The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.
— NEIL DEGRASSE TYSO
"Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in."
- LEONARD COHEN
"Adventure is not outside man; it is within."
- GEORGE ELIOT
"A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us."
-FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
"It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are."
- E.E. CUMMINGS
"We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under. The first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public. The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. They are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. They are happier than the people in the first category, who, when they lose their public, have the feeling that the lights have gone out in the room of their lives. This happens to nearly all of them sooner or later. People in the second category, on the other hand, can always come up with the eyes they need. Then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. Their situation is as dangerous as the situation of people in the first category. One day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the room will go dark. And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers."
-MILAN KUNDERA,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
"Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could."
-RALPH WALDO EMERSON
"We are shaped and fashioned by what we love."
-GOETHE
"Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise."
- SIGMUND FREUD
"Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in one's own sunshine."
-RALPH WALDO EMERSON
"In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must got by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must got through the way in which you are not."
-T.S. ELIOT
"A young Apollo, golden-haired,
Stands dreaming on the verge of strife, 
Magnificently unprepared 
For the long littleness of life."
-FRANCES CORNFORD
"I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship."
- LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
"Hope is the dream of a soul awake."
-FRENCH PROVERB
"Wine is bottled poetry."
-ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
"I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really."
-TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
"A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends who rejoice with us in our sunshine desert us; when trouble thickens around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts."
-WASHINGTON IRVING
"Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable."
- MAYA ANGELOU
"If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it."
-ANAIS NIN
"For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot."
- ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
"Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn out soil. My children ... shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth."
- NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go."
- T.S. ELIOT
"somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands"

- e.e.cummings
"Don't worry about getting to your point. I'm going to live forever."
-JACK DONAGHY,
30 Rock
"In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."
-BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
“I've got to get some seeds, right away. Nothing's planted. I don't have a thing in the ground.” 
- ARTHUR MILLER (Willy Loman), 
Death of a Salesman
"Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save."
-WILL ROGERS
"If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.
-GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
‎"A man travels the world over in search of what he needs, and returns home to find it."
- GEORGE MOORE
"love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun more last than star"
- E.E. CUMMINGS