What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Life is not an easy matter…. You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness. - Leon Trotsky, Diary in Exile, 1935

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything. - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Individuals who want to believe that there is no fulfillment in love, that true love does not exist, cling to these assumptions because this despair is actually easier to face than the reality that love is a real fact of life but is absent from their lives. - bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

The rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened. - John F. Kennedy

To overcome fear is the quickest way to gain your self-confidence. - Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

My mind then wandered. I thought of this: I thought of how every day each of us experiences a few little moments that have just a bit more resonance than other moments—we hear a word that sticks in our mind—or maybe we have a small experience that pulls us out of ourselves, if only briefly—we share a hotel elevator with a bride in her veils, say, or a stranger gives us a piece of bread to feed to the mallard ducks in the lagoon; a small child starts a conversation with us in a Dairy Queen—or we have an episode like the one I had with the M&M cars back at the Husky station. And if we were to collect these small moments in a notebook and save them over a period of months we would see certain trends emerge from our collection—certain voices would emerge that have been trying to speak through us. We would realize that we have been having another life altogether; one we didn’t even know was going on inside us. And maybe this other life is more important than the one we think of as being real—this clunky day-to-day world of furniture and noise and metal. So just maybe it is these small silent moments which are the true story-making events of our lives. - Douglas Coupland, Life After God

You're off to Great Places!Today is your day!Your mountain is waiting,So... get on your way! - Dr. Seuss, Oh, The Places You'll Go!

Shin: a device for finding furniture in the dark. - Steven Wright

And a beautiful world we live in, when it is possible, and when many other such things are possible, and not only possible, but done-- done, see you!-- under that sky there, every day. - Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends? - Abraham Lincoln

Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai découvert en moi un invincible été. - Albert Camus

Never forget:we walk on hell,gazing at flowers. - Kobayashi Issa

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. - Immanuel Kant

I'm not dumb. I just have a command of thoroughly useless information. - Bill Watterson

For the first time in forever, he was stunned to silence. Not by her words, but by the tenderness in her hands, the worry in her eyes. He was an archangel. He’d been wounded far, far worse and shrugged it off. But then, there had been no woman with sun kissed by the sunset and eyes of storm gray to tear into him for daring to get himself hurt. - Nalini Singh, Archangel's Consort

For Equilibrium, a Blessing:Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore,May the relief of laughter rinse through your soul.As the wind loves to call things to dance,May your gravity by lightened by grace.Like the dignity of moonlight restoring the earth,May your thoughts incline with reverence and respect.As water takes whatever shape it is in,So free may you be about who you become.As silence smiles on the other side of what's said,May your sense of irony bring perspective.As time remains free of all that it frames,May your mind stay clear of all it names.May your prayer of listening deepen enoughto hear in the depths the laughter of god. - John O'Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings

Astonishment is the root of philosophy. - Paul Tillich

Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason - Jerry Seinfeld

So it's not gonna be easy. It's going to be really hard; we're gonna have to work at this everyday, but I want to do that because I want you. I want all of you, forever, everyday. You and me... everyday. - Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook