Here are 10 recent good ones:
The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile. — Bertrand Russell
Currently reading Russell’s Conquest of Happiness. Highly recommended.
And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. — Ecclesiastes
If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it. — Scott Adams
Scott Adams’s new book How To Fail At Almost Everything is also great.
Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
–Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
…a great poem.
If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all. — John Cage
…if only this were easier to internalize.
It’s been a tough day. No sense making it worse with a salad. — quote from some movie
Yup, salads suck.
It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met. — Yoshida Kenko from Essays in Idleness
Recently finished the above book, will have notes soon.
I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me — Ralph Waldo Emerson
I wish I remembered the books…at least better than the meals.
One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear. — Nietzsche
And a bonus…
True love is the soul’s recognition of its counterpoint in another. I read that on a bumper sticker. — Owen Wilson in Wedding Crashers
Here are a shit-ton of quotes.