Tag: Gretchen Rubin

Quotes November 30, 2019

Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin

 
 
“The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope.”
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
 
 
 
 
“On the whole, tho’ I never arrived at the Perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet as I was, by the Endeavor, a better and a happier Man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it.”
Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
 
 
 
 
“[Physicist Niels Bohr] never trusted a purely formal or mathematical argument. ‘No, no,’ he would say, ‘You are not thinking; you are just being logical.’”
O. R. Frisch, What Little I Remember
 
 
 
 
“Wisdom has its excesses, and has no less need of moderation than folly.”
Michel de Montaigne, “Upon Some Verses of Virgil,” The Essays of Montaigne
 
 
 
 
The bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are in their place,
The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.
Walt Whitman, from “Song of Myself, 16”
 
 
 
 
“’Safe! safe! safe!’ the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry ‘Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.’”
Virginia Woolf, A Haunted House
 
 
 
 
“Meanwhile, as we read, two little girls slept as if couched on zephyrs on the south side of the parlor floor, in a room that had bunny wallpaper…and a bookcase crammed with the collected Beatrix Potter. Snow White was in a youth bed and Rose Red was in a crib, and next to them was the little blue and white guest room that one of them would have one day. Because I recognize emotions only in retrospect, I didn’t know that I was happy. As always, there was something nagging at my mind’s corners. But I did know that I had all that it is proper in this world to wish for.”
Mary Cantwell, Manhattan, When I Was Young
 
 
 
 
“Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals. Each meal should be a treat and one ought to bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the precious gift of hunger.”
Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea
 
 
 
 
“Whatever creates or increases happiness or some part of happiness, we ought to do; whatever destroys or hampers happiness, or gives rise to its opposite, we ought not to do.”
Aristotle, Rhetoric
 
 
 
 
Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.”
Leo Tolstoy

Quotes November 17, 2019

Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin

 
 
“The great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Senior
 
 
 
 
“All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
 
 
 
 
“A little tap on the window-pane, as though something had struck it, followed by a plentiful light falling sound, as of grains of sand being sprinkled from a window overhead, gradually spreading, intensifying, acquiring a regular rhythm, becoming fluid, sonorous, musical, immeasurable, universal: it was the rain.”
Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
 
 
 
 
“The important question is not, what will yield to man a few scattered pleasures, but what will render his life happy on the whole amount.”
Joseph Addison
 
 
 
 
“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.”
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
 
 
 
 
“Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.”
Flannery O’Connor
 
 
 
 
“Of all the tasks which are set before man in life, the education and management of his character is the most important, and, in order that it should be successfully pursued, it is necessary that he should make a calm and careful survey of his own tendencies, unblinded either by the self-deception which conceals errors and magnifies excellences, or by the indiscriminate pessimism which refuses to recognize his powers for good. He must avoid the fatalism which would persuade him that he has no power over his nature, and he must also clearly recognize that this power is not unlimited.”
William Edward Hartpole Lecky, The Map of Life
 
 
 
 
“All knowledge is interesting to a wise man, and the knowledge of nature is interesting to all men.”
Matthew Arnold
 
 
 
 
“What so great happiness as to be beloved, and to know that we deserve to be beloved? What so great misery as to be hated, and to know that we deserve to be hated?”
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Quotes November 04, 2019

Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin

 
 
“The work I have done has already been adequately rewarded and recognized. Imagination reaches out repeatedly trying to achieve some higher level of understanding, until suddenly I find myself momentarily alone before one new corner of nature’s pattern of beauty and true majesty revealed. That was my reward.”
Richard Feynman, banquet speech at the Nobel Prize ceremonies, Stockholm, 1966
 
 
 
 
“The Little House was very happy as she sat on the hill and watched the countryside around her. She watched the sun rise in the morning and she watched the sun set in the evening. Day followed day, each one a little different from the one before . . . but the Little House stayed just the same.”
Virginia Lee Burton, The Little House
 
 
 
 
“There is a perfect ant, a perfect bee, but man is perpetually unfinished…Moreover, the incurable unfinishedness keeps man perpetually immature, perpetually capable of learning and growing.”
Eric Hoffer
 
 
 
 
“How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.”
WWilliam James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

Quotes October 29, 2019

Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin

 
 
“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land…the only way to go to England is to go away from it.”
G. K. Chesterton, “The Riddle of the Ivy,” Tremendous Trifles
 
 
 
 
“An eccentricity made a regular thing of ceases to provoke remark.”
Sylvia Townsend Warner, “Winged Creatures” in Kingdoms of Elfin
 
 
 
 
“October is a fine and dangerous season in America. It is dry and cool and the land is wild with red and gold and crimson, and all the lassitudes of August have seeped out of your blood, and you are full of ambition. It is a wonderful time to begin anything at all.”
Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain
 
 
 
 
“One day when I was studying with Schoenberg, he pointed out the eraser on his pencil and said, ‘This end is more important than the other.’”
John Cage, Silence
 
 
 
 
“One is happy as a result of one’s own efforts, once one knows of the necessary ingredients of happiness—simple tastes, a certain degree of courage, self-denial to a point, love of work, and, above all, a clear conscience. Happiness is no vague dream, of that I now feel certain.”
George Sand
 
 
 
 

“For me, the challenge of middle age was not to stand still.”
Jon Katz, A Dog Year

Quotes October 21, 2019

Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin

 
 
“A change in the weather is sufficient to create the world and ourselves anew.”
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way
 
 
 
 
“Perhaps it is the simplest and most popular truths which are also the deepest after all.”
Thomas Merton, Journal, November 20, 1952
 
 
 
 
“You don’t become a painter, you just discover one day that you are one.”
Yves Klein, quoted in Klein, by Hannah Weitemeier
 
 
 
 
“If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others.”
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea
 
 
 
 
“I looked at the menu, then I looked at my wife. The one thing about her that I always loved was that she was never one of those people who thinks that someone else is the answer to their happiness. Me or anybody else. She’s always had her own built-in happiness.”
Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One
 
 
 
 
“Humor is the antidote to overthinking. It’s a way of saying that life is paradoxical. Humor contains contradictions; it does not resolve them but revels in them. It says that the right way to exist among the contradictions, paradoxes, and absurdities of life is to cope with them through laughter.”
Bob Mankoff, How About Never: Is Never Good For You?
 
 
 
 
“Most men rather please than admire you; they seek less to be instructed, and even to be amused, than to be praised and applauded; the most delicate of pleasures is to please another person.”
Jean de La Bruyère, “Of Society and Conversation”, The Characters of Jean de La Bruyère
 
 
 
 
“The way in which people miss their opportunities is melancholy.”
Elizabeth von Arnim, The Solitary Summer
 
 
 
 
“Grownups! Everyone remembers them. How strange and even sad it is that we never become what they were: beings noble, infallible, and free. We never become them. One of the things we discover as we live is that we never become anything different from what we are. We are no less ourselves at forty than we were at four, and because of this we know grownups as Grownups only once in life: during our own childhood. We never meet them in our lives again, and we miss them always.”
Eizabeth Enright, Doublefields, “The Walnut Shell”

 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 

Quotes October 08, 2019

Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin

 
 
“I love a broad margin to my life.”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
 
 
 
 
[Of the French writer Colette] “She was both home-loving and adventurous…passionately attached to what she possessed and ready to risk or give it away at any moment.”
Maurice Goudeket, Close to Colette: An Intimate Portrait of a Woman of Genius
 
 
 
 
“Neither does the tree hold back its leaves but lets them flow open or glide away when the time is right.”
Mary Oliver, “Habits, Differences, and the Light That Abides,” Long Life
 
 
 
 
“Alexandra drew her shawl closer about her and stood leaning against the frame of the mill, looking at the stars which glittered so keenly through the frosty autumn air. She always loved to watch them, to think of their vastness and distance, and of their ordered march. It fortified her to reflect upon the great operations of nature, and when she thought of the law that lay behind them, she felt a sense of personal security.”
Willa Cather, O Pioneers!
 
 
 
 
“I love repetition. Repetitions turn time into a place, turns the days into a house, where the repetitions form the walls, floor, and ceiling.”
Karl Ove Knausgaard, Summer
 
 
 
 
“Reflection is to colors what echo is to sounds.”
Joubert, Pensees

Quotes September 30, 2019

Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin

“No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.”
Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant
 
 
 
 
“We followed a path in between the trees, and there, in the middle of the wood, stood an apple tree laden with apples. The children were as astonished as I was, apple trees are supposed to grow in gardens, not wild out in the forest. Can we eat them, they asked. I said yes, go ahead, take as many as you want. In a sudden glimpse, as full of joy as it was of sorrow, I understood what freedom is.”
Karl Ove Knausgaard, Autumn
 
 
 
 

“Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable. Everything feeds into my creativity. But without proper preparation, I cannot see it, retain it, and use it.”
Twyla Tharp
 
 
 
 
“The mind…is rarely so disturbed, but that the company of a friend will restore it to some degree of tranquility and sedateness.”
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
 
 
 
 
“What is far off may be more familiar to us than what is quite near.”
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way
 
 
 
 
“It is all a question of weeding out what you yourself like best to do, so that you can live most agreeably in a world full of an increasing number of disagreeable surprises.”
M.F.K. Fisher, How to Cook a Wolf
 
 
 
 
“An egoist lives in poverty. A kind person lives in abundance.”
Maxime Lagacé
 
 
 
 
You are loved.
Maybe not by yourself, today.
But maybe, just for today, you could pretend to love yourself.
How about tomorrow, too?
By the end of the week, you might actually believe that you are loved.

Quotes September 22, 2019

Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin

 
 
“We may, by fixing our attention almost fiercely on the facts actually before us, force them to turn into adventures; force them to give up their meaning and fulfill their mysterious purpose.”
G. K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles
 
 
 
 
“This is suffering’s lesson: pay attention. The important part might come in a form you do not recognize.”
Sarah Manguso, The Two Kinds of Decay
 
 
 
 
“On a really clean tablecloth, the smallest speck of dirt annoys the eye. At high altitudes, a moment’s self-indulgence may mean death.”
Dag Hammarskjold, Markings
 
 
 
 
“’Appearances are not held to be a clue to the truth,’ said his cousin. ‘But we seem to have no other.’”
Ivy Compton-Burnett, Manservant and Maidservant
 
 
 
 
“Would all, who cherish such wild wishes, but look around them, they would oftenest find their sphere of duty, of prosperity and happiness, within those precincts, and in that station where Providence itself has cast their lot. Happy they who read the riddle without a weary world-search, or a lifetime spent in vain!”
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Threefold Destiny”
 
 
 
 
“Always, as one arrives, here is the old acceleration of the pulse—the mountainous gray skyline glimpsed from the Triboro Bridge, the cheerful games of basketball and handball being played on the recreational asphalt beside the FDR Drive, the startling, steamy, rain-splotched intimacy of the side streets where one’s taxi slows to a crawl, the careless flung beauty of the pedestrians clumped at the street corners. So many faces, costumes, packages, errands! So many preoccupations, hopes, passions, lives in progress!”
John Updike, “Is New York City Inhabitable?”
 
 
 
 
“At these best moments a great humility fused with a great ambition: to be only what I was, but to the utmost of what I was.”
Stephen Spender, World Within World
 
 
 
 
“Most people take action by habit in small things more often than in important things.”
Mary Oliver, “Habits, Differences, and the Light That Abides,” Long Life

Quotes September 10-12, 2019

Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin

 
 
“Most of us are experts at solving other people’s problems, but we generally solve them in terms of our own and the advice we give is seldom for other people but for ourselves.”
Nan Fairbrother, The House in the Country
 
 
 
 
“[There are] three possible ways to find meaning in life—even up to the last moment, the last breath…1) a deed we do, a work we create; 2) an experience, a human encounter, a love; and 3) when confronted with an unchangeable fate (such as an incurable disease), a change of attitude toward that fate.”
Victor Frankl, Recollections
 
 
 
 
“A house in which there are no people—but with all the signs of tenancy—can be a most tranquil good place. People take up space in a house out of proportion to their size.”
Muriel Spark, The Portobello Road
 
 
 
 
“Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things?”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” Selected Essays, Lectures and Poems
 
 
 
 
“It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility; they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.”
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
 
 
 
 
“Even in his most artificial creations, nature is the material upon which man has to work.”
Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
 
 
 
 
“Traveling makes one modest: one sees what a tiny place one occupies in the world.”
The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 1830-1857

Quotes September 03, 2019

Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin

 
 
“The years from 7 to 13 seem to be particularly formative. We are young enough to be innocent and impressionable, yet old enough to think and feel deeply about what is happening to us.”
Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Mr. Tibbits’s Catholic School
 
 
 
 
“I didn’t entirely like this glossy new surface, because it made the school look like a museum, and that’s exactly what it was to me, and what I did not want it to be. In the deep, tacit way in which feeling becomes stronger than thought, I had always felt that the Devon School came into existence the day I entered it, was vibrantly real while I was a student there, and then blinked out like a candle the day I left.”
John Knowles, A Separate Peace
 
 
 
 
“Even paradise must have rules.”
Mary Oliver, “Flow,” Long Life
 
 
 
 
“Forever—is composed of Nows—”
Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson
 
 
 
 
“To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.”
Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist Part II
 
 
 
 
“I had wanted to come back to Greenwich Village ever since I had left Waverly Place, and since moving to West Eleventh Street, I have never lived anyplace else. I do not want to. That is not because of what the Village is but because of what I have made it, and what I have made it depends on who I am at the time.”
Mary Cantwell, Manhattan, When I Was Young
 
 
 
 
“It is not always in this world the people who bring us fine roses to whom we are most friendly.”
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way
 
 
 
 
“I suppose the more you have to do, the more you learn to organise and concentrate—or else get fragmented into bits. I have learned to use my ‘ten minutes.’ I once thought it was not worth sitting down for a time as short as that; now I know differently and, if I have ten minutes, I use them, even if they bring only two lines, and it keeps the book alive.”
Rumer Godden, A House with Four Rooms
 
 
 
 
“What we want out of a vacation changes as we age. It changes from vacation to vacation. There was a time when it was all about culture for me. My idea of a real break was to stay in museums until my legs ached and then go stand in line to get tickets for an opera or a play. Later I became a disciple of relaxation and looked for words like beach and massage when making my plans. I found those little paper umbrellas that balanced on the side of rum drinks to be deeply charming then. Now I strive for transcendent invisibility and the chance to accomplish the things I can’t get done at home. But as I pack up my room at the Hotel Bel-Air, I think the best vacation is the one that relieves me of my own life for a while and then makes me long for it again.”
Ann Patchett, “Do Not Disturb,” in This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage
 
 
 
 
“Thinking about monastic ideals is not the same as living up to them, but at any rate such thinking has an important place in a monk’s life, because you cannot begin to do anything unless you have some idea what you are trying to do.”
Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas