ME: Don't let what's urgent rise above what's important
"Out of the night that covers me, black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeoninga of chance my head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears looms but the horror of the shade, and yet the menace of the years finds, shall find, me unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul."
Invictus
"Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats."
"Most of our life is a series of images. They pass us by like towns on the highway. But sometimes a moment stuns us as it happens. And we know that this instant is more than a fleeting image. We know that this moment, every part of it, will live on forever.'"
"Does this darkness have a name? This cruelty, this hatred. How did it find us? Did it steal into our lives or did we seek it out and embrace it? What happened to us? That we now send our children into the world like we send young men into war, hoping for their safe return. But knowing that some will be lost along the way. When did we lose our way? Consumed by the shadows, swallowed whole by the darkness. Does this darkness have a name? Is it your name?"
"Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact."
Henry James
"There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope."
George Eliot
"Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds. It is an ever fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken. Love alters not with time’s brief hours and weeks, but bears it out even to the edge of doom."
William Shakespeare
"Regret comes in all shapes and sizes. Some are small like when we do a bad thing for a good reason. Some are bigger like when you let down a friend.Some of us escape the pain of regret by making the right choice. Some of us have little time for regret because we're looking forward to the future. Sometimes we have to fight to come to terms with the past, and sometimes we bury our regret by promising to change your own ways.But, our biggest regrets are not for the things we did -- but, for the things we didn't do. Things we didn't say that could've save someone that we care about. Especially when we can see the dark storm that's headed their way."
"And the little prince said to the man, 'Grownups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always explaining things to them."
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
"John Steinbeck once wrote; 'It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world."
"E.E. Cummings once wrote; '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.'"
"Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swaps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours."
-- Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged"
"There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. But omitted, and the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, and we must take the current when it serves -- or lose the ventures before us." -- William Shakespeare, "Julius Ceaser"
"Tennessee Williams once wrote; 'We all live in a house of fire. No fire department to call. No way out. Just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down… with us trapped, locked in it."
"Douglas Adams once wrote: 'He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream, and he sometimes wondered whose it was, and whether they were enjoying it.'"
"Joseph Conrad once wrote: 'Who knows what true happiness is, not the conventional word.. but the naked terror. To the lonely themselves, that wears a mask, the most miserable outcast hugs some memory.. or some illusion."
"Stephen King once wrote: 'Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not. Time takes it all, time bears it away.. and in the end.. there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometime we lose them there again."
Charles Bukowski once wrote; 'There will always be something to ruin our lives. It all depends on what or which finds us first. You're always ripe and ready to be taken."
Kahlil Gibran once wrote; 'You're reason and your passion are the rudder.. and the sails of your seafaring soul. If either be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas. For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burn to it’s own destruction."
Octavio Paz once wrote; Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone."
Tennessee Williams once wrote; When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone."
Nathanial Hawthorne once wrote: No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself -- and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true."
Oliver Wendell Holmes once said: Many people die with their music still IN them. Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live...Before they know it...time runs out."
Katherine Anne Porter once said; 'There seems to be a kind of order in the universe…in the movement of the stars and the turning of the Earth and the changing of the seasons. But human life is almost pure chaos. Everyone takes his stance, asserts his own right and feelings, mistaking the motives of others, and his own."
T.H. White said; perhaps we all give the best of our hearts uncritically…to those who hardly think about us in return."
