β
So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be.
β
β
Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)
β
You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
β
β
Albert Camus
β
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedomsβto choose oneβs attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose oneβs own way.
β
β
Viktor E. Frankl (Manβs Search for Meaning)
β
I am a cage, in search of a bird.
β
β
Franz Kafka
β
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
β
β
Viktor E. Frankl (Manβs Search for Meaning)
β
It's a lot easier to be lost than found. It's the reason we're always searching and rarely discovered--so many locks not enough keys.
β
β
Sarah Dessen (Lock and Key)
β
Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity.
β
β
Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist)
β
Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.
β
β
Viktor E. Frankl (Manβs Search for Meaning)
β
Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who's in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It's like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven't seen in a long time.
β
β
Haruki Murakami
β
Without you in my arms, I feel an emptiness in my soul. I find myself searching the crowds for your face - I know it's an impossibility, but I cannot help myself.
β
β
Nicholas Sparks (Message in a Bottle)
β
To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced
life.
β
β
Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything)
β
Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.
β
β
Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)
β
Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.
β
β
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
β
You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear thorough the search.
β
β
Rick Riordan
β
What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.
β
β
John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley: In Search of America)
β
She had blue skin,
And so did he.
He kept it hid
And so did she.
They searched for blue
Their whole life through,
Then passed right by-
And never knew.
β
β
Shel Silverstein (Every Thing on It)
β
I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.
β
β
Hermann Hesse (Demian)
β
I can choose either to be a victim of the world or an adventurer in search of treasure. It's all a question of how I view my life.
β
β
Paulo Coelho (Eleven Minutes)
β
But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.
β
β
Viktor E. Frankl (Manβs Search for Meaning)
β
Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.
β
β
Studs Terkel
β
I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.
β
β
John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley: In Search of America)
β
An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.
β
β
Viktor E. Frankl (Man's Search For Ultimate Meaning)
β
Those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it, because those who are searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.
β
β
Martin Luther King Jr.
β
In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.
β
β
Viktor E. Frankl (Manβs Search for Meaning)
β
Children see magic because they look for it.
β
β
Christopher Moore (Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christβs Childhood Pal)
β
In this world, it is too common for people to search for someone to lose themselves in. But I am already lost. I will look for someone to find myself in.
β
β
C. JoyBell C.
β
You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.
β
β
Sharon Salzberg
β
I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.
β
β
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
β
So live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!
β
β
Viktor E. Frankl (Manβs Search for Meaning)
β
Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.
β
β
Neil Gaiman
β
According to Greek mythology, humans were originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves.
β
β
Plato (The Symposium)
β
Iβve been searching a long time for something I think I lost.
I felt like I found something when I saw you back there.
β
β
Marie Lu (Champion (Legend, #3))
β
Life is full of strange absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true.
β
β
Luigi Pirandello (Six Characters in Search of an Author)
β
If you don't receive love from the ones who are meant to love you, you will never stop looking for it.
β
β
Robert Goolrick (The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life)
β
No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.
β
β
Viktor E. Frankl (Manβs Search for Meaning)
β
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
β
β
Bertrand Russell
β
When we're incomplete, we're always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we're still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on--series polygamy--until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter.
β
β
Tom Robbins
β
Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.
β
β
Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time)
β
A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ.
β
β
John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley: In Search of America)
β
Some days are meant to be counted, others are meant to be weighed.
β
β
Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything)
β
Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.
β
β
Viktor E. Frankl (Manβs Search for Meaning)
β
Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged. Missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you.
β
β
Walt Whitman (Song of Myself)
β
I've always found that the most beautiful people, truly beautiful inside and out, are the ones who are quietly unaware of their effect." His eyes searched mine intently, and for a moment we stood there toe to toe. "The ones who throw their beauty around, waste what they have? Their beauty is only passing. It's just a shell hiding nothing but shadows and emptiness.
β
β
Jennifer L. Armentrout (Obsidian (Lux, #1))
β
I'm not in search of sanctity, sacredness, purity; these things are found after this life, not in this life; but in this life I search to be completely human: to feel, to give, to take, to laugh, to get lost, to be found, to dance, to love and to lust, to be so human.
β
β
C. JoyBell C.
β
Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.
β
β
Marcel Proust (The Captive / The Fugitive (In Search of Lost Time, #5-6))
β
We cannot change anything unless we accept it.
β
β
C.G. Jung (Modern Man in Search of a Soul)
β
How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole.
β
β
C.G. Jung (Modern Man in Search of a Soul)
β
Then he made one last effort to search in his heart for the place where his affection had rotted away, and he could not find it.
β
β
Gabriel GarcΓa MΓ‘rquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)
β
It was at that age
that poetry came in search of me.
β
β
Pablo Neruda (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair)
β
In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it's wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices.
β
β
Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything)
β
Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.
β
β
Viktor E. Frankl (Manβs Search for Meaning)
β
Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-runβin the long-run, I say!βsuccess will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it
β
β
Viktor E. Frankl (Manβs Search for Meaning)
β
Let me wake up next to you, have coffee in the morning and wander through the city with your hand in mine, and I'll be happy for the rest of my fucked up little life.
β
β
Charlotte Eriksson (Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps)
β
Thatβs the thing about a human life-thereβs no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.
β
β
Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything)
β
I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment.
β
β
John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley: In Search of America)
β
Once we give up searching for approval we often find it easier to earn respect.
β
β
Gloria Steinem
β
This is the greatest gift God can give you: to understand what happened in your life. To have it explained. It is the peace you have been searching for.
β
β
Mitch Albom (The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Meniti Bianglala)
β
What we seek is some kind of compensation for what we put up with.
β
β
Haruki Murakami (Dance Dance Dance)
β
I will no longer mutilate and destroy myself in order to find a secret behind the ruins.
β
β
Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)
β
One more secret smile. One more shared laugh. One more electric kiss. Finding him was like finding someone I didn't know I was searching for.
β
β
Becca Fitzpatrick (Hush, Hush (Hush, Hush, #1))
β
The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.
β
β
C.G. Jung (Modern Man in Search of a Soul)
β
You're an interesting species. An interesting mix. You're capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.
β
β
Carl Sagan (Contact)
β
Soon, the whole world would be searching for her--Linh Cinder.
A deformed cyborg with a missing foot.
A Lunar with a stolen identity.
A mechanic with no one to run to, nowhere to go.
But they will be looking for a ghost.
β
β
Marissa Meyer (Cinder (The Lunar Chronicles, #1))
β
Thereβs something about arriving in new cities, wandering empty streets with no destination. I will never lose the love for the arriving, but I'm born to leave.
β
β
Charlotte Eriksson (Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps)
β
Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for.
β
β
Maya Angelou (Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now)
β
We search for happiness everywhere, but we are like Tolstoy's fabled beggar who spent his life sitting on a pot of gold, under him the whole time. Your treasure--your perfection--is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the buy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart.
β
β
Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything)
β
Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don't find themselves at all.
β
β
Rollo May (Man's Search for Himself)
β
For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.
β
β
Viktor E. Frankl (Manβs Search for Meaning)
β
On the darkest days you have to search for a spot of brightness, on the coldest days you have to seek out a spot of warmth; on the bleakest days you have to keep your eyes onward and upward and on the saddest days you have to leave them open to let them cry. To then let them dry. To give them a chance to wash out the pain in order to see fresh and clear once again.
β
β
Tahereh Mafi (Unravel Me (Shatter Me, #2))
β
Faith is universal. Our specific methods for understanding it are arbitrary. Some of us pray to Jesus, some of us go to Mecca, some of us study subatomic particles. In the end we are all just searching for truth, that which is greater than ourselves.
β
β
Dan Brown (Angels & Demons (Robert Langdon, #1))
β
People pontificate, "Suicide is selfishness." Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call in a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reason: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching.
β
β
David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)
β
Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.
β
β
Viktor E. Frankl (Manβs Search for Meaning)
β
There is a legend about a bird which sings just once in its life, more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. From the moment it leaves the nest it searches for a thorn tree, and does not rest until it has found one. Then, singing among the savage branches, it impales itself upon the longest, sharpest spine. And, dying, it rises above its own agony to outcarol the lark and the nightingale. One superlative song, existence the price. But the whole world stills to listen, and God in His heaven smiles. For the best is only bought at the cost of great pain⦠Or so says the legend.
β
β
Colleen McCullough (The Thorn Birds)
β
Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?
β
β
Stephen Hawking (A Brief History of Time)
β
Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.
β
β
Viktor E. Frankl (Manβs Search for Meaning)
β
He dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of living each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs.
β
β
Gabriel GarcΓa MΓ‘rquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)
β
If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search. If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies. This is so fundamentally human that it's found in every culture without exception. Yes, there are assholes who just don't care, but they're massively outnumbered by the people who do.
β
β
Andy Weir (The Martian)
β
But how will I know who my Soulmate is?β Brida felt that this was one of the most important questions she had ever asked in her life.
By taking risksβ she said to Brida. β By risking failure, disappointment, disillusion, but never ceasing in you search for Love. As long as you keep looking, you will triumph in the end.
β
β
Paulo Coelho (Brida)
β
alone with everybody
the flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and them men drink too
much
and nobody finds the
one
but they keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh.
there's no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.
nobody ever finds
the one.
the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill
nothing else
fills.
β
β
Charles Bukowski (Love Is a Dog from Hell)
β
As Qhuinn looked at his best friend's handsome face, he felt as if he'd never not known that red hair, those blue eyes, those lips, that jaw. And it was because of their long history that he searched for something to say, something that would get them back to where they had been. All that came to him was . . . I miss you. I miss you so fucking bad it hurts, but I don't know how to find you even though you're right in front of me.
β
β
J.R. Ward (Lover Mine (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #8))
β
It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by lifeβdaily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.
β
β
Viktor E. Frankl (Manβs Search for Meaning)
β
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
Write, for instance: "The night is full of stars,
and the stars, blue, shiver in the distance."
The night wind whirls in the sky and sings.
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
On nights like this, I held her in my arms.
I kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her.
How could I not have loved her large, still eyes?
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
To think I don't have her. To feel that I've lost her.
To hear the immense night, more immense without her.
And the poem falls to the soul as dew to grass.
What does it matter that my love couldn't keep her.
The night is full of stars and she is not with me.
That's all. Far away, someone sings. Far away.
My soul is lost without her.
As if to bring her near, my eyes search for her.
My heart searches for her and she is not with me.
The same night that whitens the same trees.
We, we who were, we are the same no longer.
I no longer love her, true, but how much I loved her.
My voice searched the wind to touch her ear.
Someone else's. She will be someone else's. As she once
belonged to my kisses.
Her voice, her light body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, true, but perhaps I love her.
Love is so short and oblivion so long.
Because on nights like this I held her in my arms,
my soul is lost without her.
Although this may be the last pain she causes me,
and this may be the last poem I write for her.
β
β
Pablo Neruda
β
I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Donβt search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
β
β
Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)
β
The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don't. If you keep saying your slippers aren't yours, then you'll die searching, you'll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more. Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.
β
β
Abraham Verghese (Cutting for Stone)
β
There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.
(Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, NIV)
β
β
Anonymous (Study Bible: NIV)
β
Do you ever feel that way?"
"Lonely?"
I search for the words. "Restless. As if you haven't really met yourself yet. As is you'd passed yourself once in the fog, and your heart leapt - 'Ah! There I Am! I've been missing that piece!' But it happens too fast, and then that part of you disappears into the fog again. And you spend the rest of your days looking for it."
He nods, and I think he's appeasing me. I feel stupid of having said it. It's sentimental and true, and I've revealed a part of myself I shouldn't have.
"Do you know what I think?" Kartik says at last.
"What?"
"Sometimes, I think you can glimpse it in another.
β
β
Libba Bray (The Sweet Far Thing (Gemma Doyle, #3))
β
To draw an analogy: a man's suffering is similar to the behavior of a gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the "size" of human suffering is absolutely relative.
β
β
Viktor E. Frankl (Manβs Search for Meaning)
β
All I wanted was to live a life where I could be me, and be okay with that. I had no need for material possessions, money or even close friends with me on my journey. I never understood people very well anyway, and they never seemed to understand me very well either. All I wanted was my art and the chance to be the creator of my own world, my own reality. I wanted the open road and new beginnings every day.
β
β
Charlotte Eriksson (Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps)
β
There are two kinds of love...in the safe kind you look for someone who's exactly like you. It's what most folks settle for. But then there's the other kind of love. Everyone's born with a ragged edge, and some folks crave that piece that's a perfect fit. You'll search for it forever, if you have to. And if you're lucky enough to find it, it looks so right, you start to tear at your own seams, thinking, maybe I could look just as perfect. But then, of course, when you try to get close to their other half, you don't fit anymore. That kind of love...you come out of it a different person than you were when you started.
β
β
Jodi Picoult
β
You should have taken me with you," I whisper to him. Then I lean my head against his and begin to cry. In my mind, I make a silent promise to my brother's killer.
I will hunt you down. I will scour the streets of Los Angeles for you. Search every street in the Republic if I have to. I will trick you and deceive you, lie, cheat and steal to find you, tempt you out of your hiding place, and chase you until you have nowhere else to run. I make you this promise: your life is mine.
β
β
Marie Lu (Legend (Legend, #1))
β
Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension. But I am not always in what I call a state of grace. I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruits, polish furniture. But while I am doing this I feel I am not living.
β
β
AnaΓ―s Nin (The Diary of AnaΓ―s Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934)
β
Every person needs to take one day away.Β A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future.Β Jobs, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence.Β Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for.Β Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us.
β
β
Maya Angelou (Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now)
β
Get Off The Scale!
You are beautiful. Your beauty, just like your capacity for life, happiness, and success, is immeasurable. Day after day, countless people across the globe get on a scale in search of validation of beauty and social acceptance.
Get off the scale! I have yet to see a scale that can tell you how enchanting your eyes are. I have yet to see a scale that can show you how wonderful your hair looks when the sun shines its glorious rays on it. I have yet to see a scale that can thank you for your compassion, sense of humor, and contagious smile. Get off the scale because I have yet to see one that can admire you for your perseverance when challenged in life.
Itβs true, the scale can only give you a numerical reflection of your relationship with gravity. Thatβs it. It cannot measure beauty, talent, purpose, life force, possibility, strength, or love. Donβt give the scale more power than it has earned. Take note of the number, then get off the scale and live your life. You are beautiful!
β
β
Steve Maraboli (Life, the Truth, and Being Free)
β
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms toward perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action -
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
β
β
Rabindranath Tagore (Gitanjali)
β
I am one of the searchers. There are, I believe, millions of us. We are not unhappy, but neither are we really content. We continue to explore life, hoping to uncover its ultimate secret. We continue to explore ourselves, hoping to understand. We like to walk along the beach, we are drawn by the ocean, taken by its power, its unceasing motion, its mystery and unspeakable beauty. We like forests and mountains, deserts and hidden rivers, and the lonely cities as well. Our sadness is as much a part of our lives as is our laughter. To share our sadness with one we love is perhaps as great a joy as we can know - unless it be to share our laughter.
We searchers are ambitious only for life itself, for everything beautiful it can provide. Most of all we love and want to be loved. We want to live in a relationship that will not impede our wandering, nor prevent our search, nor lock us in prison walls; that will take us for what little we have to give. We do not want to prove ourselves to another or compete for love.
For wanderers, dreamers, and lovers, for lonely men and women who dare to ask of life everything good and beautiful. It is for those who are too gentle to live among wolves.
β
β
James Kavanaugh (There are men too gentle to live among wolves)
β
Do you love me?' I asked her. She smiled. 'Yes.' 'Do you want me to be happy?' as I asked her this I felt my heart beginning to race. 'Of course I do.' 'Will you do something for me then?' She looked away, sadness crossing her features. 'I don't know if I can anymore.' she said. 'but if you could, would you?' I cannot adequately describe the intensity of what I was feeling at that moment. Love, anger, sadness, hope, and fear, whirling together sharpened by the nervousness I was feeling. Jamie looked at me curiously and my breaths became shallower. Suddenly I knew that I'd never felt as strongly for another person as I did at that moment. As I returned her gaze, this simple realization made me wish for the millionth time that I could make all this go away. Had it been possible, I would have traded my life for hers. I wanted to tell her my thoughts, but the sound of her voice suddenly silenced the emotions inside me. 'yes' she finally said, her voice weak yet somehow still full of promise. 'I would.' Finally getting control of myself I kissed her again, then brought my hand to her face, gently running my fingers over her cheek. I marveled at the softness of her skin, the gentleness I saw in her eyes. even now she was perfect. My throat began to tighten again, but as I said, I knew what I had to do. Since I had to accept that it was not within my power to cure her, what I wanted to do was give her something that she'd wanted. It was what my heart had been telling me to do all along. Jamie, I understood then, had already given me the answer I'd been searching for, the answer my heart needed to find. She'd told me outside Mr. Jenkins office, the night we'd asked him about doing the play. I smiled softly, and she returned my affection with a slight squeeze of my hand, as if trusting me in what I was about to do. Encouraged, I leaned closer and took a deep breath. When I exhaled, these were the words that flowed with my breath. 'Will you marry me?
β
β
Nicholas Sparks (A Walk to Remember)
β
There is no need to search; achievement leads to nowhere. It makes no difference at all, so just be happy now! Love is the only reality of the world, because it is all One, you see. And the only laws are paradox, humor and change. There is no problem, never was, and never will be. Release your struggle, let go of your mind, throw away your concerns, and relax into the world. No need to resist life, just do your best. Open your eyes and see that you are far more than you imagine. You are the world, you are the universe; you are yourself and everyone else, too! It's all the marvelous Play of God. Wake up, regain your humor. Don't worry, just be happy. You are already free!
β
β
Dan Millman (Way of the Peaceful Warrior: A Book That Changes Lives)
β
I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be... This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages...the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide... Far too many people misunderstand what *putting away childish things* means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I'm with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don't ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child's awareness and joy, and *be* fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup.
β
β
Madeleine L'Engle
β
The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest. What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees, or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him?
No, thank you,' he will think. 'Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, although these are things which cannot inspire envy.
β
β
Viktor E. Frankl (Manβs Search for Meaning)
β
I made up my mind I was going to find someone who would love me unconditionally three hundred and sixty five days a year, I was still in elementary school at the time - fifth or sixth grade - but I made up my mind once and for all.β
βWow,β I said. βDid the search pay off?β
βThatβs the hard part,β said Midori. She watched the rising smoke for a while, thinking. βI guess Iβve been waiting so long Iβm looking for perfection. That makes it tough.β
βWaiting for the perfect love?β
βNo, even I know better than that. Iβm looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortcake. And you stop everything youβre doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortcake out to me. And I say I donβt want it anymore and throw it out the window. Thatβs what Iβm looking for.β
βIβm not sure that has anything to do with love,β I said with some amazement.
βIt does,β she said. βYou just donβt know it. There are time in a girlβs life when things like that are incredibly important.β
βThings like throwing strawberry shortcake out the window?β
βExactly. And when I do it, I want the man to apologize to me. βNow I see, Midori. What a fool I have been! I should have known that you would lose your desire for strawberry shortcake. I have all the intelligence and sensitivity of a piece of donkey shit. To make it up to you, Iβll go out and buy you something else. What would you like? Chocolate Mousse? Cheesecake?β
βSo then what?β
βSo then Iβd give him all the love he deserves for what heβs done.β
βSounds crazy to me.β
βWell, to me, thatβs what love isβ¦
β
β
Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)