My Favorite Quotes

I'm a sucker for quotes. I seek them out like an aimless teenager seeks out purpose and meaning.

Once I've found a good quote, I copy it down. I read it in my own handwriting. I massage it in my mind. I re-read it. I let it shape me, and I shape it. Soon it becomes engrained in my brain--a mantra of my mind.

Below are a few of my favorite quotes. You can find more sprinkled throughout my blog entries.


On Simplicity

  • Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery
  • Every increased possession loads us with new weariness. ~John Ruskin
  • Our freedom can be measured by the number of things we can walk away from. ~Vernon Howard

On Happiness

  • When you can't change the direction of the wind, adjust your sails. ~H. Jackson Brown
  • Sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together. ~Marilyn Monroe
  • Joys that are shared are doubled, while sorrows that are shared are halved. ~Unknown
  • Fear less, hope more; whine less, breathe more; talk less, say more; hate less, love more, and all good things are yours. ~Swedish Proverb

On Sucking the Marrow Out of Life

  • Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you did not do than the things you did do. ~Mark Twain
  • It's not the years in your life that count; it's the life in your years. ~Abraham Lincoln
  • If you don't risk anything, you risk even more. ~Erica Jong
  • One who makes no mistakes makes nothing. ~Giacomo Casanova
  • I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way. ~Carl Sagan
  • Dreams make the impossible possible; dedication makes the possible probable; and work makes the probable happen. ~Jim Trefethen
  • How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. ~Annie Dillard
  • Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways. ~Stephen Benet
  • Every new beginning comes from some other new beginning's end. ~'Feeling Strangely Fine,' Semisonic
  • "…the purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience. You can do that only if you have curiosity, an unquenchable spirit of adventure. The experience can have meaning only if you understand it. You can understand it only if you have arrived at some knowledge of yourself, a knowledge based on a deliberately and usually painfully acquired self-discipline, which teaches you to cast out fear and free you for the fullest experience of the adventure of life." ~Eleanor Roosevelt
  • If we don't offer ourselves to the unknown ours senses dull. Our world becomes small and we lose our sense of wonder. ~Kent Nerbur
  • The best teachers are those who show you were to look, but don't tell you what to see. ~Alexandra K. Trenfor
  • Thedifference in men does not lie in the size of their hands, nor in theperfection of their bodies, but in this one sublime ability of concentration:to throw the weight in one blow, to live eternity in an hour. ~Elbert Hubbard

On Wandering

  • Not all who wander are lost. ~J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe. ~Anatole France

On Authenticity

  • Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive. ~John Eldridge

On Strength

  • The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong in the broken places. ~Ernest Hemingway
  • Those who do not find time for exercise will have to find time for illness. ~Earl of Derby

On Financial Independence

  • The real measure of your wealth is how much you'd be worth if you lost all your money. ~Unknown

On Bicycles