Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up. James Baldwin on Love
Don't go through life, grow through life.
Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.
Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.
People can cry much easier than they can change.
When you are dead, you don't even know that you are dead. It's only pain for others. Same thing when you are stupid.
This is part of human nature, the desire to change consciousness.
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.
Be careful what you set your heart upon -- for it will surely be yours.
Character, not circumstances, makes the man.
Success is sweet and sweeter if long delayed and gotten through many struggles and defeats.
SIN: Self-Inflicted Nonsense
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has had to overcome while trying to succeed.
Looking at the world from other species' points of view is a cure for the disease of human self-importance.
The world cares very little about what a man or woman knows;
it is what a man or woman is able to do that counts.
Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.
We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as unsolvable problems.
The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.
You can't hold a man down without staying down with him.
There are two ways of exerting one's strength; one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.
Dreams get you into the future and add excitement to the present.
Self-pity is easily the most destructive of the non-pharmaceutical narcotics;
it is addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality.
Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't.
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
One of the best things to do sometimes is simply to be.
Anyone who has struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
The paradox of education is precisely this -- that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an immediate knowledge of its ugly side.
Many people lose their tempers merely from seeing you keep yours.
I will permit no one to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate them.
People are always looking for the single magic bullet that will totally change everything. There is no single magic bullet.
A constitutional democracy is in serious trouble if its citizenry does not have a certain degree of education and civic virtue.
Christmas, children, is not a date. It is a state of mind.
We discovered that education is not something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being.
The less routine the more life.
I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.
Don't go through life, grow through life.
The one thing that a fish can never find is water; and the one thing that man can never find is God.
It's not the situation. It's your reaction to the situation.
Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it is only suffering that makes us persons.
To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.
Habit is a cable; we weave a thread each day, and at last we cannot break it.
We don't change what we are, we change what we think what we are.
Too many young folk have addiction to superficial things and not enough conviction for substantial things like justice, truth and love.
Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
One of the reasons mature people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.
One must be a wise reader to quote wisely and well.
There is no power on earth that can neutralize the influence of a high, simple and useful life.
Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.
The true test of character is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don't know what to do.
Don't go through life, grow through life.
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.