Tranquility Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Tranquility. Here they are! All 100 of them:

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That perfect tranquility of life, which is nowhere to be found but in retreat, a faithful friend and a good library.
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Aphra Behn (The Lucky Chance (Royal Court Writers))
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Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it. - Amir
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Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)
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Only the development of compassion and understanding for others can bring us the tranquility and happiness we all seek.
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Dalai Lama XIV
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Daylight won’t protect you from anything. Bad things happen all the time; they don’t wait until after dinner
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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People like to say love is unconditional, but it's not, and even if it was unconditional, it's still never free. There's always an expectation attached. They always want something in return. Like they want you to be happy or whatever and that makes you automatically responsible for their happiness because they won't be happy unless you are ... I just don't want that responsibility.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
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William Wordsworth (Lyrical Ballads)
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nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose
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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
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There are so many things that can break you if there's nothing to hold you together.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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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.
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Charlotte BrontΓ« (Jane Eyre)
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I am pressed so hard against the earth by the weight of reality that some days I wonder how I am still able to lift my feet to walk.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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And if my Sea od Tranquility were real, it would be this place, here, with him. I don't say anything right away, because I just want one minute to look at him before I give him my last secret. And then I tell him. "Your garage.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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I know at that moment what he's given me and it isn't a chair. It's an invitation, a welcome, the knowledge that I am accepted here. He hasn't given me a place to sit. He's given me a place to belong.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.
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Anne Frank (The Diary of a Young Girl)
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It is in your power to withdraw yourself whenever you desire. Perfect tranquility within consists in the good ordering of the mind, the realm of your own.
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Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
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I live in a world without magic or miracles. A place where there are no clairvoyants or shapeshifters, no angels or superhuman boys to save you. A place where people die and music disintegrates and things suck.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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We're like mysteries to one another. Maybe if I can solve him and he can solve me, we can explain each other. Maybe that's what I need. Someone to explain me.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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We are not going to change the whole world, but we can change ourselves and feel free as birds. We can be serene even in the midst of calamities and, by our serenity, make others more tranquil. Serenity is contagious. If we smile at someone, he or she will smile back. And a smile costs nothing. We should plague everyone with joy. If we are to die in a minute, why not die happily, laughing? (136-137)
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Satchidananda (The Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali)
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Emilia," he says, and when he does, it warms me to my soul. "Every day you save me.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, to absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.
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Charlotte BrontΓ« (Jane Eyre)
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If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.
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Samuel Adams
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I wished my mother was here tonight, which is stupid, because it’s an impossible wish.” He shrugs and turns to me, drowning the smile that cracks me every time. β€œIt’s not stupid to want to see her again.” β€œIt wasn’t so much that I wanted to see her again,” he says, looking at me with the depth of more than seventeen years in his eyes. β€œI wanted her to see you.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore, trust the physician and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility.
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Kahlil Gibran
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I hear my heartbeat. I have been looking at him too long, but then, he has been looking back, and I feel like we are both trying to say something the other can't hear, though I could be imagining it. Too long - and now even longer, my heart even louder, his tranquil eyes swallowing me whole.
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Veronica Roth (Divergent (Divergent, #1))
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Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
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James Thurber
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When you look at her what do you feel?... Joy, fear, frustration, longing, friendship, anger, need, despair, love, lust?" "Yes." "Yes, what?" "All of it.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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Do real boys actually call girls baby? I don't have enough experience to know. I do know that if a guy ever called me baby, I'd probably laugh in his face. Or choke him.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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Joy, sorrow, tears, lamentation, laughter -- to all these music gives voice, but in such a way that we are transported from the world of unrest to a world of peace, and see reality in a new way, as if we were sitting by a mountain lake and contemplating hills and woods and clouds in the tranquil and fathomless water.
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Albert Schweitzer
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People who go around advertising their birthdays are douchebags. It's a fact. You can look it up on Wikipedia.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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The world should be full of Josh Bennetts. But it’s not. I had the only one. And I threw him away.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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A happy life consists in tranquility of mind.
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Marcus Tullius Cicero
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When I look at her now, I think, for just one second, that God doesn't hate me so much after all.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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I don't believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.
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Gustave Flaubert
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The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed.
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Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (Phaedrus, #1))
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Good morning, Sunshine.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson (Nature and Selected Essays (Penguin Classics))
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What? Sunshine fits you. It's bright and warm and happy. Just. Like. You.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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The more tranquil a man becomes, the greater is his success, his influence, his power for good. Calmness of mind is one of the beautiful jewels of wisdom.
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James Allen
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Just so you know,” I inform him, β€œone day, I’m going to get tired of sharing your affection with that coffee table and I’m going to make you choose.” β€œJust so you know,” he mimics me, β€œI would chop that table up and use it for firewood before I would ever choose anything over you.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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And a woman spoke, saying, "Tell us of Pain." And he said: Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain. And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy; And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields. And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief. Much of your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquillity: For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen, And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.
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Kahlil Gibran (The Prophet)
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And maybe I'm a liar and I do need it, because being kissed by Josh Bennet is kind of like being saved. It's a promise and a memory of the future and a book of better stories.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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Inner peace is the key: if you have inner peace, the external problems do not affect your deep sense of peace and tranquility...without this inner peace, no matter how comfortable your life is materially, you may still be worried, disturbed, or unhappy because of circumstances.
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Dalai Lama XIV
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You might be tempted to avoid the messiness of daily living for the tranquility of stillness and peacefulness. This of course would be an attachment to stillness, and like any strong attachment, it leads to delusion. It arrests development and short-circuits the cultivation of wisdom.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn (Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life)
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If you are driven by fear, anger or pride nature will force you to compete. If you are guided by courage, awareness, tranquility and peace nature will serve you.
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Amit Ray (Nonviolence: The Transforming Power)
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When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.
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François de La Rochefoucauld
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Call me Sunshine again, and I will murder you, cocksucker.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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Real love brings about calmβ€”not inner torment. True love allows you to be at peace with yourself and with God. That is why Allah says: β€œthat you may dwell in tranquility.” Hawa is the opposite. Hawa will make you miserable. And just like a drug, you will crave it always, but never be satisfied. You will chase it to your own detriment, but never reach it.
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Yasmin Mogahed (Reclaim Your Heart: Personal Insights on Breaking Free from Life's Shackles)
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How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naivetΓ© of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in historyβ€”greater than the fall of empiresβ€”I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.
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Emil M. Cioran (On the Heights of Despair)
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Basically, I'm for anything that gets you through the night - be it prayer, tranquilizers or a bottle of Jack Daniels.
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Frank Sinatra
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Much of your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility: For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen, And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.
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Kahlil Gibran
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Nothing contributes so much to tranquillize the mind as a steady purpose- a point on which the soul can focus its intellectual eye
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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Frankenstein)
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Isolation offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tranquility of the evenings. The promise that she would find things where she put them, that there would be no interruption, no surprise. It greeted her at the end of each day and lay still with her at night.
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Jhumpa Lahiri (The Lowland)
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To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. All other things, ruling, hoarding, building, are only little appendages and props, at most.
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Michel de Montaigne
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Nothing is perfect. It's not even good yet. But maybe.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.
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Charles Dickens (Great Expectations)
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Fall in love with the energy of the mornings trace your fingers along the lull of the afternoons take the spirit of the evenings in your arms kiss it deeply and then make love to the tranquility of the nights.
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Sanober Khan
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APPLY WITHIN You once told me You wanted to find Yourself in the world - And I told you to First apply within, To discover the world within you. You once told me You wanted to save The world from all its wars - And I told you to First save yourself From the world, And all the wars You put yourself Through. APPLY WITHIN by Suzy Kassem
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Suzy Kassem
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Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.
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James Joyce (Ulysses)
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I'm going to enjoy every second, and I'm going to know I'm enjoying it while I'm enjoying it. Most people don't live; they just race. They are trying to reach some goal far away on the horizon, and in the heat of the going they get so breathless and panting that they lose sight of the beautiful, tranquil country they are passing through; and then the first thing they know, they are old and worn out, and it doesn't make any difference whether they've reached the goal or not.
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Jean Webster
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Josh isn’t in love with me and I’m not in love with him.” β€œSell it to someone who’s buying, Sunshine. Have you seen the way he looks at you?” I’ve seen the way he looks at me but I don’t know what it means. β€œLike you’re a seventeenth-century, hand-carved table in mint condition.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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Good Morning, Sunshine!" Josh F**king Bennett. By now, I'm pretty sure that if I were to find his birth certificate that is exactly what it would say.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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Always ask yourself: "What will happen if I say nothing?
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Kamand Kojouri
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I’m going to walk over to you,” I say, taking one step at a time in her direction like I’m talking down a jumper. β€œI’m going to put my arms around you and I’m going to hold you,” I pause before taking the last step, β€œand you’re going to let me.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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I'm tired of being responsible for other people's misery. I can't even put up with my own.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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He's kissing me. And when he does, part of me is lost. But it's the part that's twisted and mangled and wrong, and for just that moment, with his hands in my hair and his lips on my mouth, I can pretend that it never existed.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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I don't really care what people say about me. I'm fine with lies and rumors. It's the truth I don't want being told.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? ... It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.
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Martin Luther King Jr.
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Maybe one day you'll come back. Maybe you never will and that'll suck, but you can't keep doing this. The blame and the self-loathing and the bullshit. I can't watch that. It makes me hate you for hating yourself. I don't want to lose you. But I'd rather lose you if it means you'll be happy. I think if you come back with me today, you'll never be okay. And I'll never be okay if you aren't. I need to know that there's a way for people like us to end up okay. I need to know that there even is such a thing as okay, maybe even good, and it's out there and we just haven't found it yet. There's got to be a happier ending than this, here. There's got to be a better story. Because we deserve one. You deserve one. Even if it doesn't end with you coming back to me.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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Just because I don't talk about it, doesn't mean I forget.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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Given enough time, you could convince yourself that loneliness was something better, that it was solitude, the ideal condition for reflection, even a kind of freedom. Once you were thus convinced, you were foolish to open the door and let anyone in, not all the way in. You risked the hard-won equilibrium, that tranquility that you called peace
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Dean Koontz (The Good Guy)
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Irrespective of whether we are believers or agnostics, whether we believe in God or karma, moral ethics is a code which everyone is able to pursue.
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Dalai Lama XIV (The Path To Tranquility: Daily Meditations By The Dalai Lama)
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I don't know how to say it - after all this time, I'm not even sure that I can - but I have to break her last rule, because if she knows nothing else, I need her to know this one thing. 'I love you, Sunshine,' I tell her, before I lose my nerve. 'And I don't give a shit whether you want me to or not.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Avarice over-rates the difference between poverty and riches: ambition, that between a private and a public station: vain-glory, that between obscurity and extensive reputation. The person under the influence of any of those extravagant passions, is not only miserable in his actual situation, but is often disposed to disturb the peace of society, in order to arrive at that which he so foolishly admires. The slightest observation, however, might satisfy him, that, in all the ordinary situations of human life, a well-disposed mind may be equally calm, equally cheerful, and equally contented. Some of those situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others: but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardour which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice; or to corrupt the future tranquillity of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse from the horror of our own injustice.
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Adam Smith (The Theory of Moral Sentiments)
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As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,β€”as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen [Muslims],β€”and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan [Mohammedan] nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries. [Adams submitted and signed the Treaty of Tripoli, 1797]
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John Adams (Thoughts on government applicable to the present state of the American colonies.: Philadelphia, Printed by John Dunlap, M,DCC,LXXXVI.)
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I don't know if I'm okay. It shouldn't be possible to be this close to another person. To let them crawl inside you.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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His hands are miracles. I can watch them for hours, transforming wood into something it never dreamed of being.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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Right from the first, I could see a calmness in you - that sort of inner tranquility that they write about in books, but that almost no one seems to possess. I was wondering to myself: How does she do that? And I figured it could only come from having no regrets - from having made choices with .... such poise and purpose.
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Amor Towles (Rules of Civility)
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A life lived in a simulation is still a life.
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Emily St. John Mandel (Sea of Tranquility)
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There's a reverence in the way he kisses me that frightens me, because it's the most wonderful thing I've ever felt.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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I haven’t started counting yet. I wonder if it’s just me or if it’s like that for everybody; that every time someone dies you start counting how much time has passed since they’ve been gone. First you count it in minutes, then in hours. You count in days, then weeks, then months. Then one day you realize that you aren’t counting anymore, and you don’t even know when you stopped. That’s the moment they’re gone.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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And as much as I'm telling her to stay here, I still want her to choose to come with me. To say fuck sanity and healing and closure. To say that I am the only thing she needs to be well and whole and alive. But we both know that's not true.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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Always remember, child" her first teacher had impressed on her, "that to think bad thoughts is really the easiest thing in the world. If you leave your mind to itself it will spiral you down into ever-increasing unhappiness. To think good thoughts, however, requires effort. This is one of the things that need disipline –training- is about. So train your mind to dwell on sweet perfumes, the touch of this silk, tender raindrops against the shoji, the curve of the flower arrangement, the tranquillity of dawn. Then, at length, you won't have to make such a great effort and you will be of value to yourself,…
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James Clavell (Shōgun (Asian Saga, #1))
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My point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.
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Emily St. John Mandel (Sea of Tranquility)
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He's the kind of good-looking that transforms once self-respecting females into useless puddles of dumbass.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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Wonderful. Last night's dinner, the charred remains of my dignity, and apparently, now, my undergarments, too. What else did I leave on Josh Bennett's bathroom floor?
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, "Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?" neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility. . . .
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Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
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He took the fucking piano, Sunshine. He didn't take everything. Look at your left hand. It's probably clenched in a fist right now, isn't it?" I don't need to look. It is. He knows it. "Now open it up and let it go." And I do.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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Is there anything, apart from a really good chocolate cream pie and receiving a large unexpected cheque in the post, to beat finding yourself at large in a foreign city on a fair spring evening, loafing along unfamiliar streets in the long shadows of a lazy sunset, pausing to gaze in shop windows or at some church or lovely square or tranquil stretch of quayside, hesitating at street corners to decide whether that cheerful and homy restaurant you will remember fondly for years is likely to lie down this street or that one? I just love it. I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city.
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Bill Bryson (Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe)
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I like finding things no one else is looking for. Things that got lost or forgotten, shoved in a corner. Stuff I never knew existed. I don’t even need to buy it. I just like to find it and know that it’s there. That’s the part I like.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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When [what you are deeply passionate about, what you can be best in the world at and what drives your economic engine] come together, not only does your work move toward greatness, but so does your life. For, in the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work. Perhaps, then, you might gain that rare tranquility that comes from knowing that you’ve had a hand in creating something of intrinsic excellence that makes a contribution. Indeed, you might even gain that deepest of all satisfactions: knowing that your short time here on this earth has been well spent, and that it mattered.
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Jim Collins (Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't)
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You know I meant it. I am human. And male. And not remotely blind. Do you want me to say it again? You are distractingly, even if-that-is-not-a-real-word pretty. You are so pretty that I bullied Clay Whitaker into drawing me a picture of you so I could look at you when you aren't around. You are so pretty that one of these days I'm going to lose a finger in my garage because I can't concentrate with you so close to me. You are so pretty that I wish you weren't so I wouldn't want to hit every guy at school who looks at you, especially my best friend.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
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Pandemics don’t approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. The arrive in retrospect, essentially. It’s disorienting. The pandemic is far away and then it’s all around you with seemingly no intermediate step.
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Emily St. John Mandel (Sea of Tranquility)
β€œ
Woman’s role in creation should be parallel to her role in life. I don’t mean the good earth. I mean the bad earth too, the demon, the instincts, the storms of nature. Tragedies, conflicts, mysteries are personal. Man fabricated a detachment which became fatal. Woman must not fabricate. She must descend into the real womb and expose its secrets and its labyrinths. She must describe it as the city of Fez, with its Arabian Nights gentleness, tranquility and mystery. She must describe the voracious moods, the desires, the worlds contained in each cell of it. For the womb has dreams. It is not as simple as the good earth. I believe at times that man created art out of fear of exploring woman. I believe woman stuttered about herself out of fear of what she had to say. She covered herself with taboos and veils. Man invented a woman to suit his needs. He disposed of her by identifying her with nature and then paraded his contemptuous domination of nature. But woman is not nature only. She is the mermaid with her fish-tail dipped in the unconscious.
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AnaΓ―s Nin
β€œ
A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquility. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved, Caesar would have spared his country, America would have been discovered more gradually, and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed.
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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Frankenstein)
β€œ
Perhaps there are those who are able to go about their lives unfettered by such concerns. But for those like us, our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents. There is nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can, for until we do so, we will be permitted no calm.
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Kazuo Ishiguro (When We Were Orphans)
β€œ
I live in a world without magic or miracles. A place where there are no clairvoyants of shapeshifters, no angels or superhuman boys to save you. A place where people die and music disintegrates and things suck. I am pressed so hard against the earth by the weight of reality that some days I wonder how I am still able to lift my feet and walk.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
β€œ
If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work ... the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk lamp ... The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding. And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence alone is enough. The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable, very mysterious.
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Muriel Spark (A Far Cry from Kensington)
β€œ
It’s about the dream of second chances,” he says finally. He hasn’t raised his eyes from the paper on his desk and I feel him looking at me without looking when he uses his grandfather’s words. β€œThe narrator doesn’t respect the beauty of life and the world around her, so it crushes her into the ground and once she’s dead, she realizes everything she took for granted and didn’t see right in front of her while she was alive. She’s begging for another chance to live again so she can appreciate it this time.” β€œAnd does she get that chance?” she asks Josh while I desperately focus on the poster of literary terms on the wall and wait for absolution. When it comes, I barely hear it. β€œShe does.
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Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
β€œ
Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret. Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between. It’s quite wonderful, really. You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, β€œfar removed from the seats of strife,” as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge. There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods. It’s where you were yesterday, where you will be tomorrow. The woods is one boundless singularity. Every bend in the path presents a prospect indistinguishable from every other, every glimpse into the trees the same tangled mass. For all you know, your route could describe a very large, pointless circle. In a way, it would hardly matter. At times, you become almost certain that you slabbed this hillside three days ago, crossed this stream yesterday, clambered over this fallen tree at least twice today already. But most of the time you don’t think. No point. Instead, you exist in a kind of mobile Zen mode, your brain like a balloon tethered with string, accompanying but not actually part of the body below. Walking for hours and miles becomes as automatic, as unremarkable, as breathing. At the end of the day you don’t think, β€œHey, I did sixteen miles today,” any more than you think, β€œHey, I took eight-thousand breaths today.” It’s just what you do.
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Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
β€œ
What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish? There are some nations in Europe whose inhabitants think of themselves in a sense as colonists, indifferent to the fate of the place they live in. The greatest changes occur in their country without their cooperation. They are not even aware of precisely what has taken place. They suspect it; they have heard of the event by chance. More than that, they are unconcerned with the fortunes of their village, the safety of their streets, the fate of their church and its vestry. They think that such things have nothing to do with them, that they belong to a powerful stranger called β€œthe government.” They enjoy these goods as tenants, without a sense of ownership, and never give a thought to how they might be improved. They are so divorced from their own interests that even when their own security and that of their children is finally compromised, they do not seek to avert the danger themselves but cross their arms and wait for the nation as a whole to come to their aid. Yet as utterly as they sacrifice their own free will, they are no fonder of obedience than anyone else. They submit, it is true, to the whims of a clerk, but no sooner is force removed than they are glad to defy the law as a defeated enemy. Thus one finds them ever wavering between servitude and license. When a nation has reached this point, it must either change its laws and mores or perish, for the well of public virtue has run dry: in such a place one no longer finds citizens but only subjects.
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Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America)
β€œ
Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, sea-shores, and mountains; and thou too art wont to desire such things very much. But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself. For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man retire than into his own soul, particularly when he has within him such thoughts that by looking into them he is immediately in perfect tranquility; and I affirm that tranquility is nothing else than the good ordering of the mind. Constantly then give to thyself this retreat, and renew thyself; and let thy principles be brief and fundamental, which, as soon as thou shalt recur to them, will be sufficient to cleanse the soul completely, and to send thee back free from all discontent with the things to which thou returnest. For with what art thou discontented? With the badness of men? Recall to thy mind this conclusion, that rational animals exist for one another, and that to endure is a part of justice, and that men do wrong involuntarily; and consider how many already, after mutual enmity, suspicion, hatred, and fighting, have been stretched dead, reduced to ashes; and be quiet at last.- But perhaps thou art dissatisfied with that which is assigned to thee out of the universe.- Recall to thy recollection this alternative; either there is providence or atoms, fortuitous concurrence of things; or remember the arguments by which it has been proved that the world is a kind of political community, and be quiet at last.- But perhaps corporeal things will still fasten upon thee.- Consider then further that the mind mingles not with the breath, whether moving gently or violently, when it has once drawn itself apart and discovered its own power, and think also of all that thou hast heard and assented to about pain and pleasure, and be quiet at last.- But perhaps the desire of the thing called fame will torment thee.- See how soon everything is forgotten, and look at the chaos of infinite time on each side of the present, and the emptiness of applause, and the changeableness and want of judgement in those who pretend to give praise, and the narrowness of the space within which it is circumscribed, and be quiet at last. For the whole earth is a point, and how small a nook in it is this thy dwelling, and how few are there in it, and what kind of people are they who will praise thee.
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Marcus Aurelius (The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius)