• ralph waldo emerson:
  
• henry david thoreau:
  
• on love:
  
• words of wisdom:
  
• from books / movies:
  

ralph waldo emerson:

• a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
  with consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.
• do not follow where the path may lead. go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
• it is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.
• sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.
• to believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men - that is genius.
• you cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

henry david thoreau:

• any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.
• i went to the woods because i wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life,
  and see if i could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
• not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves.
• on tops of mountains, as everywhere to hopeful souls, it is always morning.
• the world is but a canvas to the imagination.
• we do not enjoy poetry unless we know it to be poetry.
• we seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.
• what lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.
• if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams... he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

on love:

• better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all. - st. augustine
• love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies. - john donne
• for you see, each day i love you more.  today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow. - rosemonde gerard
• people are like stained-glass windows.
  they sparkle and shine when the sun is out,
  but when the darkness sets in,
  their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.
  - elizabeth love
• if i had a flower for every time i thought of you, i could walk through my garden forever. - kindra piturro

words of wisdom:

• man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on. - winston churchill
• silence is the true friend that never betrays. - confucious
• dream as if you'll live forever. live as if you'll die today. - james dean
• imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality. - jules de gaultier
• never apologize for showing feeling.
  in doing so, you apologize for truth. - benjamin disraeli
• imagination is more important than knowledge, for knowledge is limited while imagination embraces the entire world. - albert einstein
• obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal. - henry ford
• well done is better than well said. - benjamin franklin
• keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow. - helen keller
• in the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. - martin luther king jr.
• and in the end it's not the years in your life that count. it's the life in your years. - abraham lincoln
• better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt. - abraham lincoln
• to most of us the future seems unsure. but then it always has been; and we who have seen great changes must have great hopes. - john masefield
• courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear. - ambrose redmoon
• twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do.
  so throw off the bowlines.
  sail away from the safe harbour.
  catch the trade winds in your sails.
  explore. dream. discover. - mark twain
• wrinkles should merely indicate where the smiles have been. - mark twain
• for all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are those "it might have been." - john greenleaf whittier

from books / movies:

• some things are better left to blossom in memory rather than wither in reflection. - the diary of ellen rimbauer
• it is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day. if you could keep awake (but of course you can't) you would see your own mother doing this, and you would find it very interesting to watch her. it is quite like tidying up drawers. you would see her on her knees, i expect, lingering humorously over some of your contents, wondering where on earth you had picked this thing up, making discoveries sweet and not so sweet, pressing this to her cheek as if it were as nice as a kitten, and hurriedly stowing that out of sight. when you wake in the morning, the naughtiness and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind and on the top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on. - peter pan
• to induce her to look up he pretended to be going away, and when this failed he sat on the end of the bed and tapped her gently with his foot. “wendy,” he said, “don’t withdraw. i can’t help crowing, wendy, when I’m pleased with myself.” still she would not look up, though she was listening eagerly. “wendy,” he continued, in a voice that no woman has ever yet been able to resist, “wendy, one girl is more use than twenty boys.” - peter pan
• fairies have to be one thing or the other, because being so small they unfortunately have room for one feeling only at a time. they are, however, allowed to change, only it must be a complete change. - peter pan
• not the pain of this but its unfairness was what dazed peter. it made him quite helpless. he could only stare, horrified. every child is affected thus the first time he is treated unfairly. all he thinks he has a right to when he comes to you to be yours is fairness. after you have been unfair to him he will love you again, but will never afterwards be quite the same boy. no one ever gets over the first unfairness, no one except peter. he often met it, but he always forgot it. i suppose that was the real difference between him and the rest. - peter pan
• "not to-night?" asked the lost boys bewildered. they knew in what they called their hearts that one can get on quite well without a mother, and that it is only the mothers who think you can't. - peter pan
• "there are always a lot of young ones," explained wendy, who was now quite an authority, "because you see when a new baby laughs for the first time a new fairy is born, and as there are always new babies there are always new fairies. they live in nests on the tops of trees; and the mauve ones are the boys and the white ones are girls, and the blue ones are just little sillies who are not sure what they are." - peter pan
• "the way i flew? do you know, jane, i sometimes wonder whether i ever did really fly."
  "yes, you did."
  "the dear old days when i could fly!"
  "why can't you fly now, mother?"
  "because i am grown up, dearest. when people grow up they forget the way. - peter pan
• every man dies. not every man lives. - shawshank redemption
• hope is a great thing. i hope the pacific is as blue as it is in my dreams. i hope i see my friend. i hope. - shawshank redemption
• and such a luxury to him was this petting of his sorrows, that he could not bear to have any worldly cheeriness or any grating delight intrude upon it; it was too sacred for such contact; and so, presently, when his cousin mary danced in, all alive with the joy of seeing home again after an age-long visit of one week to the country, he got up and moved in clouds and darkness out at one door as she brought song and sunshine in at the other. - tom sawyer
• there was not even a zephyr stirring; the dead noonday heat had even stilled the songs of the birds; nature lay in a trance that was broken by no sound but the occasional far-off hammering of a woodpecker, and this seemed to render the pervading silence and sense of loneliness the more profound. the boy's soul was steeped in melancholy; his feelings were in happy accord with his surroundings. he sat long with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, meditating. it seemed to him that life was but a trouble, at best, and he more than half envied jimmy hodges, so lately released; it must be very peaceful, he thought, to lie and slumber and dream forever and ever, with the wind whispering through the trees and caressing the grass and the flowers over the grave, and nothing to bother and grieve about, ever any more. - tom sawyer
• well, i've often felt that dreams are answers to questions we haven't yet figured out how to ask. - mulder, x-files
• life... is like a box of chocolates. a cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that nobody ever asks for. unreturnable, because all you get back is another box of chocolates. so, you're stuck with this undefinable whipped-mint crap that you mindlessly wolf down when there's nothing else left to eat. sure, once in a while, there's a peanut butter cup, or an english toffee. but they're gone too fast, the taste is fleeting. so you end up with nothing but broken bits, filled with hardened jelly and teeth-shattering nuts, and if you're desperate enough to eat those, all you've got left is a... is an empty box... filled with useless, brown paper wrappers. - cigarette smoking man, x-files
• "have you ever been in love? horrible isn't it? it makes you so vulnerable. it opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. you build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life you give them a piece of you. they didn't ask for it. they did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. love takes hostages. it gets inside you. it eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. it hurts. not just in the imagination. not just in the mind. it's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. i hate love." - neil gaiman
• “i've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. they don't teach you how to love somebody. they don't teach you how to be famous. they don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. they don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. they don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. they don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. they don't teach you anything worth knowing.” - neil gaiman
• young men go to war. sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they want to. always, they feel they are supposed to. this comes from the sad, layered stories of life, which over the centuries have seen courage confused with picking up arms, and cowardice confused with laying them down. - the five people you meet in heaven
• lost love is still love, eddie. it takes a different form, that's all. you can't see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. but when those senses weaken, another heightens. memory. memory becomes your partner. you nurture it. you hold it. you dance with it. - the five people you meet in heaven
• ain't no shame in holdin' on to grief, as long as you make room for other things too. - bubbles, the wire
• “i’m not frightened. i’m not frightened of anything. the more i suffer, the more i love. danger would only increase my love. it would sharpen it, forgive its vice. i’ll be the only angel you’ll need. you will leave life even more beautiful than you entered it. heaven will take you back and look at you and say ‘only one thing can make a soul complete, and that thing is love.’“ - the reader