AliceC’s most recent Quotables

“Men spend the best parts of their lives earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.”

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.

Cowardice asks the question- Is it safe?
Expediency asks the question- Is it politic?
Vanity asks the question- Is it popular?
But conscience asks the question- Is it right?
And there comes a time when one must take a position
That is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular;
But one must take it because it is right.

If you are to judge a man, you must know his secret thoughts, sorrows, and feelings; to know merely the outward events of a man's life would only serve to make a chronological table - a fool's notion of history.

If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much room.

She was made up of more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly... She was the shame of her father stumbling home drunk. She was all of these things and of something more.

Above all, be true to yourself, and if you cannot put your heart in it, take yourself out of it.

I refuse to tip toe through life only to arrive safely at death.

We are…a nation of dancers, singers and poets.

There is nothing ugly; I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may,—light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone? [...] We are going on swinging bravely forward along the grand high road and already behind the distant mountains is the promise of the sun.

Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.

You never know the biggest day of your life is your biggest day, not until it’s happening, not until you’re right in the middle of it. The day you commit to something or someone.The day you get your heart broken. The day you meet your soul mate. The day you realize there’s not enough time because you wanna live forever. Those are the biggest days. The perfect days. You know, it was a beautiful day.

Talent is luck. The important thing in life is courage.

At twenty years of age, the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgement.

I knew finally that you shouldn't lie down and wait for darkness, leaving quietly, slouching towards death. You should run, because the only real fear is that you'll stop running, that you'll stop doing, that you'll come to an end before everything else.

But if you do not find an intelligent companion, a wise and well-behaved person going the same way as yourself, then go on your way alone, like a king abandoning a conquered kingdom, or like a great elephant in the deep forest.

Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.

Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.