Numerous English quotes to motivate, inspire and share

A broken friendship that is mended through forgiveness can be even stronger than it once was.
Stephen Richards

The first time I was ever called ugly, I was thirteen. It was a rich friend of my brother Carlton's over to shoot guns in the field.'Why you crying, girl?' Constantine asked me in the kitchen.I told her what the boy had called me, tears streaming down my face.'Well? Is you?'I blinked, paused my crying. 'Is I what?''Now you look a here, Egenia'-because constantien was the only one who'd occasionally follow Mama's rule. 'Ugly live up on the inside. Ugly be a hurtful, mean person. Is you one a them peoples?''I don't know. I don't think so,' I sobbed.Constantine sat down next to me, at the kitchen table. I heard the cracking of her swollen joints. She pressed her thumb hard in the palm of my hand, somthing we both knew meant Listen. Listen to me.'Ever morning, until you dead in the ground, you gone have to make this decision.' Constantine was so close, I could see the blackness of her gums. 'You gone have to ask yourself, Am I gone believe what them fools say about me today?'She kept her thumb pressed hard in my hand. I nodded that I understood. I was just smart enough to realize she meant white people. And even though I still felt miserable and knew that I was, most likely, ugly, it was the first time she ever talked to me like I was something besides my mother's white child. All my life I'd been told what to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl. But with Constantine's thumb pressed in my hand, I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.
Kathryn Stockett

choices

But even in the much-publicized rebellion of the young against the materialism of the affluent society, the consumer mentality is too often still intact: the standards of behavior are still those of kind and quantity, the security sought is still the security of numbers and the chief motive is still the consumer's anxiety that he is missing out on what is in. In this state of total consumerism - which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves - all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand.
Wendell Berry

consumerism earth nature society

But the great artists like Michelangelo and Blake and Tolstoi--like Christ whom Blake called an artist because he had one of the most creative imaginations that ever was on earth--do not want security, egoistic or materialistic. Why, it never occurs to them. Be not anxious for the morrow and which of you being anxious can add one cubit to his stature?So they dare to be idle, i.e. not to be pressed and duty-driven all the time. They dare to love people even when they are very bad and they dare not to try and dominate others to show them what they must do for their own good.
Brenda Ueland

anxiety art creativity freedom love peace spiritual-life

Think of being curled up and floating in a darkness. Even if you could think, even if you had an imagination, would you ever imagine its opposite, this miraculous world the Asian Taoists call the Ten Thousand Things? And if the darkness just got darker? And then you were dead? What would you care? How would you eve know the difference?' Son
Denis Johnson

dark

What makes anyone think that government officials are even trying to protect us? A government is not analogous to a hired security guard. Governments do not come into existence as social service organizations or as private firms seeking to please consumers in a competitive market. Instead, they are born in conquest and nourished by plunder. They are, in short, well-armed gangs intent on organized crime. Yes, rulers have sometimes come to recognize the prudence of protecting the herd they are milking and even of improving its ‘infrastructure’ until the day they decide to slaughter the young bulls, but the idea that government officials seek to promote my interests or yours is little more than propaganda—unless, of course, you happen to belong to the class of privileged tax eaters who give significant support to the government and therefore receive in return a share of the loot.
Robert Higgs

aggression anarcho-capitalism anarchy ancap austrian-school-of-economics coercion communism fascism freedom government libertarian liberty mafia nap non-aggression-principle socialism statism theft voluntaryism

Pudge/Colonel: I am sorry that I have not talked to you before. I am not staying for graduation. I leave for Japan tomorrow morning. For a long time, I was mad at you. The way you cut me out of everything hurt me and so I kept what I knew to myself. But then even after I wasn't mad anymore, I still didn't say anything and I don't even really know why. Pudge had that kiss, I guess. And I had this secret. You've mostly figured this out, but the truth is that I saw her that night, I'd stayed up late with Lara and some people and then I was falling asleep and I heard her crying outside my back window. It was like 3:15 that morning, maybe, amd I walked out there and saw her walking through the soccer field. I tried to talk to her, but she was in a hurry. She told me that her mother was dead eight years that day and that she always put flowers on her mother's grave on the anniversary but she forgot that year. She was out there looking for flowers, but it was too early-too wintry. That's how I knew about January 10. I still have no idea whether it was suicide. She was so sad and I didn't know what to say or do. I think she counted on me to be the one person who would always say and do the right things to help her, but I couldnt. I just thought she was looking for flowers. I didn't know she was going to go. She was drunk just trashed drunk and I really didn't think she would drive or anything. I thought she would just cry herself to sleep and then drive to visit her mom the next day or something. She walked away and then I heard a car start. I don't know what I was thinking. So I let her go too. And I am sorry. I know you loved her. It was hard not to. Takumi
John Green

accident anniversary-death girlfriend letter love-alaska-young mother mother-s-death pudge-colonel secret takumi truth-and-lies

You take what you want at the end of a gun, you murder and rape and steal and you call it bringing civilization. And what is civilization, to you, but us being properly grateful to be murdered and raped and stolen from? You said you knew justice when you heard it. Well, what is your justice but you allowed to treat us as you like and us condemned for even attempting to defend ourselves?
Ann Leckie

justice murder rape

Man cannot spend all his time doing evil and even in the company of pirates there must be some sweet moments on their sinister ship when you feel as if you were aboard a pleasure yacht.
Honoré de Balzac

evil pirates pleasure red-inn

A.E.Housman'No one, not even Cambridge was to blame(Blame if you like the human situation):Heart-injured in North London, he becameThe Latin Scholar of his generation.Deliberately he chose the dry-as-dust,Kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer;Food was his public love, his private lustSomething to do with violence and the poor.In savage foot-notes on unjust editionsHe timidly attacked the life he led,And put the money of his feelings onThe uncritical relations of the dead,Where only geographical divisionsParted the coarse hanged soldier from the don.
W.H. Auden

poetry

... Up telephone poles, Which rear, half out of leavageAs though they would shriekLike things smothered by their ownGreen, mindless, unkillable ghosts.In Georgia, the legend saysThat you must close your windowsAt night to keep it out of the houseThe glass is tinged with green, even so,As the tendrils crawl over the fields.The night the Kudzu hasYour pasture, you sleep like the dead.Silence has grown orientalAnd you cannot step upon the ground...ALL: Kudzu by James Dickey
James Dickey

kudzu poetry

And you never even reported it. You should have reported it. I could have took fingerprints. I'd love to lock up them skinheads.What I am reporting is the gun, my Sig Sauer. Dave said. Hetzel will have it. I want it back.What did it cost you? Rose said.That's not the point, Dave said. It's the only gun I ever owned. I am against guns. They give too many people power who have no right to it. Guns cancel out intelligence, reason, decency, civility and put terror in their place. I got along without a gun most of my working life. But a man can't buck the odds forever. About five years back I bought the Sig Sauer. I am used to it. And I don't know that I am morally prepared to buy another one.
Joseph Hansen

dave-brandstetter lgbt mystery

Yes, even in your mouse moods you only play with the idea of not being. She cleared her throat again. Biology, you see. It’s because of biology that we want to live and not to die. And it is because of biology that we come to a time when we want to die and not to live.'s Land
Aidan Chambers

depression euthanasia suicide

In 2008, when almost every other investor got crushed and even the Wall Street experts were down by almost half, I was up 17 percent - beating the S&P Average by over 50 percent.Reminiscences of a Stock Market Flea
James J. Houts

business investing

Sometimes when Rose was reading, she would catch a whiff of the musty smell of her book. She put her nose down in the fold and inhaled deeply so that wonderful smell, the smell of adventure in faraway lands, would fill her up. She rubbed her hand across the pages to feel the velvety surface of the paper. When she closed her eyes, her fingertips could even feel the words that were printed there, each letter raised just a little, almost like the special language that her blind aunt Mary could read.To Rose, a book was as real and alive as if it breathed and walked and spoke.
Roger Lea MacBride

books reading reading-books

We could see that our mothers blackmailed us with self-sacrifice, even if we did not know whether or not they might have been great opera stars or toasts of the town if they had not borne us. In our intractable moments we pointed out that we had not asked to be born, or even to go to an expensive school. We knew that they must have had motives of their own for what they did with us and to us. The notion of our parents' self-sacrifice filled us not with gratitude but with confusion and guilt. We wanted them to be happy yet they were sad and deprived and it was our fault.
Germaine Greer

children parenting-advice self-sacrifice

Whether we, admit it or not ,but forgiveness is one of the special attributes and qualities of our creator. we cannot forgive and forget anything, incident or matter ,even if we try hard , still some stale memories keep on hurting like pieces of broken glass or sand particles.
AISHA RAHEEL

forgiveness memories

It is important to tell good stories. You can tell stories even if they are not huge, epic and wonderful. You can still take the responsibility for being a scribe of your tribe.
Ajay Naidu

Tell Stories Still

The DJ still has the relationship with the people, I believe. I don't know to call the DJ 'the ambassadors' or what, but we still are connecting the dots, getting the good stuff and passing it on to the people. DJs still have relevance, even with the technology that elevates the DJ beyond being a selector.
Ali Shaheed Muhammad

Good Believe DJ

The one thing I've learned exploring the deep is that you just can't even begin to imagine some of the bizarre creatures that are down there.
Edith Widder

Deep Imagine Some

Nevertheless, whether in occurrences lasting days, hours or mere minutes at a time, I have experienced happiness often and have had brief encounters with it in my later years, even in old age.
Herman Hesse

Hours Brief Nevertheless

It's different hearing girls I don't even know scream my name.
Jeremy Sumpter

Name Hearing Even

We know that in our free market economy some will prosper more than others. What we don't accept is the idea that some folks won't even get a chance.
Julian Castro

Chance Prosper Some

I am not even aware of my success. Success is such an illusion.
Juliette Binoche

Success Is Aware Even

You can't please everyone, but I've always felt you cannot ultimately lose if you give everything you try 110%. You'll always learn something useful, even from a failure, that can be applied to the next challenge or project.
Mark Ryan

Project Next Applied

To solve a problem it is necessary to think. It is necessary to think even to decide what facts to collect.
Robert M. Hutchins

Think Problem Necessary

I was one of the key people responsible for building Facebook's News Feed. When we launched it in 2006, users hated it. There were 'I Hate Facebook' groups; random people organized protests. We even hired a security team.
Ruchi Sanghvi

News Facebook Groups

I am not one of those people who wakes up and thinks, 'Bring on the day!' I have to have about 7 pints of coffee before I am even remotely awake. But I love the golden hour in the evening, as hokey as that sounds. Just as the sun is about to set and you get those lovely shadows and everything looks gold and yellow.
Stacy London

Love Bring Before

You can get a good handle on a company's culture before you even get inside the building. For example, when companies say, 'We value our employees' but have reserved parking spots, a private cafeteria and over-the-top offices for the executives, that tells you more than any PR spin.
Steve Blank

Parking Before Private

As a young man, even if I was going to see a play or a film by myself, I didn't feel like I was alone. There was something that was unfolding up there that brought me into it. And I recognised that. For those two hours, it made me feel like I belonged to something really good.
Tom Hanks

Young Play Brought

There are times where I am trying to make the big play before I even catch the football.
Victor Cruz

Play Before Big

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.
Mark Twain

bookroom books libraries wisdom

But the people only talked about how ugly her face looked. No one even bothered to mention what a sweet, kindhearted girl she was. Now, don’t be amazed! That is just the nature of humans, to notice the one flaw among a person’s ten good qualities.
Janaki Sooriyarachchi

human-nature irony sarcasm

Perhaps this war will make it simpler for us to go back to some of the old ways we knew before we came over to this land and made the Big Money. Perhaps, even, we will remember how to make good bread again.It does not cost much. It is pleasant: one of those almost hypnotic businesses, like a dance from some ancient ceremony. It leaves you filled with peace and the house filled with one of the world's sweetest smells. But it takes a lot of time. If you can find that, the rest is easy. And if you cannot rightly find it, make it, for probably there is no chiropractic treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour of meditation in a music-throbbing chapel, that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread.
M.F.K. Fisher

bread food

If I have done anything, even a little, to help small children enjoy honest, simple pleasures, I have done a bit of good.
Beatrix Potter

children pleasures-of-life simplicity-in-life

Even as a child, even as my blood-past was drained from me, I understood that if I were strong enough to accept it, I was being offered a second history.
Anne Michaels

nazis war

The sky's gray and there's mizzle. It's so soft on my skin--it's nothing like rain. It's even softer than the lightest drizzle! Lift my face up, so it can kiss my skin. The Panopticon
Jenn Fagan

beauty landscape vulnerability weather

But there is merit even in the mentally retarded legislator. He asks the questions that everyone is afraid to ask for fear of seeming simple.
John Kenneth Galbraith

economics politics

His (Lenin's)humanitarianism was a very abstract passion. It embraced humanity in general but he seems to have had little love for, or even interest in, humanity in particular. He saw the people with whom he dealt, his comrades, not as individuals but as receptacles for his ideas. On that basis and no other, they were judged. He judged man not by their moral qualities but by their views, or rather the degree to which they accepted his.
Paul Johnson

leadership manipulation

Kindly permit me to tell you, sir, that I hate you. I hate you and your child, as I hate the life of which you are the representative: cheap, ridiculous, but yet triumphant life, the everlasting antipodes and deadly enemy of beauty. I cannot say I despise you - for I am honest. You are stronger than I. I have no armour for the struggle between us, I have only the Word, avenging weapon of the weak. Today I have availed myself of this weapon. This letter is nothing but an act of revenge - you see how honourable I am - and if any word of mine is sharp and bright and beautiful enough to strike home, to make you feel the presence of a power you do not know, to shake even a minute your robust equilibrium, I shall rejoice indeed. -
Thomas Mann

beauty life revenge the-word tristan writing

Remember that if I were born of the underworld, you were born of flowers. You are the blood the forest feeds upon and it is you who gave the woods their dark magic. Time doesn’t exist and in another world I never left you. I’ve transformed your wounds into a scepter for a queen. The nightcatcher may think that she’s had her victory - but your veins are buried in the map of the earth and she can never have you. She thinks she can own the universe because she’s enslaved gods and eaten stars, but she couldn’t even kill me, living here in her tunnels, because you protected me with your love.
Autumn Christian

consequence horror horror-authors horror-writer

Naturally there was the notion of private property as a pragmatic concept, for individuals or groups have a proclivity to tend to their own possessions with greater care and reverence than they would to common property...in such cases, the notion of ownership would underscore a relationship existing between distinct people, rather than a legal association between a person and that which is said to be possessed, which is to say that ownership was, in its strictest definition, the societal distinction between the owner and the non-owner with respect to the property in question. Beyond this, the concept of ownership varied further from society-to-society according to their respective derivations of natural law, legal positivism and legal realism. Some societies—the indigenous Itako tribes...for example—railed against their governments’ initiatives for private ownership in favor of maintaining equal access to available resources (in the case of the Itako, this was due primarily to the fact that theirs were kin-based tribes whose membership sought to live communally). All the same, even this notion of common possession seemed to me rather arrogant, for the necessitated existence of a public domain was rooted in the shared human dominance over the objects or organisms in question. And so, in my dizzying contemplation, I began to yearn for a greater law that stretched to vast limits beyond that which governed humanity alone. The voice in my mind spoke earnestly of the need for a unifying jurisprudence which could preside over all of Nature’s manifestations in a manner either probabilistically fair or mathematically arbitrary. And perhaps, still, this would not be enough.
Ashim Shanker

Her gaze flickered to the balcony doors and back, her brows knitted in confusion. My balcony doesn’t connect to yours.I jumped. He grinned at the flash of concern he saw in her eyes. At dinner, your grandmother informed me that you’d be moving to the room beside mine. She also mentioned how close my balcony was to yours; so close that even an old lady like herself could leap between the two without the least effort.Venetia’s cheeks heated and she pulled her nightgown closer. Grandmama is anything but subtle.Almost as subtle as your mother.Oh, no! Not Mama, too.Gregor paused beside a small table to pick up a silver tray holding a cut crystal decanter and matching glasses and set it on the table before Venetia. Your mother was concerned I might be afraid of heights. She told me that if she were thinking of jumping between the balconies and couldn’t bring herself to make the leap, it might be possible to pick the lock on the connecting door with, say, a cravat pin.Venetia blushed. I’m surprised they aren’t in here now, throwing rose petals before you as you walk.I would never countenance petal tossing. Too showy.
Karen Hawkins

drama family hilarious humor love lovers

Isn’t it complicated to be human, though? she said. Animals seem to give up their lives so naturally…And after all, I grew up, I married John, I had Debby. So knowing, being able to understand and forecast and even predict an approximate date, shouldn’t make any difference. I guess consciousness makes individuals of us and as individuals we lose the old acceptance… The one thing, Marian said in a voice that went suddenly small and tight, the thing I can hardly bear sometimes is that I won’t ever see her grow up. She’ll have to do it without whatever I could have given her. Time, too, time and everything that one could do in it and the chance of wasting or losing or never even realizing it. It’s so important to us because we see it so close. We’re individuals, we’re full of ourselves and so we’re bad historians. We get crazy and anxious because all of sudden there’s so little time left to be loving and generous as we wish we’d always been and always intended to be…do you suppose I feel the shortness of time because I want to experience everything and feel everything that the race has ever felt? Because there’s so much to feel and I’m greedy?
Wallace Stegner

beauty death grief humanity loss love suffering

So, I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know them. But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can try and feel okay about them.
Stephen Chbosky

good-and-evil inspiration inspirational power

-For me, a democracy is when the population proposes laws, for example, a petition, which are adopted or vetoed by the population by referendum. Or it's not a democracy, nor even a parody. Europe's true vocation is to make democracy impossible and install a government of experts. -Europe bothers you?-I am against it for the reasons I cited. Democracy is the future. Europe is a regression. Elected representatives means no more democracy. -We're pretty free in France.-You think?-I dunno.-I want there to be an insurrection. -In what?-Insurrection. Brussels is a good place for a civil war. Michel Houllebecq, The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq (2014)
Michel Houllebecq

democracy europe freedom

Distance from the troubled past is the product of economic and social change more than reflection or the mere passage of time, which may have little effect. To the extent that the basic circumstances of life remain unchanged, time becomes irrelevant; in fact, it may even deepen the hold of former attitudes, turning them into ancient truths. But as the foundations of social reality alter and the circumstances of daily life take on a new character, society can more easily accept hard truths and discard old controversies. It gains an ability to leave its past in the past and move into a different future.[...] The desire of a few individuals to overcome the past, to rise above enmity and engage a different future after a destructive war, is laudable but rarely is achievable for an entire society. Substantial numbers of people will defend old positions or insist on the validity of their grievances and the next generation may revive propaganda or condemn efforts to forget. Eventually, however, the world moves on and changed realities allow acceptance of bitter truths about a troubled past. As progressively greater numbers acknowledge the past, historical wounds close, even those of bloody civil war [192—93].
Paul D. Escott

civil-war conflict memory myth reconciliation spain truth usa war

I sometimes wonder how powerful are those Fortune 500 CEOs who can can’t even change the way that list looks (leave aside how the world looks). And, I wonder what message do we send to our young girls, in classrooms across the world, who work as hard as our young boys but see only 20 CEOs out of those 500 who look like them.
Sharad Vivek Sagar

ceos feminism fortune-500 fortune-500-ceos girls inspirational motivational sharad-vivek-sagar women youth