The artist, the teacher and the creator (Quotations)

"[The artist] speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation - and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear... which binds together all humanity - the dead to the living and the living to the unborn."
Joseph Conrad

"...he made a note reaffirming his belief that art always served beauty, and beauty is delight in form, and form is the key to organizing life, since no living thing can exist without it, so that every work of art, including tragedy, expresses the joy of existence. And his own ideas and notes also brought him joy, a tragic joy, a joy full of tears that exhausted him and made his head ache."
Boris Pasternak (from Doctor Zhivago)

"No matter how piercing and appalling his insights, the desolation creeping over his outer world, the lurid lights and shadows of his inner world, the writer must live with hope, work in faith."
J.B. Priestley

"I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work--a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand where I am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."
William Faulkner: Nobel Prize Speech
Stockholm, Sweden
December 10, 1950

"It is customary for adults to forget how hard and dull school is. The learning by memory all the basic things one must know is the most incredible and unending effort. Learning to read is probably the most difficult and revolutionary thing that happens to the human brain and if you don't believe that watch an illiterate adult try to do it. School is not so easy and it is not for the most part very fun, but then, if you are very lucky, you may find a teacher. Three real teachers in a lifetime is the very best of luck. I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
My three had these things in common. They all loved what they were doing. They did not tell - the catalyzed a burning desire to know. Under their influence, the horizons sprung wide and fear went away and the unknown became knowable. But most important of all, the truth, that dangerous stuff, became beautiful and precious."
John Steinbeck ("On Teaching")

A Womens's Life

How can a man know what a woman's life is? A woman's life is quite different from a man's. God has ordered it so. A man is the same from the time of circumcision to the time of his withering. He is the same before he has sought out a woman for the first time, and afterwards. But the day a woman enjoys her first love cuts her in two. She becomes another woman on that day. The man is the same after his first love as he was before. The woman is from the first day of her first love another. That continues all through life. The man spends a night by a woman and goes away. His life and body are always the same. The woman conceives. As a mother she is another person than the woman without a child. She carries the fruit of her womb for nine long months in her body. Something grows. Something grows into her life that never again departs from it. She is a mother. She is and remains a mother even though her child dies, though all her children die. For at one time she carried the child under her heart. And it does not go out of her heart ever again. Not even when it is dead. All this the man does not know; he knows nothing.
an anonymous Abyssinian woman

Unending Love (Rabindranath Tagore)

"You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
At the hear of time, love of one for another."


I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times...
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, it's age old pain,
It's ancient tale of being apart or together.
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star, piercing the darkness of time.
You become an image of what is remembered forever.
You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
At the hear of time, love of one for another.
We have played along side millions of lovers,
Shared in the same shy sweetness of meeting, the distressful tears of farewell,
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

The Human Story (Quotes)

"We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is."
John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us in nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations."
Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)

"Man's destructive hand spares nothing that lives; he kills to feed himself, he kills to clothe himself, he kills to adorn himself, he kills to attack, he kills to defend himself, he kills to instruct himself, he kills to amuse himself, he kills for the sake of killing. Proud and terrible king, he wants everything and nothing resists him... from the lamb he tears its guts and makes his harp resound... from the wolf his most deadly tooth to polish his pretty works of art; from the elephant his tusks to make a toy for his child - his table is covered with corpses... And who [in this general carnage] will exterminate him who exterminates all others? Himself. It is man who is charged with the slaughter of man... So it is accomplished... the great law of the violent destruction of living creatures. The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death."
Josef de Maistre

"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."
Voltaire

"The higher animals engage in individual fights, but never in organized masses. Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War."
Mark Twain

"Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself."
James Anthony Froude

"The essence of education is not to stuff you full of facts, but to help you discover your uniqueness, to teach you how to develop it, and then show you how to give it away."
Leo Buscaglia

"For as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he."
Proverbs 2 3:7

"A man's character is his destiny."
Heraclitus

"The mind is the man, and knowledge mind; a man is but what he knoweth."
Francis Bacon

"What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects. What is life but what a man is thinking of all day? This is his fate and his employer. Knowing is the measure of the man. By how much we know, so we are."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Great men are they who see that spiritual thought is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world."
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Progress of Culture)

"Two things fill the mind with ever increasing wonder and awe. The more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness."
Immanuel Kant

"How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because someday in your life, you will have been all of these."
George Washington Carver

"Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god."
Aristotle

"A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it."
G. K. Chesterton (Everlasting Man)

"Nor do I regret that I have lived, since I have so lived that I think I was not born in vain, and I quit life as if it were an inn, not a home."
Cicero (Tusculanes Disputationes)

"Now it is time that we were going, I to die and you to live; but which one of us has the happiest prospect is unknown to anyone but God." (Plutrach, On Banishment )

"I am the poet of the Body and the poet of the Soul.
The pleasures of heaven are with me and pains of hell are with me.
The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a new tongue.
I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,
And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,
And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men. "
Walt Whitman (Song of Myself)

"I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers."
Viktor Frankl (The Doctor and the Soul)

"Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me."
George Orwell (1984)

"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they are."
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (The Social Contract)

"They think to order all things wisely; but having rejected Christ they will end by drenching the world with blood."
Fyodor Dostoyevski (The Brothers Karamazov)

"Our difficulties are not a transitory state of affairs... No, they are the normal state of affairs and we should reckon on being angustia temporum ['in straightness of times,' Dan. 9:21] all our lives, so far as the good we want to do is concerned."
Charles de Foucauld

"There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life."
Michel Eyquen Montaigne

The peace of wild things (Wendell Berry)

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

When you are old (W. B. Yeats)

WHEN you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid face amid a crowd of stars.

On Man and Animals

"If a man aspires towards a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from injury to animals."
- Leo Tolstoy


"Our task must be to free ourselves... widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty."
- Albert Einstein


"The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated."
- Mohandas Gandhi


"The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans anymore than black people were made for whites or women for men."
- Alice Walker


"It is the fate of every truth to be an object of ridicule when it is first acclaimed. It was once considered foolish to suppose that black men were really human beings and ought to be treated as such. What was once foolish has now become a recognized truth. Today it is considered as exaggeration to proclaim constant respect for every form of life as being the serious demand of a rational ethic. But the time is coming when people will be amazed that the human race existed so long before it recognized that thoughtless injury to life is incompatible with real ethics. Ethics is in its unqualified form extended responsibility to everything that has life."
- Dr. Albert Schweitzer (Nobel 1952)


"It is man's sympathy with all creatures that first makes him truly a man."
- Dr. Albert Schweitzer (Nobel 1952)


"Until he extends his circle of compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace."
- Dr. Albert Schweitzer (Nobel 1952)


Isn't man an amazing animal? He kills wildlife - birds, kangaroos, deer, all kinds of cats, coyotes, beavers, groundhogs, mice, foxes and dingoes - by the million in order to protect his domestic animals and their feed. Then he kills domestic animals by the billion and eats them. This in turn kills man by the million, because eating all those animals leads to degenerative - and fatal- health conditions like heart disease, kidney disease, and cancer. So then man tortures and kills millions more animals to look for cures for these diseases. Elsewhere, millions of other human beings are being killed by hunger and malnutrition because food they could eat is being used to fatten domestic animals. Meanwhile, some people are dying of sad laughter at the absurdity of man, who kills so easily and so violently, and once a year, sends out cards praying for "Peace on Earth."
- David Coats from Old MacDonald's Factory Farm


"Love animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble their joy, don't harass them, don't deprive them of their happiness, don't work against God's intent. Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you-alas, it is true of almost every one of us!"
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky


"Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages."
- Thomas Edison


"True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipients has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it."
- Milan Kundera


"The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them, that's the essence of inhumanity."
- Isaac Bashevis Singer


"If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men."
- Francis of Assisi


"Man cannot pretend to be higher in ethics, spirituality, advancement, or civilization than other creatures, and at the same time live by lower standards than the vulture or hyena."
- H. Jay Dinsah


"I care not much for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it."
- Abraham Lincoln



On Eating Animals


"If he be really and seriously seeking to live a good life, the first thing from which he will abstain will always be the use of animal food, because ...its use is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act which is contrary to the moral feeling -- killing."
- Leo Tolstoy


"A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral."
- Leo Tolstoy


"You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson


"I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men."
- Leonard Da Vinci


"Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds theirs. We live by the death of others: We are burial places."
- Leonardo Da Vinci


"Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."
- Albert Einstein


"It is my view that the vegetarian manner of living by its purely physical effect on the human temperament would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind."
- Albert Einstein


"I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals."
- Henry David Thoreau


"Now I can look at you in peace; I don't eat you any more."
- Franz Kafka


"People often say that humans have always eaten animals, as if this is a justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people, since this has also been done since the earliest of times."
- Isaac Bashevis Singer


"Do we, as humans, having an ability to reason and to communicate abstract ideas verbally and in writing, and to form ethical and moral judgments using the accumulated knowledge of the ages, have the right to take the lives of other sentient organisms, particularly when we are not forced to do so by hunger or dietary need, but rather do so for the somewhat frivolous reason that we like the taste of meat? In essence, should we know better?"
- Peter Cheeke


"To a man whose mind is free there is something even more intolerable in the sufferings of animals than in the suffering of man. For with the latter it is at least admitted that suffering is evil and that the man who causes it is a criminal. But thousands (Now Millions) of animals are uselessly butchered every day without a shadow of remorse. If any man were to refer to it, he would be thought ridiculous. And that is the unpardonable crime."
- Romain Rolland (1915 Nobel Prize)


"Vegetarians have the best diet. They have the lowest rates of coronary disease of any group in the country...Some people scoff at vegetarians, but they have a fraction of our heart attack rate and they have only 40 percent of our cancer rate. They outlive other men by about six years now."
- Dr.William Castelli, M.D.


For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love."
- Pythagoras (6th Century BC)


"While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?"
- George Bernard Shaw


"Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends."
- George Bernard Shaw


"We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites, passions and organs with our own, and fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of pain and fear."
- Robert Louis Stevenson


"Honourable men may honourably disagree about some details of of human treatment of the non-human, but vegetarianism is now as necessary pledge of moral devotion as was the refusal of emperor-worship in the early church...Those who still eat flesh when they could do otherwise have no claim to be serious moralists."
- Stephen Clark


"As we talked of freedom and justice one day for all, we sat down to steaks. I am eating misery, I thought, as I took the first bite. And spit it out."
- Alice Walker


"The animals, you say, were "sent" for man's free use and nutriment. Pray, then, inform me, and be candid, why came they ions before man did, to spend long centuries on earth awaiting their devourer's birth? Those ill-timed chattels, sent from heaven, were, sure, the maddest gift ever given "sent" for man's use (can man believe it?) when there was no man to receive it!"
- Henry Salt (1851-1939)


"But to deliver animals to be slaughtered and cooked, and thus be filled with murder, not for the sake of nutriment and satisfying the wants of nature, but making pleasure and gluttony the end of such conduct is transcendently iniquitous and dire!"
- Porphyry (233-304)


"All living beings love their life, desire pleasure, and are averse to pain; they dislike any injury to themselves; everybody is desirous of life, and to every being, his life is very dear" This is the quintessence of wisdom: Not to injure any living being."
- Lord Mahavira (599-527 BC)


"The eating of meat extinguishes the great seed of compassion."
- Buddha (563-483 BC)


"In 1968 I became a vegetarian after realizing that animals feel afraid, cold, hungry and unhappy like we do."
- Cesar Chavez



On Animal Research


"I abhor vivisection. It should be at least curbed. Better, it should be abolished. I know of no achievement through vivisection, no scientific discovery, that could have not been obtained without such barbarism and cruelty. The whole thing is evil."
- Dr. Charles Mayo (Founder of the Mayo Clinic)


"I had bought two male chimps from a primate colony in Holland. They lived next to each other in separate cages for several months before I used one as a [heart] donor. When we put him to sleep in his cage in preparation for the operation, he chattered and cried incessantly. We attached no significance to this, but it must have made a great impression on his companion, for when we removed the body to the operating room, the other chimp wept bitterly and was inconsolable for days. The incident made a deep impression on me. I vowed never again to experiment with such sensitive creatures."
- Dr. Christian Barnard


"I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't. The pain which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further."
- Mark Twain


"Remember those macaques who would rather go hungry than profit from harming their fellows; might we have a more optimistic view of the human future if we were sure our ethics were up to their standards?"
- Carl Sagan


"During my medical education at the University of Basel I found vivisection, horrible, barbarous and above all unnecessary."
- Dr. Carl Jung


"What I think about vivisection is that if people admit that they have the right to take or endanger the life of living beings for the benefit of many, there will be no limit to their cruelty."
- Leo Tolstoy

Love Quotes

Teach only love for that is what you are.
~ A Course In Miracles ~

There is a law that man should love his neighbor as himself. In a few hundred years it should be as natural to mankind as breathing or the upright gait; but if he does not learn it he must perish.
~ Alfred Adler ~

The Impossible Generalized Man today is the critic who believes in loving those unworthy of love as well as those worthy --yet believes this only insofar as no personal risk is entailed. Meaning he loves no one, worthy or no. This is what makes him impossible.
~ Nelson Algren ~

In real love you want the other person's good. In romantic love, you want the other person.
~ Margaret Anderson ~

Love is a force more formidable than any other. It is invisible -- it cannot be seen or measured, yet it is powerful enough to transform you in a moment, and offer you more joy than any material possession could.
~ Barbara De Angelis ~

Love is made by two people, in different kinds of solitude. It can be in a crowd, but in an oblivious crowd.
~ Louis Aragon ~

Oh, love is real enough; you will find it someday, but it has one archenemy -- and that is life.
~ Jean Anouilh Ardele ~

Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but anti-political, perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political human forces.
~ Hannah Arendt ~

Wicked men obey from fear; good men, from love.
~ Aristotle ~

Love is the victim's response to the rapist.
~ Ti-Grace Atkinson ~

What I needed most was to love and to be loved, eager to be caught. Happily I wrapped those painful bonds around me; and sure enough, I would be lashed with the red-hot pokers or jealousy, by suspicions and fear, by burst of anger and quarrels.
~ St. Augustine ~

Not all of us have to possess earthshaking talent. Just common sense and love will do.
~ Myrtle Auvil ~

For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.
~ Francis Bacon ~

The sweetest joy, the wildest woe is love.
~ Pearl Bailey ~

Do you want to know a good way to fall in love? Just associate with all your pleasant experiences with someone, and disassociate from all the unpleasant ones.
~ Richard Bandler ~

Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.
~ Julian Barnes ~

If it is your time, love will track you down like a cruise missile.
~ Lynda Barry ~

It is unfortunately very true that, without leisure and money, love can be no more than an orgy of the common man. Instead of being a sudden impulse full of ardor and reverie, it becomes a distastefully utilitarian affair.
~ Charles Baudelaire ~

When we understand that man is the only animal who must create meaning, who must open a wedge into neutral nature, we already understand the essence of love. Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own being.
~ Ernest Becker ~

Love is the river of life in the world.
~ Henry Ward Beecher ~

Honor the ocean of love.
~ George De Benneville ~

And you are to love those who are your aliens for you yourselves were aliens in Egypt. [Deuteronomy 10:19]
~ Bible ~

Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. [I Corinthians]
~ Bible ~

Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. [Roman 13:9]
~ Bible ~

Love seeketh not itself to please, nor for itself hath any care, but for another gives its ease, and builds a Heaven in Hell's despair.
~ William Blake ~

Love matches are made by people who are content, for a month of honey, to condemn themselves to a life of vinegar.
~ Marguerite Gardiner Blessington ~

A proof that experience is of no use, is that the end of one love does not prevent us from beginning another.
~ Paul Bourget ~

If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable.
~ Andre Breton ~

When first we met we did not guess that Love would prove so hard a master.
~ Robert Bridges ~

All the little emptiness of love!
~ Rupert Brooke ~

Don't hold to anger, hurt or pain. They steal your energy and keep you from love.
~ Leo Buscaglia ~

Man's love is of man's life a part; it is a woman's whole existence. In her first passion, a woman loves her lover, in all the others all she loves is love.
~ Lord Byron ~

In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.
~ Italo Calvino ~

Love is a chain of love as nature is a chain of life.
~ Truman Capote ~

Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith.
~ Thomas Carlyle ~

You can give without loving, but you cannot love without giving.
~ Amy Carmichael ~

Everybody forgets the basic thing; people are not going to love you unless you love them.
~ Pat Carroll ~

It is difficult to lay aside a confirmed passion.
~ Catullus ~

Better to have loved a short man than never to have loved a tall.
~ David Chambless ~

The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered fire.
~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin ~

Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.
~ Gilbert K. Chesterton ~

Do not keep the alabaster boxes of your love and tenderness sealed up until your friends are dead. Fill their lives with sweetness, speak cheering words while their ears can hear, and while their hearts can be thrilled and made happier by them. George
~ Williams Childs ~

Every day I live I am more convinced that the waste of life lies in the love we have not given, the powers we have not used, the selfish prudence that will risk nothing and which, shirking pain, misses happiness as well.
~ Mary Cholmondeley ~

You can't put a price tag on love, but you can on all its accessories.
~ Melanie Clark ~

Friendship often ends in love; but love in friendship, never.
~ Charles Caleb Colton ~

Love is a tyrant sparing none.
~ Pierre Corneille ~

Love - THE FEELING - is a fruit of love, the verb.
~ Stephen R. Covey ~

Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell.
~ Joan Crawford ~

Love touched her heart, and lo! It beats high, and burns with such brave hearts.
~ Richard Crawshaw ~

Love is the extra effort we make in our dealings with those whom we do not like and once you understand that, you understand all. This idea that love overtakes you is nonsense. This is but a polite manifestation of sex. To love another you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.
~ Quentin Crisp ~

I love you, not for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you.
~ Roy Croft ~

The way to a woman's heart is through your wallet.
~ Frank Dane ~

Love makes the wildest spirit tame, and the tamest spirit wild.
~ Alexis Delp ~

Do everything with so much love in your heart that you would never want to do it any other way.
~ Yogi Desai ~

I adore him… I have never been so happy. I have real love.
~ Princess of Wales Diana ~

For in the end, we will conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught.
~ Baba Dioum ~

The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can never end.
~ Benjamin Disraeli ~

Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
~ John Donne ~

Love is a ocean of emotions entirely surrounded by expenses.
~ Lord Drewar ~

On the last analysis, then, love is life. Love never faileth and life never faileth so long as there is love.
~ Henry Drummond ~

Love works a different way in different minds, the fool it enlightens and the wise it blinds.
~ John Dryden ~

We only love truly once. It is the first time and succeeding passions are less uncontrolled.
~ Du Coeur ~

The pain of love is the pain of being alive. It is a perpetual wound.
~ Maureen Duffy ~

To love one child and to love all children, whether living or dead --somewhere these two loves come together. To love a no-good but humble punk and to love an honest man who believes himself to be an honest man --somewhere these, too, come together.
~ Marguerite Duras ~

All mankind loves a lover.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~

We always come back to our first love.
~ Etienne ~

People love others not for who they are, but for how they make them feel.
~ Irwin Federman ~

You talk too much, you laugh too loud, that's the price of love.
~ Brian Ferry ~

I don't want to live -- I want to love first, and live incidentally.
~ Zelda Fitzgerald ~

You couldn't get a clue during the clue mating season in a field full of horny clues if you smeared your body with clue musk and did the clue mating dance.
~ Edward Flaherty ~

It makes no difference how deeply seated may be the trouble, how hopeless the outlook, how muddled the tangle, how great the mistake. A sufficient realization of love will dissolve it all.
~ Emmet Fox ~

He that falls in love with himself will have no rivals.
~ Benjamin Franklin ~

We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love.
~ Sigmund Freud ~

Love, while you are able to love.
~ A. Frieligrath ~

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
~ Erich Fromm ~

Whenever you are confronted with an opponent. Conquer him with love.
~ Mahatma Gandhi ~
What then in love can woman do? If we grow fond they shun us. And when we fly them, they pursue: But leave us when they've won us.
~ John Gay ~

The chemist who can extract from his heart's elements, compassion, respect, longing, patience, regret, surprise, and forgiveness and compound them into one can create that atom which is called love.
~ Kahlil Gibran ~

Love is the irresistible desire to be desired irresistibly.
~ Louis Ginsberg ~

If I love you, what business is it of yours?
~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe ~

Love is something eternal; the aspect may change, but not the essence.
~ Vincent Van Gogh ~

Love is not blind -- it sees more, not less. But because it sees more, it is willing to see less.
~ Rabbi J. Gordon ~

Let the first impulse pass, wait for the second.
~ Baltasar Gracian ~

Love, love, love -- all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness.
~ Germaine Greer ~

Love is a gift from God, and as we obey His laws and genuinely learn to serve others, we develop God's love in our lives. Love of God is the means of unlocking divine powers which help us to live worthily and to overcome the world.
~ David B. Haight ~

Love is the final end of the world's history, the Amen of the universe.
~ Novalis Hardenberg ~

Love is the great miracle cure. Loving ourselves works miracles in our lives.
~ Louise L. Hay ~

The truth is that there is only one terminal dignity -- love. And the story of a love is not important -- what is important is that one is capable of love. It is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity.
~ Helen Hayes ~
Love and a cough cannot be hid.
~ George Hebert ~

Only the really plain people know about love --the very fascinating ones try so hard to create an impression that they very soon exhaust their talents.
~ Katharine Hepburn ~

Those that embrace the entire universe with love, for the most part love nothing, but their narrow selves.
~ Johann Gottfried Von Herder ~

Love is like a fruit. It may look good, but you shouldn't bite in it until it's ripe.
~ Nick Hertl ~

Love is a conflict between reflexes and reflections.
~ Mangnu Hirschfield ~

Love is like pi -- natural, irrational, and very important.
~ Lisa Hoffman ~

Love is the master key which opens the gates of happiness.
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes ~

Love is seeing without eyes, hearing without ears; hatred is nothing.
~ Doug Horton ~

Lovers are fools, but Nature makes them so.
~ Elbert Hubbard ~

To love another person is to see the face of God. [Les Miserables]
~ Victor Hugo ~

Dive deep, O mind, dive deep in the ocean of God's beauty! If you descend to the uttermost depths, there you will find the gem of love.
~ Bengali Hymn ~

I would rather live and love where death is king than have eternal life where love is not.
~ Robert Green Ingersoll ~

Love, you are eternal like springtime.
~ Juan Ramon Jiminez ~

Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.
~ Erica Jong ~
Love is as much of an object as an obsession, everybody wants it, everybody seeks it, but few ever achieve it, those who do will cherish it, be lost in it, and among all, never... never forget it.
~ Curtis Judalet ~

Love is swift, sincere, pious, joyful, generous, strong, patient, faithful, prudent, long-suffering, courageous, and never seeking its own; for wheresoever a person seeketh his own, there he falleth from love.
~ Thomas ã Kempis ~

Love possesses not nor will it be possessed, for love is sufficient unto love.
~ Kahlil Kibran ~

True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen.
~ Francois De La Rochefoucauld ~

We love those who admire us, but not those whom we admire.
~ Francois De La Rochefoucauld ~

I shall always be a priest of love.
~ D. H. Lawrence ~

To love is to place our happiness in the happiness of another.
~ Gottfried Wilhelm Von Leibniz ~

Love one another and you will be happy. It's as simple and as difficult as that.
~ Michael Leunig ~

Go to the truth beyond the mind. Love is the bridge.
~ Stephen Levine ~

An act of love that fails is just as much a part of the divine life as an act of love that succeeds, for love is measured by fullness, not by reception.
~ Harold Lokes ~

A man has only one escape from his old self: to see a different self in the mirror of some woman's eyes.
~ Clare Boothe Luce ~

Love is inseparable from knowledge.
~ St. Macarius of Egypt ~

Great passions, my dear, don't exist: they're liars fantasies. What do exist are little loves that may last for a short or a longer while.
~ Anna Magnani ~

There is an important difference between love and friendship. While the former delights in extremes and opposites, the latter demands equality.
~ Francoise D'Aubegne Maintenon ~

Nowadays men cannot love seven night but they must have all their desires: that love may not endure by reason; for where they be soon accorded and hasty, heat soon it cooleth. Right so fareth love nowadays, soon hot soon cold: this is no stability. But the old love was not so.
~ Sir Thomas Malory ~

Treasure the love you receive above all. It will survive long after your gold and good health have vanished.
~ Og Mandino ~

If only one could tell true love from false love as one can tell mushrooms from toadstools.
~ Katherine Mansfield ~

A love affair with knowledge will never end in heartbreak.
~ Michael Garrett Marino ~
Love means the body, the soul, the life, the entire being. We feel love as we feel the warmth of our blood, we breathe love as we breathe air, we hold it in ourselves as we hold our thoughts. Nothing more exists for us.
~ Guy De Maupassant ~

To be in love is merely to be in a perpetual state of anesthesia.
~ H. L. Mencken ~
Love cures people -- both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.
~ Karl A. Menninger ~
Parrots, tortoises and redwoods live a longer life than men do; Men a longer life than dogs do; Dogs a longer life than love does.
~ Edna St. Vincent Millay ~
Love talked about is easily turned aside, but love demonstrated is irresistible.
~ Stan Mooneyham ~
A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.
~ George Moore ~
Love never reasons, but profusely gives; it gives like a thoughtless prodigal its all, and then trembles least it has done to little.
~ Hannah More ~
I try to give to the poor people for love what the rich could get for money. No, I wouldn't touch a leper for a thousand pounds; yet I willingly cure him for the love of God.
~ Mother Teresa ~
No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
~ Iris Murdoch ~
Love is a friendship caught on fire.
~ Northern Exposure ~
I love a hand that meets my own with a grasp that causes some sensation.
~ Samuel Osgood ~
Love is much like a wild rose, beautiful and calm, but willing to draw blood in its defense.
~ Mark Overby ~

If any person wish to be idle, let them fall in love.
~ Ovid ~

No woman marries for money; they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.
~ Cesare Pavese ~

Speak low if you speak love.
~ Don Pedro ~

Love laughs at locksmiths.
~ Proverb ~

He that plants trees loves others besides himself.
~ English Proverb ~

In love, there is always one who kisses and one who offers the cheek.
~ French Proverb ~

He who is not impatient is not in love.
~ Italian Proverb ~

Love is like the measles, all the worse when it comes late.
~ Mary Roberts Rhinehart ~

Love is what is left in a relationship after all the selfishness is taken out.
~ Nick Richardson ~

A woman who could always love would never grow old; and the love of mother and wife would often give or preserve many charms if it were not too often combined with parental and conjugal anger. There remains in the face of women who are naturally serene and peaceful, and of those rendered so by religion, an after-spring, and later an after-summer, the reflex of their most beautiful bloom.
~ Jean Paul Richter ~

Our affections as well as our bodies are in perpetual flux.
~ Jean Jacques Rousseau ~

Sure I love Goldie. How could you not love Goldie? Everyone loves Goldie. I love her, and I hope our love will continue, but I don't want to give an I-love-Goldie-Hawn interview.
~ Kurt Russell ~

Every little girl knows about love. It is only her capacity to suffer because of it that increases.
~ Francoise Sagan ~

There is only one happiness in life -- to love and to be loved.
~ George Sand ~

It is the privilege of those who fear love to murder those who do not fear it!
~ May Sarton ~

Everything comes to us from others. To Be is to belong to someone.
~ Jean Paul Satre ~
Perhaps the old monks were right when they tried to root love out; perhaps the poets are right when they try to water it. It is a blood-red flower, with the color of sin; but there is always the scent of a god about it.
~ Olive Schreiner ~
True love comes quietly, without banners or flashing lights. If you hear bells, get your ears checked.
~ Erich Segal ~
If you wish to be loved; Love!
~ Seneca ~
I believe love produces a certain flowering of the whole personality which nothing else can achieve.
~ Ivan Sergeevich ~
Love and stoplights can be cruel.
~ Sesame Street ~
Love sought is good, but given unsought is better.
~ William Shakespeare ~
To say the truth, reason and love keep little company together now-a-days.
~ William Shakespeare ~
Loving can cost a lot but not loving always costs more, and those who fear to love often find that want of love is an emptiness that robs the joy from life.
~ Merle Shan ~
All fair in love and war.
~ Francis Edward Smedley ~
Love is not a matter of counting the years -- it's making the years count.
~ Wolfman Jack Smith ~
When desire, having rejected reason and overpowered judgment which leads to right, is set in the direction of the pleasure which beauty can inspire, and when again under the influence of its kindred desires it is moved with violent motion towards the beauty of corporeal forms, it acquires a surname from this very violent motion, and is called love.
~ Socrates ~
One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life; that word is love.
~ Sophocles ~
What will not woman, gentle woman dare; when strong affection stirs her spirit up?
~ Robert Southey ~

Love wholeheartedly, be surprised, give thanks and praise then you will discover the fullness of your life.
~ David Steindl-Rast ~

To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be.
~ Anna Strong ~

To love is to receive a glimpse of heaven.
~ Karen Sunde ~

A life without love in it is like a heap of ashes upon a deserted hearth, with the fire dead, the laughter stilled and the light extinguished.
~ Frank Tebbets ~

Love is the only gold.
~ Lord Alfred Tennyson ~

True love grows by sacrifice and the more thoroughly the soul rejects natural satisfaction the stronger and more detached its tenderness becomes.
~ St. Theresa of Lisieux ~

Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame.
~ Henry David Thoreau ~

To love one person with a private love is poor and miserable: to love all is glorious.
~ Thomas Traherne ~

Love is everything. It is the key to life, and its influences are those that move the world.
~ Ralph Waldo Trine ~

Listen! Encourage. Say something. Do something. Be yourself. Love
~ Rev. Dale Turner ~

I define love for our purpose as the passion of one being for another in the hope of being loved in return.
~ Source Unknown ~

If love is shelter, I'm going to walk in the rain.
~ Source Unknown ~

If you had it all to do over, would you fall in love with yourself again?
~ Source Unknown ~

Live for love. Without love, you don't live.
~ Source Unknown ~

Love may be blind, but it can sure find its way around in the dark!
~ Source Unknown ~

Once you have learned to love, You will have learned to live.
~ Source Unknown ~

True love means two seeds grow separately until they join in Matrimony forever.
~ Source Unknown ~

Without His love I can do nothing, with His love there is nothing I cannot do.
~ Source Unknown ~

An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.
~ John Updike ~

But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.
~ Vincent Van Gogh ~

Love's pure silver flame gives each innermost spirit invisible warmth.
~ A Haiku Verse ~

I've only been in love with a beer bottle and a mirror.
~ Sid Vicious ~

We were two and had but one heart between us.
~ François de Montcorbier Villon ~

Love is the same as like except you feel sexier.
~ Judith Viorst ~

A man in love is like a clipped coupon -- it's time to cash in.
~ Mae West ~

Yet each man kills the thing he loves from all let this be heard some does it with a bitter look some with a flattering word the coward does it with a kiss the brave man with the sword.
~ Oscar Wilde ~

Love is not only something you feel. It's something you do.
~ David Wilkerson ~

It is at the edge of a petal that love waits.
~ William Carlos Williams ~

Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion.
~ Sandy Wilson ~

The object of love is to serve, not to win.
~ Woodrow Wilson ~

A man falls in love through his eyes, a woman through her ears.
~ Woodrow Wyatt ~

People who are sensible about love are incapable of it.
~ Douglas Yates ~

A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.
~ William Butler Yeats ~

You can't buy love, but you can pay heavily for it.
~ Henny Youngman ~

When you interact with another, an illusion is part of this dynamic. This illusion allows each soul to perceive what it needs to understands in order to heal.
~ Gary Zukav ~

But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
~ Thorton Wilder ~

It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
~ Thomas Mann ~

He who has followed the path of love's initiation in the proper order will on arriving at the end suddenly perceive a marvelous beauty, the source of all our efforts.
~ Plato (from the Symposium, where the wise Diotima speaks to Socrates) ~

At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.
~ Plato ~

For those who love... time is eternity...
~ Henry Van Dyke ~

Women, I tell you this in all honesty: Never trust any young man who has never written a love poem - no matter how bad it might have been. Trust me in this!
~ William Butler Yeats ~

"It is with true love as it is with ghosts; everyone talks about it, but few have seen it."
~ La Rochefoucauld ~

"The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love."
~ W. Somerset Maugham (The Summing Up) ~

"To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead."
~ Bertrand Russell ~

I loved you; and I probably still do,
And for awhile the feeling may remain--
But let my love no longer trouble you:
I do not wish to cause you any pain.
I loved you; and the hopelessness I knew
The jealousy, the shyness -- though in vain --
Made up a love so tender and so true,
As may God grant you to be loved again.
~ Aleksander Pushkin ~

Friendship Quotes

"To know someone here or there with whom you can feel there is understanding
in spite of distances or thoughts expressed ~ That can make life a garden."
-Goethe

"Silence is the true friend that never betrays."
-Confucious

"Love is blind, but friendship closes its eyes."
-unknown

"But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life; and
thanks to a benevolent arrangement of things, the greater part of life is
sunshine."
-Thomas Jefferson

"Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow ~ Don't walk behind me, I may not
lead ~ Just walk beside me and be my friend."
-unknown

"An ounce of blood is worth more than a pound of friendship."
-Spanish Proverb

"Friends are born, not made."
-Henry Adams

"A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"My father always used to say that when you die, if you've got five real friends,
then you've had a great life."
-Lee Iacocca

"Hold a true friend with both your hands."
-Nigerian Proverb

"Sometimes our light goes out but is blown into flame by another human being.
Each of us owes deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this light."
-Albert Schweitzer

"There comes that mysterious meeting in life when someone acknowledges who
we are and what we can be, igniting the circuits of our highest potential."
-Rusty Berkus

"Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?"
-Abraham Lincoln

"You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other
people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you."
-Dale Carnegie

"Remember friends as you pass by,
As you are now so once was I.
As low as I you once must be,
Prepare yourself and follow me."
-Gravestone from the 1800s

"I do not want a friend
Who smiles when I smile
Who weeps when I weep
For my shadow in the pool
Can do better than that."
-Confucious

"A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to
you when you have forgotten the words."
-unknown

"Some people come into our lives and quickly go. Some stay for awhile and leave
footprints on our hearts. And we are never, ever the same."
-Unknown

"A friend is a gift you give yourself."
-Robert Louis Stevenson

"There are no such things as strangers, only friends we haven't met yet." --
Anonymous

"Odd how much it hurts when a friend moves away - and leaves behind only
silence." -- Pam Brown

"You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other
people than you can by trying to get other people interested in you." -- Dale
Carnegie

"You can hardly make a friend in a year, but you can easily offend one in an
hour." -- Chinese Proverb

"It is the friends that you can call at 4 A.M. that matter." -- Marlene Dietrich
"In times of prosperity friends will be plenty; in time of adversity not one in
twenty." -- English Proverb

"My best friend is the one that brings out the best in me." -- Henry Ford

"If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope
I should have the guts to betray my country." -- E. M. Forster

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive,
and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born." -- Anais Nin

"God save me from my friends - I can protect myself from my enemies." --
Proverb

"Life withougt a friend is death without a witness." -- Spanish Proverb

"We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in
our travels is an honest friend" -- Robert Lewis Stevenson

"The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend." -- Henry David Thoreau

"Friends are God's way of apologizing to us for our families." -- Unknown

"No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to
grow."-- Alice Walker

"Nine-tenths of the people were created so you would want to be with the other
tenth." -- Horace Walpole

"A friend is one who knows all about you and likes you anyway." -- Christi Mary
Warner

"A friend can tell you things you don't want to tell yourself." -- Frances Ward
Weller

Friends are born, not made.
* Henry Adams

Forsake not an old friend, for a new one does not compare with him.
* Apocrypha -- Ecclesiasticus 9:10

My best friend is the man who in wishing me well wishes it for my sake.
* Aristotle

Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies.
* Aristotle

This communicating of a man's self to his friend works two contrary effects; for it
redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in half.
* Francis Bacon

Friendship is a strong and habitual inclination in two persons to promote the good
and happiness of one another.
* Eustace Budgell

Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they
really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.
* Albert Camus

How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a
passion which spares nothing.
* Albert Camus

Friendship often ends in love; but love in friendship--never.
* Charles Caleb Colton

What a wretched lot of old shriveled creatures we shall be by-and-by. Never
mind--the uglier we get in the eyes of others, the lovelier we shall be to each
other; that has always been my firm faith about friendship.
* George Eliot

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
* Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
* Ralph Waldo Emerson

The only way to have a friend is to be one.
* Ralph Waldo Emerson

Real friendship is shown in times of trouble;
prosperity is full of friends.
* Euripedes

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us
any more than love did.
* F. Scott Fitzgerald

No man can be happy without a friend, nor be sure of his friend till he is
unhappy.
* Thomas Fuller

Your friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you.
* Elbert Hubbard

My father always used to say that when you die, if you've got five real friends,
you've had a great life.
* Lee Iacocca

A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care
of all to acquire.
* François Duc de La Rochefoucauld

However rare true love may be, it is less so than true friendship.
* François Duc de La Rochefoucauld

The most deadly fruit is borne by the hatred which one grafts on an extinguished
friendship.
* Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

It's no good trying to keep up old friendships. It's painful for both sides. The fact
is, one grows out of people, and the only thing is to face it.
* W. Somerset Maugham

We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits.
* W. Somerset Maugham

If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no
otherwise be expressed, than by making answer: because it was he, because it
was I.
* Michel de Montaigne

Love demands infinitely less than friendship.
* George Jean Nathan

Women can form a friendship with a man very well; but to preserve it--to that end
a slight physical antipathy must probably help.
* Friedrich Nietzsche

Hold a true friend with both your hands.
* Nigerian Proverb

To me, fair friend, you never can be old
For as you were when first your eye I eyed,
Such seems your beauty still.
* William Shakespeare

Friendship is constant in all other things
Save in the office and affairs of love.
* William Shakespeare

The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong. Nearly
anybody will side with you when you are in the right.
* Mark Twain

Friendship is the marriage of the soul, and this marriage is liable to divorce.
* Voltaire

Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.
* Oscar Wilde

A poem of Jack London

"I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze
than it should be stifled by dry rot.
I would rather be a superb meteor,
every atom of me in magnificent glow,
than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The proper function of man is to live, not to exist.
I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time"