing to fear but fear itself' was a glorious piece of inspirational rhetoric and just as gloriously wrong."

"What the society thinks is of no interest to me. All that's important is how I see myself. I know who who I am. I know the value of my work."

"A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid."

"Life is 10 percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it."

"Ah, if everyone was as sensitive as you! There's no girl who hasn't gone through that. And it's all so unimportant!"

"There is a loftier ambition than merely to stand high in the world. It is to stoop down and lift mankind a little higher."

"Pet names are a persistant remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder, too, that one is not all things to all people."

"When I was about eight, I decided that the most wonderful thing, next to a human being, was a book."

"Whatever you do, let it be lovely."

"Life doesn't just happen to you; youreceive everything in your life based on what you've given."

"When man is with God in awe and love, then he is praying."

"If the world seems cold to you, kindle fires to warm it."

"What we can change is our perceptions, which have the effect of changing everything."

"It's hard to beat a person who never gives up."

"Those who travel to mountain-tops are half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion."

"The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time."

"This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek."

"at your weakest, you end up showing more strength; at your lowest, you are suddenly lifted higher than you’ve ever been. They all border one another, these opposites and show how quickly we can be altered."

"Patience is a virtue not a vice."

"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way."