Life Quotes

The Prophet [Book]

Book Overview: Kahlil Gibran’s masterpiece, The Prophet, is one of the most beloved classics of our time. The Prophet has been translated into over 100 different languages, making it one of the most translated books in history and the American editions alone have sold more than nine million copies. The Prophet is a collection of poetic essays that are philosophical, spiritual, and, above all, inspirational. Gibran’s musings are divided into twenty-eight chapters covering such sprawling topics as love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, work, joy and sorrow, housing, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, freedom, reason and passion, pain, self-knowledge, teaching, friendship, talking, time, good and evil, prayer, pleasure, beauty, religion, and death.

“If life is fair, and it will be, it will serve you immeasurable beauties, joys and pleasures—you will feel at times that you do not have the capacity to take them in. You will. Our hearts they are boundless. If life is fair, and it will be, it will bring you huge, merciless sorrows. Devastations of your boundless heart. I wish for you the grace to persevere and accept them across time, for that is the only way these kinds of things can be taken in. A wise and articulate student once told me that struggle is vital. For all of the mundane days in between joy and sorrow? Persevere.”
Dan Weiss | Read Matt’s Blog on this Quote ➜

Master change; master life.

“‘I just don’t understand life,’ sulked Nora. ‘You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.'”
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (Page 218)

Don’t run; rise.

“You need to realise something if you are ever to succeed at chess. The game is never over until it is over. It isn’t over if there is a single pawn still on the board. If one side is down to a pawn and a king, and the other side has every player, there is still a game. And even if you were a pawn—maybe we all are—then you should remember that a pawn is the most magical piece of all. It might look small and ordinary but it isn’t. Because a pawn is never just a pawn. A pawn is a queen-in-waiting. All you need to do is find a way to keep moving forward. One square after another. And you can get to the other side and unlock all kinds of power.”
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (Page 189)

Life got you feeling lost?

“I think it is easy to imagine there are easier paths. But maybe there are no easy paths. There are just paths. In one life, I might be married. In another, I might be working in a shop. I might have said yes to this cute guy who asked me out for a coffee. In another I might be researching glaciers in the Arctic Circle. In another, I might be an Olympic swimming champion. Who knows? Every second of every day we are entering a new universe. And we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad.”
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (Page 179)

“The moment you decide you want that life, really want it, then everything that exists in your head now, will eventually be a memory so vague and intangible it will hardly be there at all.”
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (Page 39)

Trash the idea of a set timeline for your life.

“To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three-parts dead.”
Bertrand Russell, via The Midnight Library (Page 36)

“The universe tended towards chaos and entropy. That was basic thermodynamics. Maybe it was basic existence too.”
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (Page 12)

The power of creation.

The Midnight Library [Book]

By: Matt Haig

Book Overview: Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better? In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig’s enchanting blockbuster novel, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.

I have no idea how to fold a fitted sheet.

“Life isn’t a train ride where you choose your destination, pay your fare and settle back for a nap. It’s a cycle ride over uncertain terrain, with you in the driver’s seat, constantly correcting your balance and determining the direction of progress. It’s difficult, sometimes profoundly painful. But it’s better than napping through life.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page xii)

Something to think about.

“The most important things, each man must do for himself.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 224)

“My pilgrimage of repeated return to the sea will not end so long as I live. And now I know that I shall live, for as long as is given to me. And should my body be battered even more, then I will live as I can, enjoying what I might, having what joy is available to me, and being what I may to the people whom I love. I must continue my pilgrimage, for it is my only way of remaining open to this vision. It is to this end that I must struggle for the remainder of that pilgrimage that is my life.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 214)

“Sometimes life seems like a poorly designed cage within which man has been sentenced to be free. Condemned to this freedom, it is difficult for a man to face the fact that he feels like a misfit in this life, difficult until he discovers the secret that ‘all men, finally, are misfits.’ There seems to be no way out of it.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 196)

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