Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin
“Sheltered and isolated by the water that is at the same time an open possibility.”
Tove Jansson, “The Island,” The Paris Review
“The greatest of all human delusions is that there is a tangible goal, and not just direction towards an ideal aim. The idea that a goal can be attained perpetually frustrates human beings, who are disappointed at never getting there, never being able to stop.”
Stephen Spender, World Within World
“How strange painting is, it delights us with representations of objects that are not pleasing in themselves!”
Eugene Delacroix, The Journal of Eugene Delacroix
“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
“The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.”
Samuel Johnson, Selected Writings
“Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn’t these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time. At a certain moment, after all, every man chooses: will he go forward, will he go back? There was nothing dishonorable in not being blown about by every little modern wind. Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one’s own generation.”
John Le Carre, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
“We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.”
Dag Hammarskjold, Markings
“And the eighth and ninth, the tenth, eleventh, twelfth trips? What have they to do with me, the gastronomical me? What sea changes were there, to make me richer, stranger? I grew older with each one, like every other wanderer. My hungers altered: I knew better what and how to eat, just as I knew better how I loved other people, and even why.”
M.F.K. Fisher, The Gastronomical Me
“Happiness is essentially a state of going somewhere wholeheartedly, one-directionally, without regret or reservation.”
W.H. Sheldon
“The sacrifice of pleasures is of course itself a pleasure.”
Muriel Spark, Loitering With Intent
“I sometimes think how much the shaping of a destiny and the binding of a couple together depend on successful meetings and the avoidance of snares. A door which one thought was closed, a watch that is slow, a false step, a traffic jam, a sleeping car available…and your fate is settled…We walk across a cemetery of happiness missed for lack of a word, a gesture, an airy bubble; and how many people, meant for each other, have passed each other by in the fog?”
Maurice Goudeket, Close to Colette: An Intimate Portrait of a Woman of Genius
“In the shapeliness of a life, habit plays its sovereign role.”
Mary Oliver, “Habits, Differences, and the Light That Abides,” Long Life
“Years later I figured out why he [Ivan Karp] was such a successful art dealer–this may sound strange, but I believe it was because art was his second love. He seemed to love literature more, and he put the serious side of his nature into that…Some people are even better at their second love than their first, maybe because when they care too much, it freezes them, but knowing there’s something they’d rather be doing gives them a certain freedom.”
Andy Warhol, POPism
“A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.”
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda
“Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives. In later life we admire, we are entertained, we may modify some views we already hold, but we are more likely to find in books merely a confirmation of what is in our minds already…What do we ever get nowadays from reading to equal the excitement and the revelation in those first fourteen years?”
Graham Greene, The Lost Childhood
“Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.”
George Santayana
“I suppose every one has a mental picture of the days of the week, some seeing them as a circle, some as an endless line…Mine is a wavy line proceeding to infinity, dipping to Wednesday which is the colour of old silver dark with polishing and rising again to a pale gold Sunday.”
Angela Thirkell, Three Houses
“Fundamental happiness depends more than anything else upon what may be called a friendly interest in persons and things.”
Bertrand Russell
“With what pleasure do we look upon a family, through the whole of which reign mutual love and esteem, where the parents and children are companions for one another, without any other difference than what is made by respectful affection on the one side, and kind indulgence on the other, . . .”
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
