Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin
“It is a great thing if you can persuade people that they are somehow or other partakers in a mystery. It makes them feel bigger.”
Robert Louis Stevenson
“Liberty is the daughter of authority properly understood. For to be free is not to do what one pleases; it is to be the master of oneself, it is to know how to act within reason and to do one’s duty.”
Emile Durkheim, Education and Sociology
“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.”
Epicurus
“Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it.”
Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being
“Things do not change; we change.”
Henry David Thoreau
“A good conscience is a continual Christmas.”
Benjamin Franklin
“There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.”
Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head
“It is impossible to win the great prizes of life without running risks, and the greatest of all prizes are those connected with the home.”
Theodore Roosevelt
“Everything that frees our spirit without giving us control of ourselves is ruinous.”
Goethe
“Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It’s what I’ve never seen before that I recognize.”
Diane Arbus
“Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?”
Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
