"It is so easy for your people to forget that everything has a spirit, that all are equal. That magic and mystery are a part of your lives, not something to store away in a child's bedroom, or to use as an escape from your lives." - Charles de Lint, The Onion Girl "There is real magic in enthusiasm. It spells the difference between mediocrity and accomplishment." - Norman Vincent Peale "It's kind of fun to do the impossible." - Walt Disney "Do, or do not. There is no 'try.'" - Yoda, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back "Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent." - Eleanor Roosevelt "He was the sort of person who stood on mountaintops during thunderstorms in wet copper armour shouting 'All the Gods are bastards.'" - Terry Pratchett "Only I can change my life. No one can do it for me." - Carol Burnett "It is never too late to be what you might have been." - George Eliot "Never, never, never, never give up." - Winston Churchill "Under the skin, intense fires burn." - Charles de Lint, Forests of the Heart Ambition & Vital Living "Be not afraid of greatness: some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them." - William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night "I do not exist to impress the world. I exist to live my life in a way that will make me happy." - Richard Bach, Illusions "Don't look to other people's stories; live your own." - Charles de Lint, The Onion Girl "I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor." - Henry David Thoreau "A vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you're attempting can't be done." - Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites "What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it; boldness has genius, power and magic in it." - Johann von Goethe "Whoso would be a man must be nonconformist." - Ralph Waldo Emerson "Sheep are stupid, and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led." - Terry Pratchett, Small Gods "A ship in the harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for." - unknown "They sicken of the calm, who know the storm." - Dorothy Parker "If there's anything half so much fun as being alive, I'd like to know what it is!" - Mary Engelbreit "When I think about it, life has always been kind of absurd." - Rev. Webster "Kit" Howell "To live is so startling, it leaves little time for anything else!" - Emily Dickinson "It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time." - Samuel Johnson "The life which is unexamined is not worth living." - Plato "This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it ... Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense." - Ralph Waldo Emerson "Most people are rather stupid and waste their lives." - Terry Pratchett, Soul Music "I finally figured out the only reason to be alive is to enjoy it." - Rita Mae Brown "As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death." - George Bernard Shaw "Follow your bliss. ... If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on the kind of track that has been there the whole while, waiting for you, and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living." - Joseph Campbell "Don't turn away from possible futures before you're certain you don't have anything to learn from them. You're free to change your mind and choose a different future, or a different past." - Richard Bach, Illusions "It is never too late to be what you might have been." - George Eliot "Avoid quiet and passive persons, unless you are in need of sleep." - National Lampoon "If you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you." - Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites "If wishes were nickels, I'd buy a soda." - Tom Knapp "Live long and prosper." - Spock, Star Trek "In order to act, you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking." - Georges Clemenceau "There is an art or, rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Pick a nice day and try it. The first part is easy. All it requires is the simple ability to throw yourself forward with all your weight, and the willingness not to mind that it's going to hurt. That is, it's going to hurt if you fail to miss the ground. Most people fail to miss the ground, and if they are really trying properly, the likelihood is that they will fail to miss it fairly hard. Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, which presents the difficulties. One problem is that you have to miss the ground accidentally. It's no good deliberately intending to miss the ground because you won't. You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else when you're halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about falling, or about the ground, or about how much it's going to hurt if you fail to miss it. It is notoriously difficult to prize your attention away from these three things during the split second you have at your disposal. Hence most people's failure, and their eventual disillusionment with this exhilarating sport. If, however, you are lucky enough to have your attention momentarily distracted at the crucial moment by, say, a gorgeous pair of legs or a bomb going off in your vicinity, or by suddenly spotting an extremely rare species of beetle crawling along a nearby twig, then in your astonishment you will miss the ground completely and remain bobbing just a few inches above it in what may seem to be a slightly foolish manner. This is a moment for a superb and delicate concentration. ... Do not listen to what anybody says to you at this point because they are unlikely to say anything helpful. They are most likely to say something along the lines of 'Good God, you can't possibly be flying!' It is vitally important not to believe them or they will suddenly be right." - Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything "While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, the other is busy making mistakes and becoming superior." - Henry C. Link "You cannot discover new oceans unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore." - unknown "Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish." - Michelangelo "Better to reign in hell than serve in heav'n." - John Milton, Paradise Lost "When you break rules, break 'em good and hard." - Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters "To be great is to be misunderstood." - Ralph Waldo Emerson "Witchery is merely a word for what we are all capable of." - Charles de Lint, Into the Green "Things'll work out the way they're supposed to in the long run. We might not like all the details, and the trip's not always fun, but we'll make do. That's part of the blessing and curse of being alive." - Charles de Lint, The Onion Girl "In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular." - Kathleen Noris "Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours." - Richard Bach, Illusions "If I don't drive around the park, I'm pretty sure to make my mark. If I'm in bed each night by ten, I may get back my looks again. If I abstain from fun and such, I'll probably amount to much; But I shall stay the way I am, Because I do not give a damn." - Dorothy Parker "Abstainer: a weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure." - Ambrose Bierce "Happiness depends on ourselves." - Aristotle "Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there." - Will Rogers "Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure." - Helen Keller "Look, I really don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive, you got to flap your arms and legs, you got to jump around a lot, you got to make a lot of noise, because life is the very opposite of death. And therefore, as I see it, if you're quiet, you're not living. You've got to be noisy, or at least your thoughts should be noisy and colorful and lively." - Mel Brooks "You could live a perfectly normal life if you were simply willing to live a perfectly normal life." - Q, Star Trek: Voyager "Living on earth has always been a dangerous way to spend your time." - Anne Lamott "Suddenly, he realized what the answer to the problem was, and it was this, that something very weird was happening; and if something very weird was happening, he thought, he wanted it to be happening to him." - Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish "Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known." - Garrison Keillor "Time is what we want most but what we use the worst." - William Penn "If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it round. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't embrace trouble; that's as bad as treating it as any enemy. But I do say meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it." - Oliver Wendell Holmes "But then they danced down the street like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'" - Jack Kerouac, On the Road "May you live all the days of your life." - Jonathan Swift "When all's said and done, all roads lead to the same end. So it's not so much which road you take, as how you take it." - Charles de Lint, Greenmantle "Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous." - Ralph Waldo Emerson "I went into the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." - Henry David Thoreau "I am like a seed. Bursting with life, anxious to grow, yet not knowing what shape I will take or what fruit I may bear." - Brian Boru (Morgan Llywelyn, Lion of Ireland) "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." - Mark Twain "It is well known that the longer one postpones a pleasure, the greater the pleasure is when one finally gets to it. Therefore, if one postpones it forever, the pleasure should be infinite!" - Saul Gorn "I'd like to welcome the pommy bastard to God's own earth and I'd like to remind him that we don't like stuck-up sticky-beaks here." - Graham Chapman/Monty Python, Episode 22 "When you discard arrogance, complexity, and a few other things that get in the way, sooner or later you will discover that simple, childlike, and mysterious secret known to those of the Uncarved Block: Life is Fun." - The Tao of Pooh "You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however." - Richard Bach, Illusions "Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." - Napolean Bonaparte "Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans." - John Lennon "If it's just a game that we play before we leave this earth for the heavens above then surely the one who wins is the one who learns how to have a life full of living and a heart full of love." - Javan "Most of us, like the assembly line worker, have jobs that are too small for our spirit. Jobs are not big enough for people." - Studs Terkel, Working "You have no idea how pleasant it is not to have any future. It's like having a totally efficient contraceptive." - Anthony Burgess, Honey for the Bears God never intended for me to work hard. I can see that now. My true calling in life is to live unencumbered and follow the fleeing impulses of my heart and take a nap around 2 p.m. - Garrison Keillor "Life is the process of getting used to the unexpected." - Jane Bryant Quinn, author and columnist "If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them." - Henry David Thoreau "Better a good run than a long standing." - Irish saying "The lust for comfort murders the passions of the soul." - Kahlil Gibran "Comfort and convenience dull the sharpest mind." - Emma Bull, Finder "It is not length of life, but depth of life." - Ralph Waldo Emerson "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -- I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference." - Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken" "Seek the wisdom of the ages, but look at the world through the eyes of a child." - Ron Wild "The trouble with magic is that there's too much it just can't fix. When things go wrong, glimpsing junkyard faerie and crows that can turn into girls and back again doesn't help much. The useful magic's never at hand. The three wishes and the genies in bottles, seven-league boots, invisible cloaks and all. They stay in the stories, while out here in the wide world we have to muddle through as best we can on our own." - Charles de Lint, The Onion Girl "The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." - Marcel Proust "The more you know, the harder it is to take decisive action. Once you become informed, you start seeing complexities and shades of gray. You realize that nothing is as clear and simple as it first appears. Ultimately, knowledge is paralyzing. Being a man of action, I can't afford to take that risk." - Calvin (Bill Watterson) "Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess." - Oscar Wilde "It's good to have mysteries. It reminds us that there's more to the world than just making do and having a bit of fun." - Charles de Lint, Dreams Underfoot "Only the mediocre are always at their best." - Jean Giraudoux "Men for the sake of making a living forget to live." - Margaret Fuller "One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important." - Bertrand Russell "The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper." - Eden Phillpotts "Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life." - Rachel Carson "We're fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance." - Japanese proverb "If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun." - Katherine Hepburn "I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze that 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." - Jack London "Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of." - Benjamin Franklin "Yield to temptation. It may not pass your way again." - Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love "Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature. ... Life is either a daring adventure or it is nothing at all." - Helen Keller "If you get up one more time than you fall you will make it through." - Chinese proverb "One day at a time -- this is enough. Do not look back and grieve over the past, for it is gone; and do not be troubled about the future, for it has not yet come. Live in the present, and make it so beautiful that it will be worth remembering." - Ida Scott Taylor "Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little." - Agnes de Mille "Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't." - Mary Schmich, Chicago Tribune "I found a perfect ring of mushrooms one afternoon, beside the hidden well. Of course I stepped into it; what else can you do?" - Patricia A. McKillip, Winter Rose "Work as if you don't need the money, love as if you were never hurt before, and dance as if no one is watching." - unknown "Dance in the light of the pale cold moon to the sound of a wild violin." - Erika Fawcett "You will never find time for anything. If you want time you must make it." - Charles Buxton "Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in, forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day, you shall begin it well and serenely...." - Ralph Waldo Emerson "What is important in life is life, and not the result of life." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe "Mostly we're too busy living to stop and notice we're alive." - Neil Gaiman "Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it you can." - Danny Kaye "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein "Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence." - Albert Einstein "I love those who yearn for the impossible." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust "I'm not Chinese. I thrive in interesting times." - Charles de Lint, Someplace to Be Flying "Some things cannot be spoken or discovered until we have been stuck, incapacitated, or blown off course for awhile. Plain sailing is pleasant, but you are not going to explore many unknown realms that way." - David Whyte "To get anywhere, or even to live a long time, a man has to guess, and guess right, over and over again, without enough data for a logical answer." - Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love "We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years, and justify our existence ... on pain of liquidation." - George Bernard Shaw Courage & Heroism "Bravery is the capacity to perform properly even when scared half to death." - Omar Bradley "History is written by those who have hanged heroes." - Robert the Bruce in Braveheart "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anais Nin "Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead! In peace there's nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and humility: But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger; Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage; Then lend the eye a terrible aspect." - William Shakespeare, Henry V "I take it the odds are against us and the situation is grim. ... Sounds like fun." - Captain Kirk, Star Trek: Generations "We have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night." - Charles de Lint "I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave." - E.M. Forster "I'm very brave generally ... only today I happen to have a headache." - Lewis Carroll "Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy." - F. Scott Fitzgerald "An utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward." - Herman Melville "Gallant? As in, fair? Hell, I fight to win. I just try to look gallant." - Adam Lipkin "Lay on, Macduff; and damn'd be him that first cries, 'Hold, enough!'" - William Shakespeare, Macbeth Risk "There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity." - Douglas MacArthur "In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice." - Richard Bach, Illusions "You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take." - Wayne Gretzky "When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I've never tried before." - Mae West "Nothing is ever the same." - Charles de Lint, Dreams Underfoot "Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down." - Ray Bradbury "You're much safer diving in shark-infested waters than you are driving your car to work." - Eugenie Clark, ichthyologist "Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experience." - Ralph Waldo Emerson "If we do not succeed, then we run the risk of failure." - Dan Quayle "Now this is going to be your first day out on a strange new planet, so I want you all wrapped up snug and warm, and no playing with any naughty bug-eyed monsters." - Eddy the Shipboard Computer (Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) Dealing with Adversity "There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands. You seek problems because you need their gifts." - Richard Bach, Illusions "Having lost sight of our goal, we must redouble our efforts!" - Saul Gorn "You can have heartbreak for all sorts of reasons. But one can't help thinking that that's the crucible in which one's humanity is fired. ... I really like human beings who have suffered." - Emma Thompson "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down in a most delightful way." - Mary Poppins "Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm." - Winston Churchill "We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world." - Helen Keller "By trying we can easily endure adversity. Another man's, I mean." - Mark Twain "We need to face our problems. We can't pray them away." - Rev. Webster "Kit" Howell "But screw your courage to the sticking-place, and we'll not fail." - William Shakespeare, Macbeth "I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal." - Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe "If nothing else works, a total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face will see us through." - The Black Adder