Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin
“Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.”
George Eliot, Middlemarch
“…that best portion of a good man’s life, his little, nameless, unremembered, acts of kindness and of love.”
William Wordsworth
“To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends.”
Samuel Johnson
“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.”
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
“No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.”
John Ruskin
“The late summer sun slanted across the piney slopes, and the air was full of fragrance, and the click of the ancient hand-turned balls made an easy music. A big farm woman brought us tea and bread, and pots of wild green honey. It was one of the most idyllic moments I have ever known, very sharp, like a Breughel painting.”
M.F.K. Fisher, The Gastronomical Me
“When you enter an art gallery or an antique shop, you see what you hope will surprise and delight you, but a bookstore does not show what it is selling…It is from the collective impression, from the sight of many books wedged together on many shelves, that the mysterious good feel comes. Is there something that leaks out of the closed books, some subliminal message about culture and aspiration?”
Janet Malcom, “Three Sisters”
“Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter’s, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.”
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
“What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.”
C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew
“The soul makes the body.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet”
“When your toil has been a pleasure, you have not earned money merely, but money, health, delight, and moral profit, all in one.”
Robert Louis Stevenson
“Beauty has its purposes, which, all our lives and at every season, it is our opportunity, and our joy, to divine.”
Mary Oliver, “Wordsworth’s Mountain,” Long Life
“Change was such an elusive thing. A man could say every day that he wanted to change his life, was going to change it, and every day the lament became merely a part of the life he was already living, so that the desire for change was in fact a kind of stasis that allowed the unchanged life to continue, because at least the man knew to disapprove of it, which reassured him not all was lost.”
Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room
“It takes a certain amount of effort to be miserable and another kind of effort to be happy, and I was willing to do the work of happiness. I figured even if I couldn’t make Lucy deeply happy, I could provide the kind of happiness that would seem hollow if we had the money or the time to stay in it too long…I booked Lucy a massage and had her eyelashes dyed. I took her for a pedicure. I bought her the best pate I could find in Nashville along with Spaghetti-O’s and Hungry Jack biscuits and everything else I knew she liked. We went to a bad movie and then stayed for a second bad movie. I took her shopping and bought her whatever she wanted. And she was happy, and I was happy.”
Ann Patchett, Truth and Beauty
